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  • Ulrike Meinhof and West German Terrorism: Language, Violence and Identity
  • Franz Peter Hugdahl
Ulrike Meinhof and West German Terrorism: Language, Violence and Identity. By Sarah Colvin. Rochester, N.Y.: Camden House, 2009. xv + 265 pages. $75.00.

The inability of Ulrike Meinhof to capture the attention of the Anglophone world is truly difficult to fathom. Suffused with charisma, she achieved prodigious popular and critical success as a journalist and essayist before reaping notoriety for participating in Andreas Baader's escape from prison and descending into the underground to help found the Rote Armee Fraktion (RAF). Only very recently have her writings for konkret become available in an English translation by Karin Bauer (Everyone Talks about the Weather . . . We Don't, 2008) and there is only one significant study comparing the American and West German experience with the violence that rose out of the student movement (Jeremy Varon, Bringing the War Home, 2004). The first full-length study of Meinhof in English by Sarah Colvin should ignite more interest. Colvin embarks on the extremely ambitious task of introducing the general history of Meinhof and the RAF to the uninitiated as well as presenting the newest developments in the burgeoning scholarly debates that transpire in German. The work is divided into six chapters that consider three different phases in Meinhof's writing: journalism from 1959–70, writings for the RAF, and individually authored texts from 1972–76. True to her title, language, violence, and identity are the guiding and inextricably entwined concepts that drive Colvin's investigation. Ultimately, they are mobilized to study the subjectivity of Meinhof and the RAF collective as well as to examine the discourse surrounding those issues.

Colvin never claims a stable subject position for Meinhof and often appears eager to expose her as driven with contradictions. Nevertheless, she pursues Meinhof's writings along a determinate teleology inexorably leading from her earliest essays advancing the peace movement and opposing the Notstandsgesetze to the legitimation of violence that Colvin contends is already legible in 1967 and blatantly manifest in the RAF. Writing was always crucial for Meinhof's self-understanding. It enabled her to be actively involved in social-political debates as a journalist and not exclusively relegated to the private, domestic sphere as a mother. Even after abandoning journalism and her children, Meinhof made the RAF's communiqués as intelligible as possible and Gudrun Ensslin anointed her the voice of the RAF. Similarly, Colvin sees a continuum in Meinhof's ideological development, which progressed from echoes of the second-wave feminist slogan "the personal is political" to an assertion that the personal is necessarily political, and finally culminated in the RAF's solipsistic equations of authentic politics with its own subjective experience.

Studies concerning the relationship among Meinhof, the RAF, and feminism and Meinhof as a woman have only recently begun to gain momentum. The initial reports from the state reflected both the backlash to the concurrent rise of second-wave feminism and a prurient interest in the unusual proportion of women participating in [End Page 687] West German terrorist groups. Their speculation was often predicated on perverse assumptions shared with Nazi pseudo-science as well as overtly misogynistic sexology from the nineteenth century that strove to deny any agency to women by situating the reasons for violent behavior in biology or deviant sexuality. Colvin underscores the irony in Meinhof's passionate pursuit of the role of the woman in the family and child care in her journalism and her subsequent dismissal of feminism as "Votzenchauvinismus," irrelevant for the class struggle. However, Meinhof always asserted that the political disenfranchisement of women was the product of the capitalist class system and not gender hierarchy. She also identified capitalism as the cause of the foster care system's problems. Meinhof maintained that oppression, exemplified in foster homes, can generate the identity and empathy amongst the marginalized that is required for the solidarity to resist and overturn the dominant system. Implicitly, then, the RAF's strategies were latent in Meinhof's journalism.

In prison, Meinhof expressed her bitter frustration with the language she used to produce commodities and her inability to develop a new mode of writing that...

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