Ulrike Meinhof: The Biography (Jutta Ditfurth)

Ulrike Meinhof: The Biography
Ulrike Meinhof: The Biography
Author	Jutta Ditfurth
Translated by	Prolewiki
Original language	German
First published	2009

Even so we realised
Hatred of oppression still distorts the features,
Anger at injustice still makes voices raised and ugly.
Oh we, who wished to lay for the foundations for peace and friendliness,
Could never be friendly ourselves.
And in the future when no longer
Do human beings still treat themselves as animals,
Look back on us with indulgence.

from Bertolt Brecht, "To those born afterward"'

Prisoner Liberator-West Berlin, May 14, 1970

She had put her twin daughters with friends, and now 35-year-old Ulrike Meinhof was waiting at a large table in the reading room of the German Central Institute for Social Issues in the West Berlin district of Dahlem. Wearing jeans and a sweater, she sat between chairs and half-height cabinets full of index cards. Her handbag contained a mortgage deed for 40,000 German marks. Her fingers nervously rolled the band on a pack of cigarettes. Sometimes she glanced out of the high window at the garden of the Wilhelminian style villa. Her fingers rolled the band tighter and tighter. Because of the man she was meeting, the institute was closed to other visitors. When she rang at eight o'clock on Thursday, May 14, 1970, she was expected. Since then, she has hurriedly leafed through index boxes and occasionally had books brought to her. She smoked and pretended to read.

Ulrike Meinhof had convinced the left-wing publisher Klaus Wagenbach to sign a contract with Andreas Baader and her for a book on the subject of “Organization of Marginalized Young People.” She was a well-known left-wing journalist who had been writing impressive reports and radio programs about institutionalized children for years. But in reality it was about something different this time: “We want to free Andreas from prison,” Ulrike Meinhof explained to Klaus Wagenbach. He had said yes, because he, like most leftists, supported the liberation of political prisoners. With the help of this book contract, Andreas Baader's lawyer Horst Mahler persuaded the prison management of the Berlin-Tegel correctional facility (JVA) to have his client taken to the institute in Dahlem in order to be able to work on the manuscript with the journalist.

Ulrike Meinhof was involved in the planning of this operation from the beginning. She helped decide that the liberators-initially all women-would carry weapons in order to intimidate Andreas Baader's escorts, who were also armed. But it was agreed that during the action they only wanted to threaten, not shoot. And Ulrike Meinhof had raised money for the weapons.

The circle around Ulrike Meinhof, Gudrun Ensslin, Andreas Baader, Horst Mahler and other leftists had discussed for months what the left should do next; the extra-parliamentary movement was in ruins; many groups were divided; The Spaßguerilla was exhausted and the Republican Club (RC), which had been an action center for the left for some time, had now become too academic again. At the end of the revolt, many comrades returned to civil life and concentrated on their careers at universities or in parties. The SDS had disbanded six weeks earlier. But in Vietnam, clouds of the defoliant Agent Orange from US Air Force planes continued to poison millions of people; Proxy wars also continued in other states in the so-called Third World. Words and explanations didn't seem to have any effect.

Many dissidents did not want to accept this decline in their rebellion, which had started out so promisingly. They came to a variety of conclusions: some founded communist organizations of various orientations, others continued the anti-authoritarian concept in grassroots groups. After long discussions, Ulrike Meinhof and her political friends agreed to build an urban guerrilla unit modeled after the Uruguayan Tupamaros. Meinhof knew full well that her decision to carry out illegal activities and occasionally use weapons would lead to a life that would force her, at least temporarily, underground. But the group had no plans to go underground just yet. Everyone wanted to continue their civil life for as long as possible.

In contrast to her mostly younger friends, Ulrike Meinhof had experienced what illegality could mean, as she had belonged to the banned and persecuted German Communist Party (KPD) for several years. This time it would be different. Different circumstances, harsher consequences. She prepared herself. She sorted out her circle of acquaintances. She broke off contact with people who did not approve of her decision. She warned others who wouldn't take part but wouldn't betray her either. She said to a friend: “Don’t come into the kitchen when you’re with us. You have nothing to do with what we're discussing there because you don't pick up a weapon."

Ulrike Meinhof was originally supposed to leave the institute around half an hour before the liberation and Andreas Baader was to sit alone in the reading room. She was supposed to appear uninvolved so that she could continue to live legally for the time being. There were good reasons for this: she enjoyed a certain reputation and reached many people with her journalistic work. With her political and professional connections, she could have been of use to an illegally operating left.

But a few days before Andreas Baader's liberation, Horst Mahler burst into a preparatory meeting with bad news. The head of the prison suddenly ordered that Baader was only allowed to stay in the library as long as Meinhof was present there. The group trusted Horst Mahler, so no one checked his information. The action now depended on whether Ulrike Meinhof would be willing to stay. She decided to join in. Four years later, she justified the liberation of Andreas Baader as that a revolutionary action was indispensable for the development of the urban guerrilla movement.

A few days before the prisoner was freed, she visited her sister Wienke, who was three years older than her, in Hesse. The sisters, war children and orphans, looked back on their shared political past in the Adenauer era. Ulrike Meinhof wanted at all costs to prevent her daughters from falling into the hands of her divorced husband Klaus Rainer Röhl, nor did she want them to live with Renate Riemeck, as for personal and political reasons, both of them had long maintained a decided distance from the professor of history, their former foster mother.

Wienke also had two daughters. The two sisters had promised each other that they would care for each other's children should circumstances require it. Ulrike Meinhof was reassured when her sister now willingly readily renewed her promise. She didn't tell anyone about the planned action and her sister didn't ask.

In Hamburg, Ulrike Meinhof's ex-husband Klaus Rainer Röhl celebrated the magazine's 15th anniversary on that very day. All of his guests knew the paper's former editor-in-chief and columnist and many valued Ulrike Meinhof more than the host. At the party the news suddenly spread that and why the police were looking for Ulrike Meinhof. The mood changed. Jürgen Holtkamp, a former Beton editor and now an author at Radio Bremen, remained silent. He quickly said goodbye and drove back to Bremen because he knew who was waiting for him at home.

Marianne H. and Jan-Carl Raspe, after urgent requests by Ulrike Meinhof, brought the seven-year-old twins Regine and Bettina from West Berlin to the Holtkamps in Bremen. On the evening of the prisoners' liberation, H. and Raspe had dinner with Lilli Holtkamp and the three Holtkamp children as well as Ulrike Meinhof's daughters. Lilli Holtkamp turned on the television news, but when the news anchor announced that the department store arsonist Andreas Baader had been freed at gunpoint and that the perpetrators were on the run, she quickly turned off the television. The girls shouldn't hear their mother's name. The children continued to eat without worry, only the adults suddenly became hectic. Marianne H. and Jan-Carl Raspe set off for West Berlin.

Days later there was a risk that the manhunt would expand to Bremen. The Holtkamps packed their bags and drove to the North Sea with all five children. They rented a farmhouse southwest of Cuxhaven.

Wienke Zitzlaff was the principal at the special education school in Lollar, Hesse, and was attending teacher training in Weilburg an der Lahn when she heard about the prisoner liberation on the radio. Although Ulrike Meinhof's name was not initially mentioned, she suspected that her sister was among those wanted. She left Weilburg and drove to Staufenberg near Lollar, where she lived, so Ulrike would be able to reach her at any time. She herself was preparing to welcome her nieces, as she had promised.

But the next day the police broke into her house with a search warrant and threatened: "We'll find your sister at your house one day!" She realized that Ulrike Meinhof's children couldn't be brought to her until everything was sorted out. The danger that the twins would be used by the police as blackmail against their mother was too great. From now on, Wienke interrupted anyone who called her to immediately inform them that the police expected to find Ulrike Meinhof with her; she hoped her sister would find out about it this way. One day the phone rang, but this time the caller interrupted her; a very familiar, gentle voice said: “Don’t worry, Wienke, everything is fine."

Ulrike Meinhof had sole custody of her daughters. She justifiably hoped that she would be able to keep her involvement hidden and ensure that the girls could live with Wienke for the time being. After all, even convicted and imprisoned women did not lose the right to determine the place of residence for their children. She never thought for a second that she could separated from her children forever. Shortly before Baader was liberated, she had applied for child passports for the twins. She calculated the worst case scenario: that she would be caught by the police. But she couldn't imagine that a prison sentence for liberating a prisoner would be longer than six months or a year. But if she managed to escape in time, she could, for example, live abroad with her children. She believed she had options.

It was inconceivable to her that a West Berlin court would grant temporary custody to Klaus Rainer Röhl within 48 hours of Baader's release, and such a ruling was not common at the time. Perhaps the interest of the police was behind the father's sudden request, who had only exercised his visitation rights occasionally. It was only because the court temporarily gave the children to Röhl-without hearing Ulrike Meinhof's lawyer or her sister-that the police could officially search for the children via Interpol and thus perhaps get closer to the mother, but in any case put pressure on her. The children became pawns, which Ulrike Meinhof had wanted to avoid.

Ulrike Meinhof had no idea about any of this. At seven o'clock in the morning on May 14th, only about a kilometer away from the institute as the crow flies, the 32-year-old actress Barbara Morawiecz found a note in the hallway of her apartment on Heiligendammer Strasse that Ulrike Meinhof had slipped under the front door: "We come for breakfast, Anna." That was the nickname the friends gave each other after the character of Anna in Brecht's opera Mahagonny.

Spontaneous self-invitations from friends and comrades were not out of the ordinary for Barbara Morawiecz. West Berlin leftists such as Rudi Dutschke, Erich Kuby and Bahman Nirumand as well as artists who frequented the Republican Club or belonged to its chess club often met in her large apartment. After her children went to school, she bought fresh rolls and whatever else was needed for a sumptuous breakfast.

Ulrike Meinhof, Gudrun Ensslin, Ingrid Schubert, Irene G., Andreas Baader, the shooter and the two drivers of the getaway cars left the stolen cars not far from the Dahlem crime scene and set off on foot. In the stairwell they met an old neighbor of Morawiecz. Ulrike Meinhof had no idea that this anti-fascist had allegedly helped Fritz Kortner escape into exile in Switzerland and would later adamantly deny to the police that she had ever seen the people she was looking for.

They were exuberant and happy about the successful event. They didn't yet know that the shot had hit Georg Linke in the liver, because Linke had fled. They only found out when they heard the news that evening.

In all the excitement, Ulrike Meinhof had left her handbag at the crime scene. The mortgage note for 40,000 German marks was gone, as were the cash and ID cards. Barbara Morawiecz quickly ran to her bank and withdrew 40 of the 41 German marks that she still had in the account for Ulrike. When her two children came home from school, she explained to them: "We're playing Indians." Because the children knew some of the guests, she warned urgently: "You can't tell anyone that they were here, otherwise I'll go to jail!" The children kept their promise.

"You can't walk around outside like that," the actress stated and persuaded Andreas Baader to sit on the toilet seat in the bathroom to get his hair cut. Then she did hair, make-up and costumes for those who had been unmasked during the liberation. Ulrike Meinhof came with her hair down and in jeans and a sweater. “They’ll get you like that!” complained Barbara Morawiecz and took her only fine piece of clothing out of the closet.

In the early afternoon, a young woman with an old-fashioned bun on the back of her neck, wearing a blue tailor's costume with a tight skirt, a tailored suit jacket and a white blouse got on bus number 10. Ulrike Meinhof bought a ticket and went to Charlottenburg, where she met up with the others on the bus going to visit the apartment of the cabaret artist Wolfgang Neuss.

That evening and over the next few days, the freeing of Andreas Baader was the only topic in many left-wing shared apartments and bars in the Federal Republic of Germany. What a feat! People had fun and applauded.

Within a day, West Berlin was flooded with her mugshot. It was the largest manhunt since 1945. No Nazi murderer or war criminal had ever been searched for with such intensity. In a very short time, posters were hanging on all the advertising pillars with the headline: “Attempted murder in Berlin-10,000 DM reward!” On it was only Ulrike Meinhof's name, not that of the escaped prisoner Baader or the shooter. Attempted murder? Ulrike Meinhof hadn't even fired a gas pistol, and the police knew that. Under her large photo it said: "35 years old, 165 cm tall, slim, long face, long medium brown hair, brown eyes... The wanted person left her residence in Berlin-Schöneberg, Kufsteiner Straße 12, on the day of the crime and has been on the run ever since . Can anyone provide information about their current whereabouts?”

A Very German Family

Two worlds collided when Ulrike Meinhof's parents met: the Guthardts were staunch socialists and the Meinhofs were German nationalist Protestant Christians who would soon become commuted Nazis.

The teacher Johannes Guthardt, Ulrike Meinhof's maternal grandfather, was born in 1884 in Borken, Hesse, as the fifth child of a master tailor. In 1906 he married the 20-year-old educator Martha Kluge, daughter of a master shoemaker. Three years later, the Guthardts' only child was born in Schwiebus (today Swiebodzin, Poland): Ingeborg Marie Elise, Ulrike Meinhof's mother.

Johannes Guthardt rose to the position of school principal. When the First World War broke out, he was drafted. In 1918, during the November Revolution, a workers' and soldiers' council was formed in Schwiebus to support the republic, with Ulrike Meinhof's grandfather as chairman. The lieutenant was later elected to the city council and the district council and he joined the SPD. He then became a school councilor in the small town of Osterburg near Magdeburg in the Altmark region and was elected to the district committee. But the Guthardts were considered “red outsiders” in Osterburg’s national-conservative society. Ulrike Meinhof's mother was the only student at the German High School who belonged to the Socialist Workers' Youth. Ultimately, Guthardt was transferred to Schleswig and became a government councilor there.

The paternal grandfather, Johannes Meinhof, was born in 1859 in Barzwitz, Pomerania. He was pastor of the Laurentiusgemeinde, an influential superintendent in Halle an der Saale and a classic representative of Christian antisemitism, who, as a fraternity member in the 19th century, wanted to proselytize the "wrong-believing" Jews. In the 1930s he turned to aggressive antisemitism. At a meeting with the Gauleiter of the Bavarian Ostmark, Hans Schemm, Johannes Meinhof's heart was, in his own words, soaring: "God bless and guide Adolf Hitler!" Hans Schemm, who believed "there should be a Jew dangling from every lamppost," had in enormous influence in evangelical circles. In 1933, Ulrike Meinhof's grandfather temporarily joined the German Christians, the “SA of Jesus Christ,” as he called it. He was married to Mathilde Köstlin, the daughter of a theology professor who was born in 1860. They had ten children together, the youngest of which, Werner Kurt Armin, born in 1901, would become the father of Ulrike Meinhof. Werner Meinhof's brothers and many other Meinhof relatives were, always in the name of God, commited Nazi fascists from an early age. Even private letters were signed by the “Meinhofians,” as they liked to call themselves, with: “God command, Heil Hitler!”

Werner Meinhof dropped out of school and became an art and construction fitter. But the family put him under pressure until he got his high school diploma and studied art history in Halle. Like his brothers, he became a member of the reactionary German National People's Party (DNVP). He "proved himself " in 1920 during the bloody suppression of the "communist unrest in and around Halle" by the Reichswehr and the Freikorps, for which he was awarded the Silver Emergency Helper Symbol. In these uprisings after the Kapp–Lüttwitz Putsch, workers demanded that the Social Democratic Reich government suppress the right-wing military coup and implement promised social reforms. Many workers were murdered.

The 24-year-old Werner Meinhof was slim, had little self-confidence and looked like a bird who had fallen out of its nest when he met 16-year-old Ingeborg Guthardt in 1925, who fell head over heels in love with the young man. To her parents' dismay, she wanted to drop out of school and get married immediately. The Guthardts, due to their own difficult journeys and out of political conviction, wanted their daughter to graduate from high school and study. But Ingeborg forced her parents to come to a compromise: Yes, she would graduate from high school, but instead of being a student, she would be a wife. In 1926 Ulrike Meinhof's parents got engaged.

With the help of his father, Werner Meinhof found a job as a drawing teacher in Halle, received his doctorate in art history and, again thanks to family connections, got a job as a senior drawing teacher at a secondary school in Gdansk. In the meantime, he was overcome with ambition and his goal was to become a museum director. He tirelessly but unsuccessfully applied to many important museums until, in March 1928, he finally became a research assistant at the State Museum of Art and Cultural History in Oldenburg. This meant that nothing stood in the way of his marriage. The few Guthardts and Ingeborg's school friend Hanni, Johanna Meyer, a medical student, seemed pretty lost among the 30 or so Meinhofs, and not just numerically, when Ulrike Meinhof's parents got married in Halle on December 28, 1928, Johannes Guthardt feared that his daughter would slip into an environment that he found extremely unpleasant, and he got terribly drunk at the wedding.

The following January, Ingeborg moved to Oldenburg to live with her husband, one of the early brown strongholds in Germany: in the 1930 Reichstag election, the NSDAP won 27.3 percent there, nine percent more than the national average.

The couple's circle of acquaintances grew. Otto Borchers, a student and close confidant of Meinhof, was one of them, as was the “Blood and Soil” poet Friedrich Griese or ethnic artists such as the sculptor Günter Martin and NSDAP and SA member Franz Radziwill, whom Werner Meinhof supported and who soon became a famous Nazi painter. They also met the fascist artist Paul Schultze-Naumburg. For ideological but also career reasons, Ulrike Meinhof's father joined NSDAP chief ideologist Alfred Rosenberg's "Battle League for German Culture" in 1930 at the latest. This was a "gathering place for the intellectual professions of national-ethnic sentiment" in which "the cultural-political cadre of the new Reich was trained" (Hildegard Brenner), which fought against what they called “Judeo-Bolshevist” art in word and writing, but also quickly with brass knuckles and truncheons.

Werner Meinhof was one of the art historians who helped shape the path to Nazi fascism. His aesthetic standard was “clean” and “orderly” German craftsmanship; he propagated “true” folk art. He was repulsed by any modern, avant-garde, emancipatory, socially critical or revolutionary art. He only accepted art if it appeared national, ethnic and Christian.

On May 1, 1933, Ulrike Meinhof's father became a member of the NSDAP (membership number 285 63 34). He had ambitious plans: he sought the position of his boss, the museum director Professor Walter Müller-Wulckow. Müller-Wulckow, a supporter of modernism, a supporting member of the SS and a few years later also a party member, was never fond of his assistant, considered him to be unintelligent, scientifically unqualified and pedantic-put simply incompetent. A power struggle began in which both men used every political means available. At the height of the conflict, Müller-Wulckow was deposed as museum director overnight through a scheme by Meinhof and Meinhof was appointed in his place. But after some internal NSDAP disputes, the old hierarchy was restored.

Meinhof continued to strive for social advancement-and he had friends. Time and again, the powerful Gauleitung Weser-Ems forced the museum director to grant Meinhof special paid leave “to promote all German art”. For example, in May 1933 in Berlin and in August at the Museum Folkwang in Essen, where he gave the opening speech for the exhibition of the artists' initiative “Die Gemeinschaft”. The exhibition plan in Berlin was coordinated by Goebbels' Reich Ministry for Popular Enlightenment and Propaganda. The Völkischer Beobachter praised Meinhof's speech and admired the “wonderful Hitler's head” by the artist couple Magdalena Müller-Martin and Günter Martin as the artistic “quintessence” of the exhibition.

Despite all his political efforts, including those of his father and brothers, Werner Meinhof did not become a museum director, neither in Oldenburg nor anywhere else.

In July 1931, Ingeborg Meinhof had her first child, a daughter named Wienke. Three years later, she was pregnant again. In spring 1934, she happily informed the family that they had found a nice apartment in Marschweg, with four rooms, a small balcony and a large garden. Ulrike Meinhof was born on October 7, 1934. The card to relatives and friends read: “We gratefully announce the birth of a baby girl: Ulrike Marie-Oct. 7, 1934. Dr. Werner Meinhof and Mrs. Ingeborg Meinhof née Guthardt, Oldenburg i. O., Marschweg 2."

A month earlier, the Meinhofs had joined a tiny Christian community with a long name: “Renitente Kirche Ungeänderter Augsburgischer Konfession in Niederhessen.” The Oldenburg group had eight members, including Werner, Ingeborg and Wienke Meinhof, Otto and Regine Borchers and Grete Ulrich. Werner Meinhof only disliked some of the state's interference in church affairs. He wanted his admired “brilliant leader” Adolf Hitler to take the German Protestant Church (DEK) seriously and take it into account “in his political calculations”. In Werner Meinhof's eyes, “National Socialism” had no right to claim to be a “religion”. However, as the DEK kowtowed to party functionaries, Meinhof sought and found a niche in what he himself admitted was a somewhat “narrow-minded” and “sectarian” renitence that had formed in the 19th century in response to the state's interference in the church's internal affairs. However, he rejected the Confessing Church and the “emergency law” it demanded against state encroachment as “disastrous”.

Otherwise, Meinhof was satisfied with the political situation: he praised Hitler's great personal achievement in defeating Röhm and the elimination of the “rotten” SA leadership by its rival organizations, the Reichswehr and SS. The “Führer” had an immense feeling for the realities of this world, with his propaganda apparatus, which had been tested under difficult circumstances, and with his educational institutions Hitler Youth, SA and Secret State Police.

On November 18, 1934, six-week-old Ulrike Meinhof became the youngest member of the tiny Oldenburg Renitenz group. Pastor Karl Adalbert Wicke baptized the infant.

At nine months old, Ulrike sat upright in her high-wheeled baby carriage and laughed unabashedly at the camera. She wore a chain with a Christian cross around her neck. July 1935 was very hot. Jewish children were no longer allowed to bathe in the Hunte “in the interests of peace, order and safety” (city administration).

Ulrike Meinhof: The Biography (Jutta Ditfurth)

Contents

Prisoner Liberator

A Very German Family

Childhood

Elementary School Student

Between Tents

Postwar Years

Foster Daughter

Beatnik

High School Graduate

Student

Nuclear Weapons Opponent

SDS Comrade

Communist

Editor

Editor-in-Chief and Wife

Mother of Twins

Anti-Fascist

Publicist

Anti-Authoritarian

Extra-Parliamentary Opposition

Filmmaker

Border Walker

Anti-Authoritarian Authority

Mother

Partisan

Bank Robber

Assassin

Prisoner

In Solitary Confinement

Object

Stammhein

Accused

Last Offensive

Death

Appendix

Prisoner Liberator-West Berlin, May 14, 1970

A Very German Family