Description
No other figure embodies revolutionary politics and radical chic quite like Ulrike Meinhof, who formed, with Andreas Baader and Gudrun Ensslin, the Red Army Faction (RAF), also known as the Baader–Meinhof Gang, notorious for its bombings and kidnappings of the wealthy in the 1970s. But in the years leading up to her leap into the fray, Meinhof was known throughout Europe as a respected journalist, who informed and entertained her loyal readers with monthly magazine columns.
What impels someone to abandon middle-class privilege for the sake of revolution? In the 1960s, Meinhof began to see the world in increasingly stark terms: the United States was emerging as an unstoppable superpower, massacring a tiny country overseas despite increasingly popular dissent at home; and Germany appeared to be run by former Nazis. Never before translated into English, Meinhof's writings show a woman increasingly engaged in the major political events and social currents of her time. In her introduction, Karin Bauer tells Meinhof's mesmerizing life story and her political coming-of-age; Nobel Prize–winning author Elfriede Jelinek provides a thoughtful reflection on Meinhof's tragic failure to be heard; and Meinhof ’s daughter—a relentless critic of her mother and of the Left—contributes an afterword that shows how Meinhof's ghost still haunts us today.
About the Author
German left-wing militant. She co-founded the Red Army Faction (Rote Armee Fraktion) in 1970 after having previously worked as a journalist for the monthly left-wing magazineKonkret.She was arrested in 1972, and eventually charged with numerous murders and the formation of a criminal association. Before the trial concluded, Meinhof died in her cell in 1976 in controversial circumstances.Ulrike Marie Meinhof was born in 1934 in Oldenburg, Germany. In 1936, her family moved to Jena when her father, art historian Dr. Werner Meinhof, became director of the city's museum. Her father died of cancer in 1940, causing her mother to take in a boarder, Renate Riemeck, to make money. In 1946 the family moved back to Oldenburg because Jena fell under Soviet rule as a result of the Yalta agreement. Ulrike's mother, Dr. Ingeborg Meinhof, who worked as a teacher after World War II, died 8 years later from cancer. Renate Riemeck took on the role of guardian for Ulrike and her elder sister.In 1955 she took her Abitur at a school in Weilburg. She then studied philosophy, sociology, Pädagogik (roughly pedagogy) and Germanistik (German studies) at Marburg where she became involved with reform movements.In 1957 she moved to the University of Münster, where she met the Spanish MarxistManuel Sacristán(who later translated and edited some of her writings) and joined the Socialist German Student Union, participating in the protests against the rearmament of the Bundeswehr and its involvement with nuclear weapons as proposed by Konrad Adenauer's government. She eventually became the spokeswoman of the local Anti-Atomtod-Ausschuss ('Anti-Atomic Death Committee'). In 1958, she spent a short time on the AStA (German: Allgemeiner Studierendenausschuss, or General Committee of Students) of the university and wrote articles for various student newspapers.In 1959 she joined the Communist Party of Germany (KPD)—the banned German Communist Party—and later began work at the magazine konkret, serving as chief editor from 1962 until 1964. In 1961, she married the co-founder and publisher ofKonkret, Klaus Rainer Röhl. Their marriage produced twins, Regine and Bettina, on 21 September 1962, and lasted until their separation in 1967, which was followed by divorce the following year.(Source:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ulrike_M...)
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