“everyone (except you or course) knows that YOU WERE AND WILL BE THE VOICE.”
–Ensslin to Meinhof in a 1973 prison letter
Ulrike Meinhof struggled to find her voice. While courting attention in the student protest seven in the late 1950s, and rising to be a spokes-person for the student movements in the 1960s, she harbored doubts about her ability to convey her message. In 1970 she entered the underground at the height of her journalist powers, transforming her renown as a writer, radio commentator, television personality, and filmmaker into an equal measure of infamy. Uncertainty continued to dog Meinhof as the Red Army Faction’s (RAF’s) underground and prison scribe. However, the voice she was increasingly unsure of in private, nonetheless reverberated publicly. Her fame had rested on being able to capture the mood of protest, and in the underground her words and actions performed what became the RAF brand of terrorism. After her arrest, Meinhof managed to reinvent RAF rhetoric for a prison context and subsequently for a trial audience. She was able to inspire a new generation of RAF members from her cell and ensure West German terrorism did not Peter out in the mid-1970s. Her voice also echoed long after her death, as she prepared the discursive foundation for the RAF violence of the 1980s and 1990s, as well as much of the RAF myth of the twenty-first century.
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leith passmore 