“Identity” 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...

As Klaus Rainer Röhl tells it, the magazine that would establish Meinhof’s name began life in 1955 as a student newspaper called Das Plädoyer (The Appeal).¹ It was rechristened Studentenkurier (The Student Courier) before acquiring its lasting name konkret (written without a capital “k” in the spirit of orthographic antiauthoritarianism) in the autumn of 1957.

Röhl may have had a less prominent role in konkret’s founding than his own account suggests — some impetus certainly came from his friend Klaus Hübotter, who was affiliated with East Germany’s Free German Youth (Freie Deutsche Jugend). As Röhl has long since made public, konkret’s...

In 1969 the Iranian exile Bahman Nirumand (b. 1936), a fierce critic of the shah’s regime, was facing extradition from West Germany after extension of his leave to remain was refused. Ulrike Meinhof appealed to konkret readers to demonstrate their solidarity with him,¹ but she used her regular column in the magazine to address the situation faced by his wife and daughter. “Alle reden vom Wetter” (Everybody Talks about the Weather) asks why protest on behalf of women and children is perceived as emotional rather than political. “It is unpolitical to protest over a woman’s fate,” Meinhof complains: “what is...

At eleven o’clock on 14 May 1970, an armed group entered the reading room of the Social Studies Institute of West Berlin’s Free University,¹ where Andreas Baader and Ulrike Meinhof were sitting. Medical student Ingrid Schubert, nineteen-year-old Irene Goergens (a former inmate of the Eichenhof home in which Bambule was filmed), and two masked accomplices — subsequently supposed to have been Gudrun Ensslin and Hans-Jürgen Bäcker — burst in. Ironically it was Bäcker, hired by the group as a “specialist” for the occasion, who panicked and fired his gun, but it was Meinhof’s photograph that appeared the following day on “wanted” posters...

After the May bombs of 1972, the police hunt for the RAF was stepped up, and by July all its core members had been arrested. In late 1974, when Holger Meins issued his “human being or swine” ultimatum (to fellow prisoner Manfred Grashof), the group was on hunger strike. Baader, writing from his cell, described his view of the collective in defensive isolation: “totally surrounded; we have only our consciousness, our history, our understanding of our situation + this heap of bones to develop the struggle . . . freedom is only possible if we’re fighting” (“in der situation totaler...

The imprisoned RAF still identified as a fighting unit, but the only means of doing battle and cohering as a group was, now, via language: “in solitary,” wrote Holger Meins, “the typewriter is THE means of production and communication (“in der iso ist die schreibmaschine DAS produktions- und kommunikationsmittel”).¹

Solitary confinement characterized the prison experience of the RAF. Immediately after their arrests in June and early July 1972, core members were held carefully apart: Ulrike Meinhof in Cologne-Ossendorf, Andreas Baader in Schwalmstadt (between Frankfurt and Kassel), Holger Meins in Wittlich (north of Trier, in the Eifel), Jan Carl Raspe in...

The letzte texte show Meinhof repeatedly negotiating her place in the group by identifying not herself but Andreas Baader as the guerilla incarnate. After her death, those texts may have helped the RAF reassure itself (and certainly informed its attempts to persuade the outside world) that perfect collectivity had existed to the very end. But taken in the context of other letters to the group, her self-positioning vis-à-vis Baader seems to reflect profound insecurity. “Not raf . . . but cunt” is how, on another occasion, she described herself, where “cunt” — I am going to argue — conflates the ideas “woman,”...

It is likely that Brückner, an old friend and “sympathizer,” had at least some contact with Meinhof in the years after she went underground, so his reading of her situation may be based on things she said to him herself. He did not visit her in prison, however (having been, by then, rejected along with other non-RAF elements), and he could not have seen the prison documents that suggest she did not or could no longer believe her subjectivity had become collectivity in the RAF — even if she wished desperately that it had.

In her later and last writings we...