Introduction: Terrorists, Language, and The State: Dentity Is A Slippery Notion

Introduction: Terrorists, Language, and
the State
wir freuen uns über jeden bullen, der umgelegt wird, umgelegt
worden ist und jeder im knast, der bullen reingelegt und umgelegt
hat, ist unser bruder, schwester, genosse, freund, einer von uns.
[we delight in the death of every cop who gets killed or has ever
been killed, and anyone in prison who has tricked and killed the
pigs is our brother, sister, comrade, friend — one of us.]
— Ulrike Meinhof, August 1974
I propose to make use of a simple image . . . This image is of an

imaginary circle that each person draws around him/herself. We
shall call this “the circle of empathy.” On the inside of the circle
are those things that are considered deserving of empathy and the
corresponding respect, rights, and practical treatment as approx-
imate equals. On the outside of the circle are those things that are
considered less important, less alive, less deserving of rights.
— Jaron Lanier, November 2000
“I DENTITY” IS A SLIPPERY NOTION. Do we define ourselves (for example

by constructing a “constitutive outside”:1 an idea of what we are
not), or are we defined by our historical circumstances: the social and
linguistic context in which we live?2 Suggesting that we define ourselves
raises the difficulty of accounting for an “I” that preexists self-definition,
but saying that circumstances are everything removes human agency from
the equation in a way that is equally (not least morally) problematic. In
this book I am going to suggest that identity derives both from what
we do in language (who we say we are, or are not), and from what lan-
guage does to, or says about, us — that is, from a discursive context that
is socially and historically contingent and preexists the individual subject.
I shall also suggest that identities are supported, even protected, by what
Lanier calls the circle of empathy, and that when identity seems under
threat, in times of crisis, there is an impulse to draw the bounds of our
empathy circles ever more tightly (nationalism in times of war is one
example; the closeness of a gang facing rival gangs, or of an extremist
or illegal group, is another).3 Group identity gives a strong sense of self
embedded in a context (the football fan in a crowd at a match, the patriot
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2 INTRODUCTION: TERRORISTS, LANGUAGE, AND THE STATE
in time of war), but the price of that protected identity is that it lacks flex-
ibility — any shift by an individual within a tightly knit community neces-
sarily disturbs others in the network and is likely to meet with sanctions
or resistance. To say that (terrorist) violence is an identity mode is not to
trivialize it; on the contrary, it is to underline the dangerous inaccessibility
of terrorists to all who find themselves outside of their circle.
My subject is Ulrike Marie Meinhof, a writer who became a terror-
ist in the historical context of West Germany. This is the first full-length
study of Meinhof in English. The material I am working with is Meinhof’s
writing: her language and ideas, first in her journalistic texts and later in
her writings for and about the RAF, including a wide range of unpub-
lished sources. Most of the texts are available only in the original German;
I am giving parallel English translations for those who cannot access the
German. How individuals use language to construct and support iden-
tity, how the linguistic or discursive context in which they live and think
affects or interacts with that, and which is more powerful — the language
or the individual (inasfar as the two are separate) — are central questions
in this book.
Complete neutrality is impossible, but studies of Meinhof and the
RAF have tended to be dogged by its opposite. In focusing on the texts
she wrote, I have tried to avoid the kind of anecdotal evidence that feeds
myth.4 To give the fullest picture I can, I have cast the net wide in my
selection of materials, which range from articles about politics and society
written at the height of her journalistic career to notes sent secretly to other
RAF members in prison. This is not a biography — not even a “political
biography”5 — but an account of how a writer’s language developed, and
with it her ideas; from her work for the political magazine konkret from
1959 through 1969, via the texts she produced as the “voice” of the Red
Army Faction after 1970, to the more introspective reflections on self and
language that she wrote while in prison. That may not account for why
Meinhof, at thirty-five, left her career and her six-year-old twins to cofound
a terrorist organization, but it does provide a basis for understanding how it
happened, and how she herself managed to justify it.
Language: Why (Else) Would a

Terrorist Read Wittgenstein?
Meinhof was found hanged in her cell in Stuttgart-Stammheim prison
on the morning of 9 May 1976. The police report describes the state in
which the cell was found:
In der Zelle ist keine Beleuchtung eingeschaltet. Dazu ergibt sich,

daß die Neonröhre des an der Zellendecke installierten Hauptbe-
leuchtungskörpers fehlt, andererseits ist aber an der Tischlampe, die
INTRODUCTION: TERRORISTS, LANGUAGE, AND THE STATE 3
an einem etwa im Mittelteil der Zelle stehenden Tisch befestigt ist,

eine Glühbirne eingeschraubt.
Auf dem erwähnten Tisch herrscht augenfällig eine starke
Unordnung, auf die aber im einzelnen hier nicht eingegangen wird,
zumal sich keine tatrelevanten Spuren, Hinweise oder Aufzeich-
nungen, auf dem Tisch befinden. Auf dem Tisch fällt lediglich auf,
daß dort u.a. das Buch mit dem Titel “Philosophische Grammatik”
von Ludwig Wittgenstein liegt. Von dem Buch sind die Leseseiten
84/85 aufgeschlagen.6
[There is no light on in the cell. In that regard it can be observed

that the neon tube is missing from the ceiling light fitting, but that
a light bulb has been screwed into the table lamp fixed to a table
standing roughly in the central area of the cell.
On the aforementioned table are books and papers in significant
disarray, but nothing that need be described in detail here, particu-
larly given that there are no traces, clues, or pieces of writing on
the table that are relevant to the case. The only thing of note on
the table is that among the books is one with the title Philosophical
Grammar by Ludwig Wittgenstein. It is open to pages 84–85.]
Curiously, Meinhof was not the only RAF member to have been reading
Wittgenstein. Among the books found in Jan-Carl Raspe’s cell after his
death in 1977 was Über Gewißheit (On Certainty)7 — the same book had
been ordered by Gudrun Ensslin via her lawyer on 16 May 1974, along-
side the Philosophische Untersuchungen (Philosophical Investigations) and
another whose title is missing. Ensslin emphasizes that she is asking for
three titles by Wittgenstein,8 so it is conceivable that the Grammar came
into the group’s possession via her order too.
No gifts of books could be brought or sent to the RAF prisoners, not
even by family or lawyers; all reading material had to come directly from
the publisher or bookshop, and would pass through the hands of the prison
authorities.9 The prisoners sent orders via their lawyers, and the legal records
therefore give a clear picture of the RAF’s preferred reading. It is strikingly
functional: “Ulrike M. would like bibliographic hints on the topics of mili-
tant antifascism and antifascism generally,” Meinhof’s lawyer wrote on her
behalf to a publisher in 1973, “but especially on commando operations, the
uprising in the Warsaw ghetto, the uprising in Buchenwald, the communist
cells, sabotage, etc.” (“Ulrike M. hätte gern bibliografische Hinweise zum
Thema: Militanter Antifaschismus bzw. Antifaschismus überhaupt. Aber
speziell: Kommandoaktionen, Aufstand im Warschauer Ghetto, Aufstand
in Buchenwald, KP-Zellen, Sabotage etc.”).10 Wittgenstein is one of only
two philosophers (the other is Sartre) to have the honor of appearing on
a political “schooling list” (Schulungsliste) compiled probably by Meinhof
and Ensslin for the edification of their imprisoned comrades;11 this time,
however, it is Wittgenstein’s early work, the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus,

that is listed.
Whatever it was Meinhof hoped to glean from Wittgenstein for the
armed struggle (and whether or not that hope was based on a defensible
reading of his philosophy — Lenin had, after all, lambasted the work of
Wittgenstein’s fellow logical positivist, Ernst Mach),12 it is likely to have
been something she imagined might be practically applicable. The Trac-
tatus (which Wittgenstein himself later repudiated) takes as its central
premise that all of the problems of philosophy can be solved via a logical
understanding of language. I am going to argue in this book that a great
many of the problems associated with the RAF can be, if not solved, then
at least better comprehended if we can come to an understanding of its
language. I shall also suggest that Meinhof, in the last years of her life,
struggled painfully with her own relationship with language, and with her
identity as a writer.
The Case of Ulrike Meinhof

In 1996, the memorial conference that marked the twentieth anniver-
sary of Meinhof’s death took place against the backdrop of an enormous
image of her head (taken from a pretty, sanitized photograph of her when
she was a young journalist) set within what appears to be a divine halo
of light. In the opening speeches of the event, ex-RAF member Monika
Berberich touched on Meinhof’s posthumous significance in left-wing
mythology as the “icon, the sublime warrior, the martyr” (“die Ikone, die
hehre Kämpferin, die Märtyrerin”).13
Even before her death, elements on the left chose to construct
Meinhof as different and separate from the violent, armed group with
which she identified. “You’re different, Ulrike” (“Du bist anders,
Ulrike”), wrote her foster mother Renate Riemeck in a sentimental
appeal after Meinhof went underground with the RAF.14 For some,
Meinhof had taken up where Rosa Luxemburg left off; the comparison
with Luxemburg was being made as early as 1958,15 and after her death
in 1976 the poet Erich Fried would send a funeral telegram in praise
of “the greatest German woman since Rosa Luxemburg.”16 Even dur-
ing her lifetime Meinhof began to acquire a reputation for purity of
purpose: “intellectual integrity incarnate” (“fleischgewordene intellek-
tuelle Redlichkeit”) is her ex-husband Klaus Rainer Röhl’s designa-
tion.17 Even though the radical left consciously rejects any association
with Röhl, who is vilified, Berberich echoed that notion in 1996 when
she spoke of the “moral integrity” (“moralische Integrität”) that, in
her view, still defined Meinhof.18
In 2003, a biography by Alois Prinz drew a picture of Ulrike Meinhof
as a kind of fallen angel.19 The idea of Meinhof as an angelic child seems
to have originated with Riemeck, who takes time out in her otherwise
largely self-glorifying autobiography to propound a sentimental vision of
her foster daughter that is somewhere between avenging angel of justice
and mater misericordiae.20 Meinhof as angel of justice figures in Mario
Krebs’s biography (“the young Ulrike had a powerful sense of justice, and
so she very often took up the cudgels for those weaker than her”),21 and
in Stefan Aust’s influential Baader-Meinhof-Komplex.22
In the eyes of some admirers Meinhof rode into battle like Joan of
Arc: fearless and self-sacrificing.23 Joan is an emblem of French history, and
there is a sense that the story of Meinhof and Germany’s history in the
mid twentieth century go hand-in-hand, too.24 Prinz notes that her birth
in October 1934 coincided with the rise of the Nazi party — that is, with
the death of democracy in Germany,25 and the academic psychologist Peter
Brückner titled his account of her political work Ulrike Marie Meinhof und
die deutschen Verhältnisse (Ulrike Marie Meinhof and the German Situa-
tion).26 The fates of the other terrorists — Andreas Baader, Gudrun Ens-
slin, or Inge Viett (b. 1944) of the 2 June Movement, for example — are
never connected with Germany’s national history in quite the same way.
Meinhof is again somehow separate, somehow different. For her konkret
columns, Meinhof — presumably advised by Röhl — used her full name
Ulrike Marie; the connotations of purity inherent in that middle name may
well be what has led biographers to reiterate it in accounts of her life.
Two recent biographies (the first, incidentally, to have been written
by women authors) do show an impulse to look for new approaches to
her story, and take a tone noticeably different from previous accounts.27
In 2007, ex-Green party activist Jutta Ditfurth moved away from tales of
Meinhof as a maternal angel and later victim of her fellow revolutionaries
to a more sober assessment of her political motivation and her real influ-
ence in and on the organization RAF;28 East German academic Kristin
Wesemann, in a noticeably less sympathetic account of Meinhof’s inten-
tions and intelligence, offers a bitter critique of her adherence to the com-
munist ideal and the failure to engage critically with the real-life problems
of “lived socialism” in the East.29
Meinhof’s biography brings us face-to-face with difficult facts:30 her
active participation in deliberate killing (notably the May bomb campaign
of 1972), her ruthless rhetorical functionalization of Auschwitz and the
Jewish experience, and her complete lack of sympathy for the Israeli ath-
letes killed in Munich after their abduction from the Olympic games by
Palestinian extremists in 1972.31 No one has yet engaged with this “femi-
nist icon’s”32 rejection of the liberal women’s movement in Germany as
“Votzenchauvismus” (cunt chauvinism).33
In the United States, where homegrown terrorism took the form
of the Weathermen — later the Weather Underground and contempo-
raries of the RAF — there is obvious discomfort not only because acts
of terrorism happened, but because of who perpetrated them: “Violence

against the state is not supposed to happen — not in formally democratic
societies . . . And not, certainly, at the hands of well-educated youths of
the middle or upper classes,” Jeremy Varon explains; political violence is
supposed to be “the last resort of the disenfranchised and dispossessed,
fighting oppression in societies that permit them no other choice.”34 In
Meinhof’s case, the notion that terrorist violence is the recourse only of
those who have no other means of being heard is difficult to uphold.
During the 1960s she was a high-profile media figure who broadcast her
political and social views on the radio (still a very powerful medium in
the sixties) as well as publishing in books, newspapers, and in the maga-
zine she also edited, konkret. A terrorist is not necessarily underprivileged,
undereducated, or a hapless victim of world politics: Meinhof attended
grammar school and university, and came from a intellectual environment
that was certainly above average (both her mother and her foster mother
were university-trained teachers, her father, who died when she was very
young, an art historian). As a young adult she was well informed in mat-
ters of politics, economics, and society. That renders attempts made by,
among others, her ex-husband Röhl and family friend Aust to portray
her primarily as the victim of the RAF unconvincing.35 The documen-
tary evidence suggests that she actively helped plan and shape the Red
Army Faction. Her politics, and importantly her diction — the words and
images she chose to use in her writing — were a decisive influence on the
language and therefore on the actions of the organization.
Politics for Meinhof was a spectrum that extended far beyond party
political matters or the domestic and foreign policies of the Federal
Republic. In her columns for konkret, world politics (particularly the bur-
geoning postcolonial movements in the wake of Western imperialism),
the developing world, and social justice and gender politics at home in
Germany were all matters of urgent concern. In the late 1960s her focus
on social justice, gender, and the domestic context sharpened; that cul-
minated in the preparation and filming of a television drama, a piece of
documentary fiction about a Berlin girls’ home, called Bambule (Riot).
Her success as a journalist and columnist throughout the 1960s was
the result not only of a journalist’s “nose” for the right material, but also
of her rhetorical skills. Meinhof knew how to present material in a per-
suasive and engaging manner. “With her typewriter and on the edito-
rial board of konkret,” Röhl recalls, “she was a profound influence on an
entire generation of young people who would one day themselves influ-
ence society” (“Mit ihrer Schreibmaschine und am Redaktionstisch von
konkret beeinflußte sie zehn Jahre lang nachhaltig eine ganze Generation
von jungen Multiplikatoren”).36 That promise of persuasive influence was
not least what made her such a desirable addition to the RAF: “everyone
knows you were, are, will be our voice” (“jeder weiß, daß du die stimme
warst, bist, sein wirst”), Ensslin assured her.37 The Red Army Faction
may have discussed and determined its agenda collectively, but it relied
on Meinhof to write it down, to present its arguments and raison d’être
to the outside world.
I shall be distinguishing three phases in her life as a writer: her jour-
nalistic work to 1970, when the Red Army Faction was founded; then the
revolutionary theory she wrote on behalf of the collective during her time
as a RAF member operating underground; and finally the texts written
after her arrest in 1972 until her death in 1976, as a core member of the
imprisoned collective. About half of the columns and articles she wrote
during her ten years at konkret have been reprinted: the Berlin publisher
Klaus Wagenbach, a personal friend of hers, published two volumes of her
journalistic work, called Die Würde des Menschen ist antastbar (Human
Dignity is Violable) and Deutschland Deutschland unter anderm (Ger-
many, Germany — among other things).38 Both titles are taken from her
columns for konkret; the former deliberately reverses the well-known first
article of the West German constitution, which states that human dignity
is inviolable (“die Würde des Menschen ist unantastbar”), while the latter
is a drily humorous reminder that the Federal Republic has, or ought to
have, put away the nationalism contained in the first verse of its national
anthem just as it has jettisoned that first verse, which is no longer sung. A
selection of the journalistic texts has recently appeared in English transla-
tion, with the title (again taken from one of her columns) Everybody Talks
about the Weather . . . We Don’t.39
The difficulty with assessing Meinhof’s writing after 1970 is not only
that much of it was written “collectively,” but that there is no politically
neutral edition of her writing after that time. Some of the later and last
texts, especially from the period 1974–76 (the two years before she died),
are the most interesting on the subject of identity and violence. They are
available in posthumously published collections, all of which, however, were
produced by editors or editorial cooperatives with a strong political agenda.
Two volumes, called letzte texte von ulrike (ulrike’s last texts) and texte: der
raf (texts: of the raf; both titles are in lower case to reflect the RAF’s, or
raf’s, own practice) were collated and published shortly after her death by
an International Committee for the Defense of Political Prisoners in West-
ern Europe, founded in 1975 by RAF attorney Klaus Croissant. Dutch law-
yer Pieter Bakker Schut subsequently edited a collection of prison letters,
called das info (the info).40 While there is no reason to suppose that the
texts published in these collections are not authentic,41 each of the three
volumes presents the reader with a selection; what we see of Meinhof’s
writing is controlled by those who had access to the original documents.
Lurking suspicions that the selections reflect a particular image of Mein-
hof and the RAF that seemed desirable to those editors at that particular
time are confirmed by a number of letters and documents that were not
reprinted. The latter chapters of this book give access to some of those
documents: unedited copies of the original texts from the archived collec-
tion of RAF documents in Hamburg’s Institute for Social Research.
The Context of West Germany

Until recently Germany found the history of home-grown terrorism
almost too hot to handle. In 2005 the Süddeutsche Zeitung suggested that
the events of the nineteen-seventies still ranked among the elements in
the German past that Germans least wanted to face up to.42 It is a history
of violence and killing that is uncomfortably difficult to separate from
another history of violence and killing — the Nazi regime between 1933
and 1945, to which 1970s terrorism is certainly, at least in part, a reac-
tion. “The immense social and psychological significance of the RAF for
the Federal Republic of Germany is that it reopens a chapter of the mur-
derous history that preceded its foundation,” a weighty German study of
left-wing terrorism posited recently.43
German authors have tended to apologize or excuse themselves
when engaging with the subject: in the early 1990s, a book about the
structure of the RAF worried that it was “exotic” or even “unrespect-
able” to address the history of a terrorist organization,44 and a disserta-
tion published in 1999 still found it “relatively problematic” to tackle
the topic in any form.45 In 2004 — six years after the final dissolution of
the Red Army Faction in 1998 — established writer and journalist Alois
Prinz would still introduce his biography of Ulrike Meinhof cautiously,
in case it might be received as support for terrorist violence.46 But in the
new millenium Germany has been discovering an increasing will to look
back, evidenced in a burgeoning of academic and popular publications;47
in 2005 the controversial exhibition in Berlin, Zur Vorstellung des Terrors:
Die RAF — The RAF: Regarding Terror was launched; and in the autumn
of 2008 Der Baader-Meinhof-Komplex (The Baader Meinhof Complex),
a major film by Bernd Eichinger, based on the book by Stefan Aust, was
released both in Germany and internationally.48
The 1960s saw a gradual shift in the West German parliament from
center right to center left. Until 1966 the government was conservative,
under Adenauer and his successor Ludwig Erhardt; from 1966–69 it con-
stituted itself via an unusual “grand coalition” of conservative Christian
Democrats and left-leaning Social Democrats under Chancellor Kurt
Georg Kiesinger, and from 1969 Germany was ruled by the Social Demo-
crats under Chancellor Willy Brandt. All governments, however, found
themselves confronted by the Extraparliamentary Opposition (Außer-
parlamentarische Opposition, or APO for short): a conglomerate of ele-
ments on the liberal and radical left that rejected the mainstream parties,
and was championed by (among others) Ulrike Meinhof.
Whatever West Germany’s domestic difficulties were, the most high-

profile social disturbance of the 1960s — the student movement — was
triggered by an event on the other side of the world: the war in Viet-
nam. The first American protest march against the war was in 1964, and
demonstrations grew in size and frequency throughout the later 1960s.
In 1967, an international association of academics under philosopher
Bertrand Russell established a War Crimes Tribunal, which compared
events in Vietnam to crimes perpetrated by the Nazis during the Second
World War. Reports of napalm attacks on peasants and children reached
the United States and Europe through the new medium of television, a
medium that “brought the war home” to people in an unprecedented
way. The only time anything similar had been seen was when film footage
of the death camps was released by the Allies after 1945. “For many of us
the pictures coming out of Vietnam . . . made us think of Auschwitz,” ex-
RAF member Birgit Hogefeld has recalled, and in the light of Germany’s
past, that had a particular effect: “For many of us that meant the absolute
necessity . . . to take action and to take responsibility.”49 That might be
Hogefeld’s post-hoc rationalization of terrorist violence, but it is also true
that the students did take action. The winter semester 1965–66 in Ber-
lin was declared a “Vietnam semester,” and students shared information
about the war during “sit-ins” and “teach-ins”: a vocabulary borrowed
from their American counterparts. In February 1968, Berlin’s Technische
Universität hosted the International Vietnam Congress, concluding with
a twelve-thousand-strong antiwar march through the city.
But Vietnam was only one of a number of foreign states that Ger-
man socialist student organizations felt duty bound to protect from the
machinations of the capitalist West (which they read, with Marx and
Lenin, as imperialist). Their parents’ generation had failed to demon-
strate the political conscience necessary to nip Nazi empire-building in
the bud, and the new generation was driven by a powerful need to act,
and be seen to act, differently. Iran, a country largely made up of very
poor peasants, ruled by the enormously wealthy Shah Reza Pahlavi, was
among their targets, and when the shah visited Berlin in 1967 a key
event shifted the tenor of the whole movement: policeman Heinz Kur-
ras, on duty during the demonstration that greeted the Shah, shot and
killed a young student protester called Benno Ohnesorg, apparently in
a moment of panic but without provocation. Ohnesorg’s fellow stu-
dents were profoundly shocked. Many later identified that moment as
a moment of internal radicalization, a moment when violence suddenly
became real and possible. (The recent discovery that Kurras was also
working for the East German secret police has reopened some debates,
but does not alter the effect of events at the time.)50 Similar responses
were provoked by the shooting of the leader of the student movement,
Rudi Dutschke, on the streets of Berlin by a young right-winger called
Josef Bachmann (Dutschke survived the attack, but his death twelve
years later was a consequence of his injuries). Bommi Baumann of the
2 June Movement has described his internal monologue on hearing of
the Dutschke shooting: “that bullet was meant for you . . . Before I let
myself get carted off to Auschwitz I’d rather shoot first.”51
The students’ stance was in essence Marxist-Leninist, but also neo-
Marxist, drawing on the political philosophy of Herbert Marcuse, whose
theory of “repressive tolerance” critiqued liberal pacifism and provided a
basis for justifying revolutionary violence.52 That basis was further devel-
oped in Frantz Fanon’s widely-read The Wretched of the Earth, an account
of the Algerian uprising that appeared in German in 1966 with a forward
by Jean-Paul Sartre. Violence (Sartre summarizes Fanon) is an expression
of identity: “The native cures himself of colonial neurosis by thrusting
out the settler through force of arms. When his rage boils over, he redis-
covers his lost innocence and comes to know himself in that he himself
creates his self.”53 Inspired not only by the collapse of colonialism, but
by the postwar analyses of Marcuse’s fellow Frankfurt School philosopher
Theodor W. Adorno, the students’ position was emphatically antiauthori-
tarian. In response to what had happened in Germany and central Europe
under National Socialism, Adorno and colleagues in the United States
had developed the notion of what they called the “authoritarian person-
ality.” The project was looking to establish what kind of an individual,
under what circumstances, can be persuaded to contribute to the build-
ing of a dictatorship: is there such a thing as a fascist personality? A core
notion is that attraction to a strong leader — that is, the will to subject
oneself to authority in order to be part of an “in-group” — goes hand-
in-hand with a willingness to reject and stereotype minority groups, and
that the attraction to or need for strong leadership arises out of a certain
(authoritarian) style of childrearing.54 For young people, rebelling against
instances of authority such as the university, their parents, or the state
could therefore be seen both as a step towards personal emancipation and
as a step away from the Nazi past. But the students’ fierce language drew
criticism from many (including Frankfurt School philosophers Jürgen
Habermas and Max Horkheimer, who spoke of “left-wing fascism” and
incipient totalitarianism)55 that they were reprising the repressive tactics
of Nazism. Similar accusations were, and continue to be, leveled at the
RAF: in 2002 a publication commemorating the victims of the German
Autumn of 1977, edited by the head of the Dresdner Bank, would still
assert that the RAF (“these self-styled ‘antifascists’”) in fact showed a
“totally fascist” disregard for humanity.56
There are uncomfortable indicators that Germany’s left-wing extrem-
ists may have carried forward a tradition of antisemitism. In his mem-
oir of his involvement in the 2 June Movement, Wie alles anfing (How
It All Started), Bommi Baumann describes an antisemitic flyer produced
by left-wingers in 1969 — which he read with approval rather than dis-

turbance. On the thirty-first anniversary of the fascist Kristallnacht, sev-
eral Jewish memorials in West Berlin had been smeared with the words
“shalom napalm” and “El Fatah,” [sic] and a firebomb had been planted
in the Jewish community center. The leaflet Baumann cites with praise
refused to condemn such actions, reading them not as right-wing extrem-
ism but as “a decisive expression of international socialist solidarity,”
based on the notion that “the Jews who were hounded by fascism have
now have become fascists themselves.”57 The accusation that Israelis are
the new fascists is echoed in Meinhof’s own Schwarzer September (Black
September) text of 1972, about the abduction of Israeli athletes from the
Munich Olympics (discussed in detail in chapter 5), and at Horst Mahler’s
trial later in the same year she would even attempt to argue that German
antisemitism was not really antisemitism at all, but an expression of natu-
ral and proper anticapitalism: “The Jews were identified with their busi-
ness activity,” she claimed, “antisemitism was in essence anticapitalist”
(“Die Juden wurden mit ihren Geschäften identifiziert. Der Antisemitis-
mus war seinem Wesen nach antikapitalistisch”).58 When Palestinian and
German extremists abducted an Air France flight in June 1976, the plane
was forced to land at Entebbe airport, Uganda. After some days the non-
Jewish passengers on board were released; the “selection” of the Jewish
passengers who were forced to remain involved two German terrorists,
Wilfried Böse and Brigitte Kuhlmann — not RAF members, but mem-
bers of the “Red Cells” (Rote Zellen or RZ).
Nearly thirty years later, radical left-wing commentator Joachim
Bruhn would argue from the perspective of 1998 that the RAF, which
saw itself as internationalist, was in fact “entirely German”;59 by this he
means primarily that the terrorists failed to emancipate themselves from
German antisemitism, not least in their solidarity with Palestinian nation-
alists. The activities of the terrorists are a painful element in recent Ger-
man history. It is no coincidence that some of those who experienced the
difficult and eventful decade between the shooting of Benno Ohnesorg
in 1967 and the German Autumn of 1977 have become its most promi-
nent historians;60 the need to reassess events and their fallout is clearly
being felt by those who experienced it at first hand. In the recent explo-
sion of German publications on the topic, we are seeing something like a
new process of Vergangenheitsbewältigung: the project of dealing with the
national past.61
Terrorism and Language

“Terrorism,” writes Joanne Wright, “is a strategy, not an ideology.”62
Charles Townshend appears to contradict when he decides that “terror-
ism appears to be a state of mind rather than an activity.”63 Both decline
to pin down a single idea or set of ideas regarding what constitutes ter-
rorist activity and motivation. Even though we may feel that we recognize
acts of terrorism, it is difficult to define a “terrorist” in the abstract: to
distinguish terrorist activity, in every form it takes and has ever taken,
from criminal violence or military action.
For German terrorism expert Uwe Backes in 1991, the phenom-
enon was “a political strategy employed by minority groups, politically
relatively without influence,” and characterized by “the systematic use
of acts of violence, which are intended to engender existential insecu-
rity in the social groups under attack, as well as to educate, mobilize,
and revolutionize the ‘oppressed’ elements in society they seek to win
over.”64 Writing more recently of the challenge posed by both the RAF
and Al-Qaida, Henner Hess has observed that “terrorism is in the eye
of the beholder”:65 definitions of legitimate and illegitimate violence will
always reflect the standpoint of the definer. Terrorism, like criminality,
is an idea that acquires meaning from its historical and political context.
In real terms, it is the state (government and judiciary, supported by the
police force and, if necessary, the armed forces) that decides who is a ter-
rorist, just as it is the state that decides who is a criminal. For the state,
a terrorist act is a criminal act; to accept the notion of political violence
would tend to undermine the political legitimacy of government. For ter-
rorist groups, by contrast, it is important to differentiate themselves from
“common” criminals, to legitimize their actions by asserting a necessity
that goes beyond self-interest. That means that a group other than the
terrorists needs to be identified in whose interest the acts of violence are
allegedly being committed: what Herfried Münkler has called a “third
party with an assumed interest . . . a nationally, ethnically, or sociologi-
cally [these days we might add: religiously] defined tranche of the popula-
tion in whose ‘objective interest,’ the terrorists insist, their operations are
carried out.”66
Backes was reproducing a widespread view when he defined terrorism
as “aggressive” but also “communicative” — as something that depends
for its success not so much on its physical as on its psychological effect.67
Andreas Musolff refines that when he redefines acts of terrorist violence as
a pathological style of political communication.68 The point is not the vio-
lence itself, but the “terror” — destabilization and fear — it engenders.
The RAF did not refer to itself as a terrorist organization; it preferred
the designation “guerilla.” That is a deliberate, and arguably misleading
allusion to the South American context; it is also a rhetorical tactic. Speak-
ing of a “guerilla fighter” tends to express, and invite, political sympathy
where speaking of “terrorists” does not.69 The notion of the guerilla con-
notes a (civil) war situation, and war legitimizes acts of violence that would
otherwise be regarded as criminal: in times of war, a murder becomes a
justified killing (which may be called a casualty, or collateral damage, or
an execution). Guerilla fighters and revolutionaries underpin their sense of

their difference from murderers or criminals exactly as national armies do:
by strict codes of discipline. In his “Problems of Strategy in China’s Revo-
lutionary War” (1936), Mao insisted on political and practical discipline
among revolutionaries, while Brazilian revolutionary Carlos Marighella, in
his Minimanual of the Urban Guerilla of 1969, emphasized the guerilla’s
clear focus on government and capitalist-imperialist targets. Che Guevara
in Guerilla Warfare (1961) measured the difference between bandits and
partisans by the support they found among the people.
Historian David Fromkin’s differentiation between guerilla and ter-
rorist activity is pragmatic. In Fromkin’s analysis, a guerilla army attacks
a target (such as a railway line) with the intention of destroying the tar-
get — that means that the physical result of the attack is the primary inten-
tion. Terrorists, by contrast, attack targets with the intention of provoking
a reaction — so the psychological result of the attack is the primary inten-
tion. Fromkin’s point is that terrorist strategy is remarkable because its
aims are achieved not through actions, but through the response to those
actions; it is a strategy of provocation.70 By that definition the proper des-
ignation for the RAF is terrorist.
In order for the provocation to be understood, an act of terror-
ism needs to be correctly “read,” and terrorist activity of the 1970s was
unfailingly accompanied by verbal statements from the perpetrators. Peter
Waldmann’s rather worrying dictum that “terrorism is primarily [!] a
communicative strategy”71 is echoed in a letter from Gudrun Ensslin to
the RAF group in 1973: “only a free man speaks of oppression in lan-
guage that is no longer the language of oppression,” she wrote; “that is
what makes communication so difficult. but our language begins with
what we do . . . words, expressions are actions. actions are words” (“erst
der befreite spricht von der unterdrückung nicht mehr in der sprache der
unterdrückung. das macht die verständigung so schwierig. aber der aus-
gangspunkt unserer rede ist unsere handlung . . . wörter, begriffe sind
aktionen. aktionen sind begriffe”).72
The word “terrorism” itself is often used rhetorically, with a certain
persuasive force or intention. Defense lawyer Josef Grässle-Münscher
explains that, when the designation “terrorist organization” (terroristische
Vereinigung) was introduced into German law in August 1976, one vital
consideration was its “public effectiveness”: it created an overlap between
the politicians’ assessment of the RAF and the group’s legal status in a
(literal) legitimization of the government perspective.73 From the per-
spective of terrorists, who are seeking to avoid criminal status, at least in
the eyes of the people, self-justification or legitimization is just as impor-
tant as it is for government. In the case of Meinhof and the RAF, I am
going to argue that terrorist activity — violence — went hand-in-hand
with self-invention in language. The group around Baader, Ensslin, and
Meinhof may have claimed that deeds rank above words, but words — as
anyone who has read the exhaustingly extensive revolutionary documents
of the RAF will know — were a major part of its practice.
There is a clear and demonstrable continuity between the texts Mein-
hof wrote as a journalist and the revolutionary writings of the RAF’s so-
called first generation. Both are characterized by assertions that pretend
to logic, but actually fail to fulfill the rules of logical argument. In the
classic demagogic manner, Meinhof argues with valid premises to draw
invalid conclusions. She routinely employs what philosophers call “use-
ful fictions,” which overlap with what literary critics call “metaphor” or
in some cases “personalization”: the technique of associating one thing
with another. That may be harmless (if I call you a lamb, or a gene “self-
ish”) or dangerous (if I say you are a plague or its carrier and should be
destroyed). The danger goes beyond the individual: we need to take the
caution to heart that “this kind of useful fiction is perilous. . . . too much
talk of selfish genes or purpose in evolution can lead people to mistake fic-
tions for facts. Useful fictions are most useful when they are most clearly
fictions.”74
Meinhof’s metaphorical and rhetorical language has attracted both
admiration and anxiety: Eberhard Itzenplitz, who directed her television
drama Bambule (Riot), subsequently recalled her “striking gift for the
rhetorical, for argument”; later, a government-sponsored analysis of ter-
rorist activity in West Germany would shift that up a gear when it deemed
her “demagogically rhetorical” (“demagogisch-rhetorisch”).75 In her
equations of Auschwitz with Vietnam (for example), or of Nazi Germany
with the Federal Republic (both of which will be discussed in detail in
chapter 1), Meinhof was creating fictions in place of argument: both of
these comparisons are fallacious, in the manner of the “masked man” fal-
lacy, which suggests — illogically — that X and Y are identical if anything
that is true of X is also true of Y.76 In fact, X and Y are only identical if
they share all of the same properties, but once one has started calling
democratic West Germany “Nazi Germany,” Vietnam “Auschwitz,” and
Israelis the new fascists, it becomes possible — for Meinhof as much as
for her readers — to mistake fiction for fact.
In the current world context of a “war on terror,” Germany is a use-

ful point of reference: the Germans are digesting their terrorist past, and
assessing not only how the trouble started, but where reactions to ter-
rorism in government and society may have made things worse. German
political analysts noticed some time ago that the “aggressive rhetoric” of
the so-called war on terror is more likely to aggravate than to relieve the
situation.77 The RAF shook West Germany in the 1970s not least because
the population no longer knew whether it could believe in a Rechtsstaat,
or ethical government. The German example demonstrates how much
damage is done to the reputation and practices of a democratic state when

the violence of terrorists is reflected back in the prophylactic and punitive
activities of the government that finds itself under attack. Historian Mar-
tin Jander observes the threat to democracies from their reaction to ter-
rorism. “The fact is that their democratic credentials only emerge when
they are challenged,” he argues. “Whether the Federal Republic of Ger-
many can claim those democratic credentials for itself in the matter of
how it dealt with prisoners from the terrorist groups is going to have to
be a subject for political scientists and others to debate.”78
Notes
The citations for the two epigraphs in this chapter are as follows: Meinhof, docu-
ment titled “14. Mai Notizen,” in RAF-Archiv des Hamburger Instituts für Sozi-
alforschung (henceforth cited as HIS) Me,U/025,006, 3; Lanier, http://www.
edge.org/3rd_culture/lanier/lanier_index.html (accessed April 2008). Lanier is
Interdisciplinary Scholar-in-Residence, UC Berkeley.
1See Judith Butler, Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of “Sex” (New
York: Routledge, 1993), 8.
2 See, e.g., Identity: A Reader, ed. Paul du Gay, Jessica Evans, and Peter Redman
(London: Sage, 2000).
3 Thanks to Cary Parker for his useful clarification of this point.
4 See Sarah Colvin, “Witch, Amazon, or Joan of Arc? Ulrike Meinhof’s Defend-
ers, or How to Legitimize a Violent Woman,” in Women and Death 2: Warlike
Women in the German Literary and Cultural Imagination since 1500, ed. Colvin
and Helen Watanabe-O’Kelly (Rochester, NY: Camden House, 2009), 250–72.
5 As a recent academic study of Meinhof describes itself: see Kristin Wesemann,
Ulrike Meinhof: Kommunistin, Journalistin, Terroristin: Eine politische Biografie
(Baden-Baden: Nomos, 2007).
6Ermittlungsrichter des Bundesgerichtshofs, “Rückgabe von sichergestellten
Gegenständen” (document of 17 September 1976 detailing items removed from
Meinhof’s cell), in HIS Me,U/016,001.
7Landeskriminalamt Baden-Württemberg, List of books found in Raspe’s cell, in
HIS Te/006,005.
8Klaus Croissant to Buchhandlung Wendelin Niedlich (16 May 1974), in HIS
En,G/008,001.
9Ermittlungsrichter des Bundesgerichtshofs, “Beschluss: Baader, Ensslin, Meins,
Raspe” (27 September 1972), in HIS En,G/002,002.
10The publisher was Ebehardt Zamory, at konkret Verlag in Hamburg. See HIS
Me,U/004,004.
11 Kollektiv RAF, “Schulungsliste,” in HIS Ba,A/025,004.
12See Peter Kampits, Eine kleine Geschichte der österreichischen Philosophie (Vienna:
Österreichische Bundesverlag, 1984).
13See http://www.nadir.org/nadir/archiv/PolitischeStroemungen/Stadtguerilla+RAF/
RAF/ulrike_meinhof/va20/va20podium.html (accessed November 2006). The
image is reproduced in a photograph of Berberich at the event, in taz (= Die
Tageszeitung), taz-Journal: die RAF, der Staat, und die Linke: 20 Jahre Deutscher
Herbst (1997), 83.
14 Renate Riemeck, “Gib auf, Ulrike!” in konkret 22 (1971).
15 “Ulrike Meinhof hatte mit klarer, melodisch klingender Stimme gespro-
chen. Man konnte später hören: ‘Sie hat geredet wie eine Rosa Luxemburg.’”
Jürgen Seifert, “Ulrike Meinhof,” in Die RAF und der linke Terrorismus, ed.
Wolfgang Kraushaar, 2 vols. (Hamburg: Hamburger Edition, 2006), 1:350–
71; here 354.
16 Cited in Klaus Wagenbach’s afterword in Meinhof, Bambule: Fürsorge — Sorge
für wen? (Berlin: Wagenbach, 1971).
17Klaus Rainer Röhl, Fünf Finger sind keine Faust: Eine Abrechnung, 3rd edn.
(Munich: Universitas, 1998 [1974]), 99.
18http://www.nadir.org/nadir/archiv/PolitischeStroemungen/Stadtguerilla+RAF/
RAF/ulrike_meinhof/va20/va20podium.html (accessed 1 July 2008).
19Alois Prinz, Lieber wütend als traurig: Die Lebensgeschichte der Ulrike Marie
Meinhof (Weinheim: Beltz, 2003).
20 Renate Riemeck, Ich bin ein Mensch für mich: Aus einem unbequemen Leben
(Stuttgart: Urachhaus, 1992).

21 “Die junge Ulrike habe einen starken Gerechtigkeitssinn gehabt und sich des-
halb vor allem für die Schwächeren eingesetzt.” Mario Krebs, Ulrike Meinhof:
Ein Leben im Widerspruch (Reinbek: Rowohlt, 1988), 22. Krebs specifically gives
Riemeck as his source.
22 Stefan Aust, Der Baader-Meinhof Komplex (Hamburg: Hoffmann und Campe,
2008 [1985]), 46. See also the film based on the book: Der Baader-Meinhof-
Komplex, dir. Bernd Eichinger (Germany, 2008).
23 See Colvin, “Witch, Amazon, or Joan of Arc?”
24 On the connection of woman and nation, see Clare Bielby, “Attacking the Body
Politic: The Terroristin in 1970s German Media,” in Reconstruction 7.1 (2007);
http://reconstruction.eserver.org/071/bielby.shtml (accessed 15 January 2008).
25 “Man könnte sagen, dass Ulrike Meinhofs Leben begann, als in Deutschland
die Demokratie zu Grabe getragen wurde.” Prinz, Lieber wütend, 22.
26Peter Brückner, Ulrike Meinhof und die deutschen Verhältnisse (Berlin: Wagen-
bach, 1995 [1976]).
27Ditfurth, Ulrike Meinhof: Die Biografie (Berlin: Ullstein, 2007), 129–30; Wese-
mann, Ulrike Meinhof.
28 Ditfurth has nonetheless attracted criticism for an overly positive portrayal.
See, e.g., Reinhard Mohr, “Terroristen ausmisten,” in Spiegel Online (20 Novem-
ber 2007); http://www.spiegel.de/kultur/gesellschaft/0,1518,518534,00.html
(accessed 26 April 2008). Ditfurth’s more recent account of the “friendship”
between Meinhof and student leader Dutschke is an opportunistic and uncon-
vincing piece of writing that has been deservedly lacerated by reviewers; see Ditfurth,
Rudi und Ulrike: Geschichte einer Freundschaft (Munich: Droemer, 2008); see
also, e.g., Michael Sontheimer, “Die trügt wie gedruckt,” in Spiegel Online (7
April 2008); http://www.spiegel.de/kultur/literatur/0,1518,545852,00.html
(accessed 26 April 2008).
29 Wesemann, Ulrike Meinhof, 30, passim.
30Not least her daughter’s account of her life: see Bettina Röhl, So macht Kom-
munismus Spaß! Ulrike Meinhof, Klaus Rainer Röhl, und die Akte konkret (Ham-
burg: EVA, 2006).
31 See chapters 3 through 5; on the latter also Wolfgang Kraushaar, “Antizionis-
mus als Trojanisches Pferd: Zur antisemitischen Dimension in den Kooperationen
von Tupamaros West-Berlin, RAF und RZ mit den Palästinensern,” in Die RAF,
ed. Kraushaar, 1:676–95; here 689–90.
32Klausjürgen Hehn, “Im Tod größer als im Leben,” Frankfurter Rundschau (9
September 2008), 13.
33 See chapter 5.
34 Varon, Bringing the War Home: The Weather Underground, the Red Army Fac-
tion, and Revolutionary Violence in the Sixties and Seventies (Berkeley, CA: U of
California P, 2004), 2.
35See, e.g., Klaus Rainer Röhl, “Ulrike Meinhof — Gefangene der Baader-
Gruppe?” konkret 14 (1972): 17–19; Aust, Der Baader-Meinhof Komplex.
36Klaus Rainer Röhl, “Vorbemerkung,” in Ulrike Meinhof: Dokumente einer
Rebellion. 10 Jahre “konkret”-Kolumnen (Hamburg: konkret, 1972), 5–6; here 5.
37 Letter from Ensslin, cited in Pieter Bakker Schut, Stammheim: Der Prozeß
gegen die Rote Armee Fraktion: Die notwendige Korrektur der herrschenden Mei-
nung (Bonn: Pahl-Rugenstein, 1997), 287.
38 Meinhof, Die Würde des Menschen ist antastbar: Aufsätze und Polemiken (Ber-
lin: Wagenbach, 1995 [1980]); Deutschland Deutschland unter anderm: Aufsätze
und Polemiken (Berlin: Wagenbach, 1995).
39 Everybody Talks About the Weather . . . We Don’t: The Writings of Ulrike Mein-
hof, ed. Karin Bauer (New York: Seven Stories, 2008).
40 Meinhof, letzte texte von ulrike, ed. Internationales Komitee zur Verteidigung
politischer Gefangener in Westeuropa (Eigendruck im Selbstverlag, June 1976);
texte: der raf, ed. Internationales Komitee zur Verteidigung politischer Gefange-
ner in Westeuropa, Sektion BRD, Stuttgart (Lund: Verlag Bo Cavefors, 1977);
das info: briefe von gefangenen aus der raf aus der diskussion 1973–1977: Doku-
mente, ed. Pieter Bakker Schut (Kiel: Neuer Malik Verlag, 1987).
41Letters in Bakker Schut’s das info were shortened (or cut) and the orthogra-
phy altered before publication. See Olaf Gäthje, “Das ‘info’-System der RAF von
1973 bis 1977 in sprachwissenschaftlicher Perspektive,” in Die RAF, ed. Kraus-
haar, 1:714–35.
42 “eines der am brüchigsten aufgearbeiteten Themen bundesdeutscher Zeitge-
schichte.” Gottfried Oy, “Vom Hass zum großen Sprung: Zurückgeworfen auf
die Familie: Die Gefängnisbriefe Gudrun Ensslins an ihre Geschwister,” in Süd-
deutsche Zeitung (17 May 2005), 16.
43 “Die immense sozialpsychologische Bedeutung der RAF für die Bundes-

republik liegt darin, dass mit ihr ein Kapitel der mörderischen Geschichte, die
ihrer Gründung vorausging, wieder aufgeschlagen wurde.” Christian Schneider,
“Omnipotente Opfer: Die Geburt der Gewalt aus dem Geist des Widerstands,” in
Die RAF, ed. Kraushaar, 2:1328–42; here 1341.
44 “exotisch, wenn nicht . . . anrüchig.” Gerd Rosenkranz, introduction to Uta
Demes, Die Binnenstruktur der RAF: Divergenz zwischen postulierter und tatsäch-
licher Gruppenrealität (Münster: Waxmann, 1994), 1.
45 “relativ problematisch . . . , sich in welcher Form auch immer mit dieser The-
matik auseinanderzusetzen.” Caesar Martin Kedzierski, Sprache und Politik: Exem-
plarisch dargestellt am Beispiel Ulrike Meinhofs (Marburg: Tectum, 1999), 4.
46 “Ist es immer noch so, . . . dass bereits ‘das bloße Verstehen-Wollen’ als ein
geheimes Einverständnis mit den Taten der RAF-Täter gewertet wird?” Prinz,
Lieber wütend, 7.
47 Most recently, e.g., Sven Felix Kellerhof, Was stimmt? RAF: Die wichtigsten
Antworten (Freiburg: Herder, 2007); Ulf G. Stuberger, Die Akte RAF: Taten und
Motive, Täter und Opfer (Munich: Herbig, 2008); Willi Winkler, Die Geschichte
der RAF (Reinbek: Rowohlt, 2008); Daniela Fleischhauer, Vom Protest zur
gewaltsamen Aktion: Gründe für den Weg von Ulrike Meinhof in den Terrorismus
(Norderstedt: Books on Demand, 2008).
48 Aust’s book was originally published in English and German in 1985, but
has been republished in an updated version in both languages to accompany the
release of the film. See Aust, Der Baader-Meinhof-Komplex, and Aust, The Baader-
Meinhof Complex (London: Bodley Head, 2008).
49 “Für viele hat sich bei den Bildern aus Vietnam . . . die Parallele zu Auschwitz
aufgedrängt. . . . Für viele ergab sich daraus zwingend die Notwendigkeit . . . zu
handeln und Verantwortung zu übernehmen.” Hogefeld, “Zur Geschichte der
RAF,” in Carlchristian von Braunmühl, Hogefeld, Hubertus Janssen, Horst-Eber-
hard Richter, and Gerd Rosenkranz, Versuche, die Geschichte der RAF zu verstehen:
Das Beispiel Birgit Hogefeld (Gießen: Psychosozial-Verlag, 1996), 19–58; here 30.
50 See, for example, Süddeutsche Zeitung (22 May 2009): 1.
51 “Die Kugel war genauso gegen dich . . . Bevor ich nun wieder nach Auschwitz
transportiert werde, denn schieß ich lieber vorher.” Michael (Bommi) Baumann,
Wie alles anfing (Munich: Trikont, 1980), 38–39.
52Marcuse, “Repressive Tolerance,” in A Critique of Pure Tolerance, ed. Robert
Paul Wolff, Barrington Moore Jr., and Herbert Marcuse (Boston: Beacon Press,
1969), 95–137.
53 Jean-Paul Sartre, “Preface,” in Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, trans.
Constance Farrington (London: Penguin, 2001 [1965]), 18–19. The German
edition has the title Die Verdammten dieser Erde.
54Theodor W. Adorno et al., The Authoritarian Personality (New York: Harper
& Brothers, 1950).
55 Habermas, cited in Ditfurth, Rudi und Ulrike, 87; Horkheimer, “Die Motive
der rebellierenden Studierenden” (1968), cited in Susanne Kailitz, Von den Worten
zu den Waffen: Frankfurter Schule, Studentenbewegung, RAF und die Gewaltfrage

(Wiesbaden: VS, 2007), 83.
56 “dass diese selbst ernannten ‘Antifaschisten’ schon in ihren ersten Handlun-
gen mit absolut faschistischer Menschenverachtung ans Werk gingen.” Freiheit
und Demokratie: 25 Jahre nach dem “Deutschen Herbst”: Herausforderungen und
Verpflichtungen für Bürger und Staat in einer freiheitlichen Demokratie, ed. Bernd
Fahrholz (Hamburg: Hoffmann und Campe, 2002), 67.
57 “Beide Aktionen sind . . . ein entscheidendes Bindeglied internationaler soziali-
stischer Solidarität . . . Aus den vom Faschismus vertriebenenen Juden sind selbst
Faschisten geworden.” Baumann, Wie alles anfing, 81.
58 Cited in Otto Schily and Hans-Christian Ströbele, Plädoyers einer politischen
Verteidigung. Reden und Mitschriften aus dem Mahler-Prozeß, ed. Rote Hilfe
Westberlin (Berlin: Rote Hilfe, 1973), 141–42.
59 “überaus deutsch.” Bruhn, “Vorwort,” in Emile Marenssin, Stadtguerilla und
soziale Revolution: Über den bewaffneten Kampf und die Rote Armee Fraktion
(Freiburg i. Br.: Ca ira, 1998), 2.
60 Notably Wolfgang Kraushaar, most recently in his Achtundsechzig: Eine Bilanz
(Berlin: Propyläen, 2008); see also Ditfurth, Ulrike Meinhof; Gerd Koenen, Das
rote Jahrzehnt: Unsere kleine deutsche Kulturrevolution 1967–1977 (Frankfurt am
Main: Fischer, 2002) and Vesper, Ensslin, Baader: Urszenen des deutschen Terro-
rismus (Cologne: Kiepenheuer & Witsch, 2003); Klaus Pflieger, Die Rote Armee
Fraktion — RAF (Baden-Baden: Nomos 2004).
61 See, e.g., Schneider, “Omnipotente Opfer,” 1341.
62 Joanne Wright, Terrorist Propaganda: The Red Army Faction and the Provi-
sional IRA, 1968–86 (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1991), xi.
63Charles Townshend, Terrorism: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford: Oxford
UP, 2002), 3.
64 “eine politische Strategie nicht über Herrschaftsmittel verfügender, politisch rela-
tiv einflußschwacher . . . Minderheiten . . . durch den systematischen Einsatz mas-
siver, als Überraschungsschläge durchgeführter Gewalttaten gekennzeichnet, die ein
Gefühl existentieller Verunsicherung bei zu bekämpfenden sozialen Gruppen erzeu-
gen sowie der Bewußtseinsformung, Mobilisierung und Revolutionierung bei ‘unter-
drückten’ und zu gewinnenden gesellschaftlichen Schichten dienen sollen.” Uwe
Backes, Bleierne Jahre: Baader-Meinhof und danach (Erlangen: Straube, 1991),
32. Emphasis in original.
65 Henner Hess, “Die neue Herausforderung: Von der RAF zu Al-Qaida,” in Die
RAF, ed. Kraushaar, 1:103–22; here 104.

66 Herfried Münkler, “Guerillakrieg und Terrorismus: Begriffliche Unklarheit mit
politischen Folgen,” in Die RAF, ed. Kraushaar, 1:78–102; here 94. See chapter
3.
67 “Nicht die physische, sondern die psychische Wirkung terroristischer Aktionen
steht im Vordergrund.” Backes, Bleierne Jahre, 31–32. Emphasis in original.
68
“Terrorismus als pathologischer Typus politischer Kommunikation.” Andreas
Musolff, “Bürgerkriegs-Szenarios und ihre Folgen: Die Terrorismusdebatte in
der Bundesrepublik 1970–1993,” in Die RAF, ed. Kraushaar, 2:1171–84; here

1172.
69 See Münkler, “Guerillakrieg und Terrorismus,” 79.
70Fromkin, “The Strategy of Terrorism,” in Foreign Affairs (July 1975): 683–
98.
71 “Terrorismus, das gilt es festzuhalten, ist primär eine Kommunikationsstrate-
gie.” Peter Waldmann, Terrorismus: Provokation der Macht, 2nd edn. (Hamburg:
Murmann, 2005), 15.
72 Letter from Ensslin to other RAF prisoners of early 1973, in das info, ed. Bak-
ker Schut, 14.
73 “Maßgeblich für die Aufnahme des Tatbestandes der ‘terroristischen Vereini-
gung’ in das Strafgesetzbuch war die öffentliche Wirksamkeit. . . . Damit war ein
Gleichklang von politischer Bewertung und rechtlicher Bewertung hergestellt.
Das politische Verfolgungsinteresse traf sich unmittelbar mit der rechtlichen
Bewertung und wurde durch dieses legitimiert. Wenn der Politiker das Wort Ter-
rorismus aussprach, so sprach er in einem Atemzug über eine Straftat (terrori-
stische Vereinigung).” Josef Grässle-Münscher, Kriminelle Vereinigung: Von den
Burschenschaften bis zur RAF (Hamburg: EVA, 1991), 163.
74Julian Baggini and Peter S. Fosl, The Philosopher’s Toolkit: A Compendium of
Philosophical Concepts and Methods (Oxford: Blackwell, 2003), 64. Thanks to
Cary Parker for the reference.
75 “ihre auffallende Gabe zum Rhetorischen, zum Argumentieren.” Itzenplitz,
“Nachwort,” in Meinhof, Bambule, 130; “demagogisch-rhetorisch.” Iring Fet-
scher, Herfried Münkler, and Hannelore Ludwig, “Ideologien der Terroristen in
der Bundesrepublik Deutschland,” in Fetscher and Günter Rohrmoser, Ideologien
und Strategien (Analysen zum Terrorismus, ed. Bundesministerium des Innern,
vol. 1) (Opladen: Westdeutscher Verlag, 1981), 228.
76 Baggini and Fosl, The Philosopher’s Toolkit, 103.
77For the recent British context, see Alan Travis, “Whitehall draws up new rules
on language of terror,” in The Guardian (4 February 2008): 1.
78 “die mögliche Bedrohung der Demokratien durch ihre Reaktion auf den Ter-
rorismus selbst . . . Denn für Demokratien gilt: Erst wenn sie herausgefordert
sind, erweist sich ihre Wetterfestigkeit. Ob die Bundesrepublik Deutschland diese
im Falle des Umgangs mit Häftlingen aus Terrorgruppen für sich reklamieren
kann, muss künftig ein wesentlicher Gegenstand politikwissenschaftlicher und
anderer Erörtungen werden.” Jander, “Isolation: zu den Haftbedingungen der
RAF-Gefangenen,” in Die RAF, ed. Kraushaar, 2:973–93; here 973–74.

Introduction: Terrorists, Language, and The State: Dentity Is A Slippery Notion

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Introduction: Terrorists, Language, and

I propose to make use of a simple image . . . This image is of an

“I DENTITY” IS A SLIPPERY NOTION. Do we define ourselves (for example

Language: Why (Else) Would a

In der Zelle ist keine Beleuchtung eingeschaltet. Dazu ergibt sich,

an einem etwa im Mittelteil der Zelle stehenden Tisch befestigt ist,

[There is no light on in the cell. In that regard it can be observed

however, it is Wittgenstein’s early work, the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus,

The Case of Ulrike Meinhof

of terrorism happened, but because of who perpetrated them: “Violence

The Context of West Germany

Whatever West Germany’s domestic difficulties were, the most high-

by left-wingers in 1969 — which he read with approval rather than dis-

Terrorism and Language

an execution). Guerilla fighters and revolutionaries underpin their sense of

In the current world context of a “war on terror,” Germany is a use-

damage is done to the reputation and practices of a democratic state when

(Stuttgart: Urachhaus, 1992).

43 “Die immense sozialpsychologische Bedeutung der RAF für die Bundes-

zu den Waffen: Frankfurter Schule, Studentenbewegung, RAF und die Gewaltfrage

RAF, ed. Kraushaar, 1:103–22; here 104.

der Bundesrepublik 1970–1993,” in Die RAF, ed. Kraushaar, 2:1171–84; here

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