Everybody Talks about the Weather ... We Don't: The Writings of Ulrike Meinhof (review)

Everybody Talks about the Weather ... — edited and introduced by Karin Bauer, with a short preface by Nobel Prize winner Elfriede Jelinek and an afterword by Meinhof's daughter Bettina Röhl — presents twenty-four articles by Ulrike Meinhof translated into English by Luise von Flotow. Written and published in the Hamburg-based magazine konkret between 1959 and 1968, two years before Meinhof joined the RAF and went underground, the articles are drawn from archival materials as well as from three volumes of Meinhof's writings available in German.

Bauer's introduction details Meinhof's life growing up and her early participation in protests against the rearmament of West Germany. She outlines Meinhof's personal life: her marriage to Klaus Rainer Röhl, their move to a villa in Hamburg, and the birth of their twin daughters. Bauer also chronicles Meinhof's meteoric professional rise. In 1959 Meinhof began writing for konkret, which Röhl had founded in 1955 under another name. She was editor-in-chief from 1961 to 1964, returned to writing for it as a freelancer in 1964, and ultimately resigned in 1968. Bauer moves to Meinhof's time as a member of the RAF from its founding in 1970 to her death on 4 May 1976 in Stammheim maximum-security prison. She discusses as well how Meinhof has lived on, as a projection surface, a historical figure, a pop icon, an image frequently reproduced in art, and a figure in dramas. She introduces the reader not only to Meinhof but also to post-World War II West German history and politics.

Meinhof's articles address most of the era's pivotal events. A few of them look back at Germany's fascist era and its legacy, others discuss the new West German constitution, the Vietnam War, the Six-Day War of 1967, feminist politics, the West German SDS (Sozialistische Deutscher Studentenbund), student actions, increased police brutality at demonstrations, and the 1968 department-store fire set by Andreas Baader and Gudrun Ensslin two years before they cofounded the Red Army Faction along with others. The selection leans heavily towards articles looking back at the fascist era and those written in 1968.

To some extent, this selection suggests that the student movement was working through Germany's fascist past, which, to be sure, it was doing. Other political concerns, however, abounded; the selection could have given a broader picture of the political landscape during the 1960s given the range of issues Meinhof covers in her writings.

Since the Easter Marches, which Meinhof participated in and wrote about, formed a pivotal expression of widespread West German agitation against West German re-armament, against joining NATO, and against nuclear weapons and energy, it would have been worthwhile to include the essay "Easter Marches" (1964). Likewise, the Cold War shaped 1960s German politics, influencing a range of decisions, from whether or not to have a military to which political parties should be allowed to exist. While the opening article "Shadows of the Summit Pointing West" (1960) presents the Cold War's origins, it would have been helpful to include "Status Quo Mauer" (1962), which elaborates on Cold War developments.

Furthermore, the emergency laws, which permitted temporarily reducing constitutional rights during a state of emergency, were a source of contention. Drafts of the laws were written as early as 1958; however, it was only through the 1966 Grand Coalition between the CDU (Christian Democratic Union) and the SPD (Social Democratic Party) that they could eventually be passed in 1968. Meinhof wrote numerous articles about them over the years. For these reasons, it would have been valuable to include at least one them, for example "Gegen wen? Wider ein deutsches Notstandsgesetz," "Notstandgesetz 1. Lesung," or "Große Koalition."

Equally important throughout the 1960s was the increasing failure of representational politics for leftists. Domestically, four concerns form an important backdrop to...