Blood and Rage_ A Cultural History of Terrorism - Michael Burleigh [148]
Meinhof had interviewed Ensslin fourteen months previously for the magazine konkret of which she was the star columnist; she was also the ex-wife of its editor and owner Klaus Rainer Röhl. Born in 1934, Meinhof was the daughter of an art historian and museum director in Jena who died of cancer when Ulrike was four. Her widowed mother struggled through the war while training to be a teacher. The young Ulrike was an exceptionally pious Protestant as a little girl. In 1946 the mother moved to Oldenburg to flee the Russians, with her children and a younger colleague and friend called Renate Riemeck. Riemeck became Ulrike’s guardian when her mother died of cancer at the age of forty. A committed pacifist and socialist she also became her role model. At her Gymnasium Ulrike stood up to the more authoritarian teachers.33
At the university of Münster she became engaged in protests against atomic weapons and German rearmament; a relationship with a student of nuclear physics did not work out. On a demonstration in May 1958 she met the six years older Röhl, editor of a left-wing monthly covertly subsidised by the underground Communist Party to which he belonged. She joined too. Known to friends as ‘K2R’ Röhl wore smart suits and drove a Porsche to work. Soon Meinhof was working as a columnist for her lover, who called her ‘Riki-baby’, moving up to editor in chief when he accorded himself the grander title of publisher. She was not an easy person to work for. They married and in 1962 had twin girls, Regina and Bettina. Following discovery of a suspected brain tumour, which turned out to be a benign cyst, surgeons inserted silver clamps into her head, causing her to suffer migraine for the rest of her life.
As a prominent radical media couple, Meinhof and Röhl were regular social fixtures among the so-called Schickeria living in spacious urban villas dotted along the banks of the Elbe. They could be found at every party, she wearing the white gloves still obligatory at the time, chatting amiably with Rudolf Augstein of Spiegel and Gert Bucerius of Die Zeit, or dancing frenetically to ‘Dizzy Miss Lizzy’ and the like. But there were worms in paradise. Röhl had other women, while his plans to fill konkret with tits and scandal to boost circulation did not amuse the puritanical Meinhof. She did not regard her membership of Hamburg’s left Establishment as her life’s destiny, and nor did she care to have her increasingly politically engaged journalism ringed with naked breasts.
In March 1968 the couple divorced and the thirty-four-year-old Meinhof moved to Berlin with the twins. They were enrolled at an anti-authoritarian kindergarten where they learned why police were called ‘Bullen’ (‘Pigs’) and about Chairman Mao and the Vietnam War. Meinhof worked remorselessly at her typewriter, clattering away sustained by coffee and incessant cigarettes. Earning a substantial 3,000 DM a month from her column in konkret, she diversified into radio, where her direct, socially critical tones were a novelty. Ever more radical, she claimed that Germany was undergoing the beginnings of a police state, proof of her increasing substitution of agitprop for objective journalism. She wrote her first television script for a docudrama about conditions in Germany’s homes for problem children - in other words, the area in which Baader and Ensslin were simultaneously operating as saviours of the oppressed. Unsurprisingly her days as a columnist on her former husband’s paper were numbered. She resigned, in a blaze of self-generated publicity, although she also threatened to occupy the magazine’s offices with her radical friends. In anticipation, her ex-husband - who knew his Mao too - took the magazine underground to frustrate his ex-wife. She and thirty of her radical friends descended on the former family home. They trashed the place, the finale being to defecate and urinate on the former marital bed.
Living in Berlin proved a lonely experience for Meinhof, as it probably was too for her twins since their mother was frequently