Conclusion: From Warrior Revolutionaries to Logical Fallacies: Language, Violence, and Identity

Summary

Ulrike M. Meinhof selbst empfand sich nach 1970 als die “ganz andere”; war der Auffassung, daß das Bedingungsgefüge und die Basis ihres Lebens: ihres Denkens, Fühlens, Handelns, kurz — ihrer Subjektivität das Kollektiv der RAF geworden war.

[After 1970, Ulrike Meinhof experienced herself as someone “completely different”; she believed that the conditions and basis of her life: of her thoughts, feelings, actions, in short — her subjectivity had become collectivity in the RAF.]

— Peter Brückner, 1976

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 hear two voices: the brisk, determined voice of the core group member who will never let her side down by despairing, and the voice of someone who has lost the ground beneath her feet and is angry, not least with herself, because she has not managed to get the better of her ego and make her subjectivity identical with that of the collective. The first writing voice — which we might call the ideal voice — tells us how things ought to be, but in the indicative, as if they already were: “the guerilla,” she asserted in her Berlin court statement of 1974, “permits each of us to determine where he stands — it's our first and only way of working out where it is that we stand, working out and then determining for ourselves where we are in the class-based society, in imperialism” (“an der guerilla kann jeder für sich bestimmen, wo er steht — kann überhaupt erstmal rausfinden, wo er überhaupt steht, seinen platz in der klassengesellschaft, im imperialismus rausfinden, für sich bestimmen”).