Karin Bauer, ed. Everybody Talks about the Weather--We Don't: The Writings of Ulrike Meinhof. New York Seven Stories Press, 2008. 268 pp. $16.95 (paper), ISBN 978-1-58322-831-9.
Kristin Wesemann. Ulrike Meinhof: Kommunistin, Journalistin, Terroristin - eine politische Biografie. Baden-Baden Nomos Verlag, 2007. 439 pp. EUR 49.00 (cloth), ISBN 978-3-8329-2933-6.
Jutta Ditfurth. Ulrike Meinhof: Die Biografie. Berlin Ullstein Verlag, 2007. 478 pp. EUR 22.90 (cloth), ISBN 978-3-550-08728-8.
Reviewed by Allie Tichenor (Department of History, University of Chicago)
Published on H-German (June, 2009)
Commissioned by Susan R. Boettcher
Remembering Ulrike Meinhof: Conflicting Narratives of Her Life and Times
The occasion of the thirty-year anniversary of the Deutscher Herbst the term used to describe a series of violent attacks launched by the second generation of the Red Army Faction (RAF, or Baader-Meinhof Gang) in the autumn of 1977--resulted in a plethora of popular and scholarly treatments of the RAF and its most notorious members. Although no consensus emerged from these popular and scholarly accounts about the origins of terrorism in 1970s Germany, the threat it posed to West German democracy, or the long-term legacy of the RAF, it is clear that the memory of the RAF remains divisive for German society. This polarization of German memory informs the three works reviewed here on Ulrike Meinhof, one of the founding members of the RAF. In each case, the reader learns as much about the authors' political orientations as he/she does about Meinhof's conversion from journalist to terrorist and, by implication, the shift from peaceful protest to violence by some elements in the student movement.