Ulrike Meinhof Biography Quotes 1 Report mistakes

Early Life and Education
Ulrike Marie Meinhof was born on 7 October 1934 in Oldenburg, in what later became West Germany. Her father, Werner Meinhof, was an art historian, and her mother, Ingeborg Meinhof, was a teacher. After early losses in her family, she was raised for a formative period by Renate Riemeck, a historian who became an important mentor. Meinhof attended schools that emphasized humanistic education and, after finishing secondary school, studied philosophy, sociology, and German literature at the universities of Marburg and Munster. As a student she wrote for campus publications and engaged in debates about Germany's postwar reconstruction, democratic renewal, and the lingering legacies of National Socialism.

Entrance into Journalism
In the late 1950s Meinhof began a professional career in journalism that soon made her one of the most recognizable voices of the West German left. She joined the Hamburg-based magazine konkret, where she rose to be a leading editor and, above all, a widely read columnist. Her essays addressed atomic rearmament, educational reform, the hypocrisy of postwar elites, and the moral consequences of the Algerian and Vietnam wars. She wrote in a clear, polemical style that combined meticulous facts with a moral urgency, challenging readers to reconsider authority, militarism, and the persistence of authoritarian habits in democratic institutions. During this period she underwent brain surgery in 1962, an episode that later commentators debated when discussing changes in her health and temperament.

Marriage and Family
In 1961 Meinhof married the journalist and publisher Klaus Rainer Roehl, who was closely connected with konkret. The couple had twin daughters, Bettina and Regine, in 1962. Their marriage, marked by intense political and editorial collaboration, grew strained as the 1960s progressed, and they separated before divorcing in 1968. The separation precipitated a difficult custody conflict that intersected with her increasingly visible public persona. In later years, one of the twins, Bettina Roehl, became a journalist and a prominent critic of the armed struggle Meinhof embraced.

1967–1968: Protest and Radicalization
The student and extra-parliamentary opposition (the APO) reshaped West German politics in the late 1960s. Meinhof, already famous as a commentator, took a sharper turn. She reported on the shooting of the student Benno Ohnesorg during a protest in 1967, criticized the power of the Springer press empire, and engaged intellectually with figures such as Rudi Dutschke, whose insistence on confronting structural violence resonated with her. The arson convictions of Andreas Baader and Gudrun Ensslin in 1968, and the broader debate about state repression, moved Meinhof toward a new assessment of the limits of legal protest. Her writing began to argue that the state's violence, at home and abroad, provoked counter-violence. Around this time she cut ties with konkret, which also meant a definitive personal break with Roehl.

From Public Intellectual to Clandestine Militancy
The decisive transition came in 1970. When Andreas Baader was allowed to visit a research institute under guard for a work appointment involving Meinhof, armed accomplices freed him. In the aftermath, Meinhof chose to go underground rather than return to legality. With Baader, Gudrun Ensslin, and others including Horst Mahler and, later, Jan-Carl Raspe and Holger Meins, she helped form what came to be called the Red Army Faction (RAF), also known abroad as the Baader-Meinhof Group. The emergent organization articulated a strategy of urban guerrilla warfare aimed at symbols of imperialism and alleged state oppression. Meinhof contributed to communiques and theoretical texts associated with the group, including the influential brochure often referred to as The Concept of the Urban Guerrilla. During this period, some RAF members sought training in camps in the Middle East, and the group developed international connections that informed its tactics and rhetoric.

Actions and Crackdown
Between 1970 and 1972, the RAF carried out a campaign that included bank robberies to finance underground activity and, in 1972, a series of bombings that the group framed as retaliation for the Vietnam War and domestic repression. These actions caused casualties and deepened public outrage. The federal authorities responded with an unprecedented manhunt. In June 1972, Meinhof was arrested near Hanover. Within weeks, Baader, Ensslin, and Raspe were also captured, signaling the collapse of the organization's first generation. Defense attorneys such as Otto Schily and Hans-Christian Strobele emerged as public figures in the legal battles that followed, while sympathizers and critics debated the boundaries between political dissent and terrorism.

Imprisonment, Trial, and Conditions
Meinhof spent much of her pretrial incarceration in strict solitary confinement, first in Cologne and later in the high-security prison at Stuttgart-Stammheim. The conditions, which the state justified on security grounds, included isolation, limited contact with counsel, and sensory deprivation measures that prisoners described as psychological torture. RAF prisoners undertook hunger strikes to protest these conditions; the death of Holger Meins in 1974 after a prolonged hunger strike became a rallying point for sympathizers and a national scandal for opponents of the state's carceral policies. The Stammheim trial of Meinhof, Baader, Ensslin, and Raspe began in 1975 and became a stage for confrontations over the legitimacy of the court, the role of defense counsel, and the political meaning of RAF violence. Inside this intense environment, Meinhof's mental and physical health visibly eroded, and relationships with some co-defendants grew strained as strategic and personal differences sharpened.

Death and Controversy
On 9 May 1976, Ulrike Meinhof was found hanged in her cell at Stammheim. The official investigation ruled her death a suicide. Many on the left, and some members of her legal team, questioned the findings, citing the extreme conditions of detention and raising suspicions of state responsibility. The controversy never fully subsided, and her death became part of the larger narrative of the so-called German Autumn that followed in 1977, when later RAF actions and further deaths in Stammheim marked a crescendo of violence and state response.

Writings and Ideas
Before going underground, Meinhof's essays made her a central moral voice for a generation grappling with the Nazi past and the contradictions of the economic miracle. She wrote about the authoritarian residues in schools and families, the complicity of institutions in injustice, and the moral demand to side with the oppressed. After 1970, her texts justified armed struggle as a response to structural violence, yet they retained the analytical sharpness and moral vocabulary that had defined her journalism. This continuity, fused to a radical break in methods, is key to understanding her trajectory: the journalist who indicted violence in society became a participant in violent resistance. Admirers saw integrity and courage; critics saw a fatal blindness to the human costs of terror.

Legacy
Ulrike Meinhof remains one of the most polarizing figures in modern German history. To some she symbolizes the tragedy of a brilliant intellectual drawn into clandestine violence; to others she epitomizes a principled, if misguided, refusal to accept the limits of postwar democracy. The people around her, Gudrun Ensslin and Andreas Baader as closest comrades, Jan-Carl Raspe and Holger Meins as fellow militants, Horst Mahler as an early collaborator, Renate Riemeck as mentor, Klaus Rainer Roehl as spouse and adversary in the public sphere, and her daughters Bettina and Regine as the most intimate witnesses to her choices, map the arc of a life lived at the intersection of family, media, and rebellion. Her story continues to provoke debate about the ethics of political violence, the responsibilities of the press, the boundaries of state power, and the fragile line between conviction and catastrophe in democratic societies.

Our collection contains 1 quotes who is written by Ulrike, under the main topics: Freedom.

• 2008 Everybody talks about the weather...We don't (Book)
• 1971 The Urban Guerilla Concept (Essay)
• 1970 Bambule (Screenplay)
• 1959 Columns (Book)

• Wikipedia