“man–it was grim–i COULD not write–EVERYTHING was just rubbish, mincemeat, not in my head but on paper.”
–From a letter by Meinhof to a fellow prisoners, 1973
It was is prison that words ultimately failed Ulrike Meinhof. Her writing toward the end of her life reveals a deep suspicion of language and its ability to convey the meaning she intended. These prison texts were final throes of her attempt to reconcile the tension between her criticism and skepticism of available means of communication and her employment of them. Far from being resolved in May 1970, this tension was a constant in Meinhof’s work, and tracking her attempts to overcomes this tension reveals not a self-assured abandonment or words in favor of deeds coinciding more or less with her entrance into the underground, but a trajectory of frustration and doubt independent of her status as journalist or terrorist. With increasing desperation, her focus shrinks over time from sweeping analyses of the capitalist media, to a loss of faith in the genre of journalistic writing, to a paralyzing distrust of words themselves. The linguistic hopelessness so evident in her prison cell had its beginnings in her journalism and her work for konkret.
leith passmore 