Jumping into the Unknown
West Berlin, May 14, 1970, 9:45 a.m. Ulrike Meinhof is sitting in the reading room of the German Central Institute for German Issues. The political prisoner Andreas Baader enters, handcuffed and accompanied by two guards. For 75 minutes, he will speak about a book project with journalist Ulrike Meinhof. They read magazines and take notes. At around 11 am, three armed comrades storm the institute shouting «Hands up or we`ll shoot». Shots are fired from both sides. Andreas Baader and Ulrike Meinhof and everybody else who took part in the action jump out of a window at 1,5 m height and run to an Alfa Romeo waiting at the corner. The Red Army Fraction is born. Decades later, we will find out that Ulrike Meinhof jumped spontaneously. She was supposed to stay behind and report on the action later, without having to go underground herself.
What drives a successful journalist and mother to abandon her entire life in an instant?
Or maybe: what could have kept her from jumping? There was no other option. Where would she even have returned to? She had filled pages with relentless critiques on imperialist war-mongering, the half-hearted confrontation with Germany’s genocidal past and the twofold exploitation of the woman as a worker and a mother. And yet she remained part of it; still an isolated mother, still an exploited worker, still part of the murderous system.
There was no other way, what she had endured until now became unbearable. She saw cops shooting, she saw her friends jumping.
In this moment, with this jump, she gave a promise to herself; a promise she could not have broken easily without betraying her values. And even though she certainly could not have known what expected her, she dared to jump into the unkown. She woke herself up to stay alive. This one jump forward was not just about leaving something behind. May 14, 1970 was not only the day Andreas Baader was freed, not only the birth of RAF. This jump was cutting with the system to open everyone’s eyes.
Let‘s jump back. West Germany, October 7, 1934. Ulrike Meinhof is born in Oldenburg. She was a child during the first world war. Through her texts we see how deeply she disapproved the war Germany had waged and the fact that life just continued while Nazis were still doing the same jobs, only in different clothes.
She grew up during the Second World War and lived her youth in the post-war period. The whole German nation was crushed about having lost:Both about having lost the war and about having lost so much of its humanity that a fascist extermination system could emerge. She was way too small during the war, she herself has certainly not caused any injustice directly related to the extermination of millions of people. But fascist ideology permeates society — if you do not defend yourself against it, you will be shaped by it. Her own father was a NSDAP1 member and even if they did not spend a lot of time together, that must have been frightening. The indifference of this time was overwhelming and the unwillingness to end German fascism or at least to confront it was paralyzing. But she did not see herself as separate from history. German fascism did not come overnight. Still, the majorty of the society just accepted it. The German society had seen the posters that read «Jew, die» and still continued to vote for Hitler.
In the post-war period, Ulrike started doing political works to dismantle the war machine. She was connected to the peoples. She went to Jordan2 for a boot camp, wrote for the people of Iran, spoke up for the people of Vietnam. For her, her generation had a direct responsibility. She insisted that her generation is innocent of genocide, of course, but cannot remain content with that.
She carried a heaviness within her. Our past is weighing heavily on our shoulders and fascism is threatening to take away the air we breathe. Ulrike Meinhof writes at a time Kiesinger3 was the German chancellor. He pushed law changes, so NS-criminals who were his long time party comrades, would not be judged in court. This heaviness and suffering drove her to act, based on a feeling of injustice and on a simple rational thought: what do we need right now?
Ulrike Meinhof had two small daughters. Being a mother meant a lot to her. She strongly rejected authoritarian education and took her daughters out of state school. She talked about what it meant to be a single mother. Her articles on the situation of working women and mothers are scientifically sound and well researched. She understood the situation of women and fought for them in many ways, writing a lot and giving lectures. When women were unaware of their situation, it made her really angry.
She did not act without considering her own reality or becoming blind to her own situation. When she sent her children to Sicily so that they would not have to live with their father, it was a difficult decision for her. She struggled with herself, but considered the need to take radical steps to be greater than her family’s happiness. It was certainly difficult for her children, and therefore for her too, because she loved them. Being a single mother and working in politics is difficult, incredibly difficult, she says.
“So the problem for all women working in politics, myself included, is that on the one hand they do socially necessary work, their heads are full of the right ideas, they may even be able to talk, write, and agitate effectively, but on the other hand they sit there with their children just as helplessly as all other women.”
She was the leader of a campaign that fought against the situation of children in orphanages in the 1960s. She was particularly moved by the situation of young women. In her writings, we see the situation of women through her eyes. These orphanages were not homes for these young women, but prisons. Raising children and working, working politically, is incredibly difficult. She looks at her own children and all the children in the world and turns her anger into revenge. She has never seen her own life as a mother separate from the global situation of all mothers and women .
“If you like, this is the central oppression of women, that their private lives are contrasted with some kind of political life. On the other hand, one could say that if political work has nothing to do with private life, it is not right, because it is not sustainable in the long term.”
She saw it as her responsibility to act. As Ulrike Meinhof said, one day they will ask about Mr. Strauss4 just as we now ask our parents about Hitler. We are continuing on her path. When future generations ask about Trump, Merz, Erdoğan, Netanyahu, what will we have to say in response?
When future generations ask us what we did to continue the work of these revolutionaries – what do we do to avenge the death of Ulrike Meinhof, who was tortured and murdered by the German state precisely because she remained resistant, and especially because she was a woman?
What will we say then? Will we jump?
“Protest is when I say that I don’t like this or that. Resistance is when I make sure that what I don’t like no longer happens. Protest is when I say I’m not going along with it anymore. Resistance is when I make sure that everyone else stops going along with it too.”
- Hitler’s far-right political party in Germany, active between 1920 and 1945. ↩︎
- In 1970, the PLO (Palestinian Liberation Organization) organized itself in Jordan. The PLO fought in the Jordanian Civil War with allied revolutionary groups against the Jordanian regime. At that time, the Middle East was generally an internationalist center. Many revolutionaries from all over the world learned from the movements overthere. ↩︎
- Kurt Georg Kiesinger was a German politician. He was an active member of the Nazi Party from 1933 and became deputy director of the Reich’s external radio propaganda, being in this capacity one of the main censors of the regime. ↩︎
- A German conservative politician who was a Wehrmacht soldier during the Second World War and who participated in several massacres against jews. ↩︎
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