Ulrike Meinhof and West German Terrorism: Language, Violence, and Identity

In 1970 Ulrike Meinhof abandoned a successful career as an activist journalist to join the terrorist group Red Army Faction; captured along with other members of the RAF in 1972, she died an unexplained death in a high-security prison in 1976. A charismatic spokesperson for the RAF, she has often come near to being lionized as a freedom fighter, despite her use of violence against innocents. In an effort to understand -- but not condone -- how terrorism can take root, Sarah Colvin seeks a dispassionate viewof Meinhof and a period when West Germany became the first modern state to declare a "war on terror." Meinhof was principally a writer, and the book focuses on the role of language in the formation and development of the RAF: how Meinhof and her colleagues used it to justify acts of extreme violence, creating an identity that depended on an imagined state of war. When such rhetoric was in turn adopted by the media and the state, the group's isolation was heightened. Once this stable identity was found, empathy with other human beings -- those the RAF were allegedly "fighting for" -- was lost. The group became a closed unit, able to justify anything through language. This is the first specialized study of Meinhof and the RAF in English -- remarkable given the current interest in the topic in both Europe and the U.S. Sarah Colvin is Professor and Eudo C. Mason Chair of the German Department at the University of Edinburgh, UK.