Ulrike Meinhof: Everybody Talks about the Weather...We Don't

“Protest is when I say I don’t like this. Resistance is when I put an end to what I don’t like. Protest is when I say I refuse to go along with this any more. Resistance is when I make sure everybody else stops going along too. That was more or less what a black speaker from the Black Power movement said at the Vietnam Conference in February in Berlin. The students are not rehearsing for a rebellion, they are engaging in resistance.” Everybody Talks about the Weather . . . We Don’t collects the columns Ulrike Meinhof – co-founder of the Red Army Faction (RAF) / Baader-Meinhof Gang – published in konkret between 1960 and 1969, the years leading up to her leap into political violence. It is practically impossible not to read these columns (especially when packaged in an edition such as this) teleologically, as blindly moving down a path toward violent resistance. Without any real surprises, the columns collected here clearly show that progression, and Meinhof’s rhetorical incisiveness, especially when driven by her increasing militancy, remains a striking model of political writing. Her writings begin in liberal-Left territory, focusing on the antinuclear movement, Germany’s Nazi past (and continued ex-Nazi leadership), and, perhaps most importantly, the difficulties women face in a class society. Meinhof’s tone reaches a new level of boldness in the ironic “Open Letter to Farah Diba,” (1967) which attacks the Persian queen for the hypocrisy of her printed statements. But it is the (perhaps Mao-influenced) “Water Cannons: Against Women, Too” (1968) that breaks new ground in openly admitting conflict, instead of mere debate, into politics. In that text, Meinhof asserts, “People are no longer just playing the roles of adversaries in order to be nice to each other again afterward.” She adds, “Conflicts are becoming visible, personal conflicts are increasingly being ascribed to social ones, or seen as an expression of social conflicts.” Others columns from this period attack merely “symbolic” or apparent forms of action and resistance or struggle to recognize the significant advances of the proto-autonomous communes that were creating “models of what to do.” In one column, Meinhof claims that the attack on Left leader “Rudi Dutschke marked the first time that people massively crossed the boundary between verbal protest and physical resistance. . . . they crossed it really and truly, not just symbolically.” That is, “There are people who have decided to not only name what is intolerable but to oppose it. . . . “ Viewing the violent protest against the Springer publisher that occurred in response to the attack on Dutschke, she concludes, “we can and must discuss violence and counter-violence anew and from the very beginning.” Considering the department store fire set by a group led by Andreas Baader and Gudrun Ensslin (with whom Meinhof would later form the Red Army Faction), she notes that such destruction actually served capitalism by helping it overcome over-accumulation, but still praises the criminal act for revealing the hypocritical laws of property. The final column collected here, “Columnism,” contains an attack on the subordination of journalism to market interests that make political activism into an exception, a personality trait of the star columnist rather than an expression of a collective political movement. The editor’s decision not to include any of the collectively-authored Red Army Faction texts that followed is politically and practically understandable, but it does result in a false conclusion to Meinhof’s textual output, a silencing of her political expression at its moment of utmost intensity (of course, that silence may have been self-inflicted). Karin Bauer’s long biographical essay on Meinhof’s life is perhaps as interesting as the columns collected here. Opposing those (like Meinhof’s own daughter) who view Meinhof as a Communist pawn, Bauer argues that Meinhof was “a gifted writer with a dream, a tragic figure who now stands for the thwarted ideals and the frustration of a generation.” Bauer describes Meinhof’s early writing/political career, including her long relationship with Klaus Rainer Röhl, who published konkret, the left magazine for which Meinhof eventually became a well-known columnist. konkret was secretly subsidized by East Germany, and the magazine shared many of the views of that country. Although accepting Communist funding for his publication, “Röhl, not a dogmatic Marxist, did not fit the mold of a loyal Communist toeing the party line. He was a flamboyant bon vivant, known as an adventurer and a cynic. His motto was ‘Enjoy capitalism, because socialism will be tough.’” Ideological conflicts between konkret and East Germany in 1964 led to an end of the subsidy and a change in direction for the magazine, which began to encourage, if not exploit, the sexual revolution in its pages. By this point Meinhof had a regular column: “She had become, in essence, a brand. Meinhof stood for the serious side of konkret’s blend of culture and politics.” Meinhof gained access to the wealthy that were enchanted with radical chic, and also became a radio and television journalist. Her success pushed her toward a bourgeois environment that conspicuously conflicted with her political beliefs. The murder of the student Benno Ohnesorg by the police at a protest against a visit by the Shah of Iran in 1967 radicalized the West German Left and sparked widespread discussion of the uses of political violence, and konkret mostly celebrated this new fervor in the Left. But when Röhl opened a Berlin office of konkret, he rejected Meinhof and the other writers’ plan to create a writing collective that would anonymously publish articles in the magazine. The bitter fight that ensued between Röhl and Meinhof ended with the latter quitting. Meinhof used her new free time to produce a television documentary, Bambule, which focused on a woman’s public home (the film was not shown because of Meinhof’s subsequent illegal activities). In early 1970, Baader and Ensslin, fugitives from the law, began staying at Meinhof’s large house, where they created an atmosphere of political debate and planning. When Baader was re-arrested for driving without a license, Meinhof used her journalist credentials to arrange a meeting with Baader about a book on marginalized youth. The meeting was actually a cover to assist Ensslin and others in freeing Baader, and Meinhof hoped to appear as an innocent bystander rather than an accomplice. No violence was planned, but when a “professional” that the group had hired for help shot a librarian, Meinhof fled with everyone else and the RAF was truly born. Soon after the first RAF communiqué, “Build up the Red Army!,” appeared (unfortunately these RAF documents are not collected in this volume). According to Bauer, “Likely, Meinhof was the primary author of the communiqué, but all public communications of the group were said to be written collectively, and no doubt, there was some truth to that. Meinhof had finally achieved what she had been denied by konkret: collective authorship as an alternative mode of producing texts from discussion. This process of text production literally wrote the RAF into existence. Although the group was advocating the propaganda of deeds, communication was of prime importance and was needed to make the group’s actions readable to the public.”