1 - Fighting Talk (1959–69): From the Peace Movement to the Revolutionary Legitimacy of Violence

Summary

der Friede ist zum bestimmenden Faktor politischen Handelns geworden.

[peace is now the driving factor for political action.]

—Ulrike Meinhof, October 1959

Gewalt … [ist] ein Mittel, das wir weder kategorisch ablehnen noch willkürlich anwenden werden, dessen Methodik und revolutionärer Legitimität wir vielmehr in theoretischer Reflexion und praktischer Anwendung erlernen und begreifen müssen.

[Violence … is an instrument we shall neither categorically reject nor use arbitrarily, one whose effectiveness and revolutionary legitimacy we need to learn to understand in a process of theoretical reflection and practical use.]

—Ulrike Meinhof and the Berlin Editors’ Collective, June 1968

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). 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 secret sponsor was the East German government.

Its East German sponsors encouraged the team at konkret to connect with one of the biggest oppositional movements in postwar West Germany: the antinuclear peace movement (Anti-Atom-Bewegung), led at Münster university by a student activist named Ulrike Meinhof. At its national forefront was Professor Renate Riemeck — Meinhof's foster mother. Röhl's coworker Reinhard Opitz and later Röhl himself took on the task of persuading Meinhof to join them in Hamburg. Röhl clearly enjoys telling the story of how he won the young peacenik, for himself and the magazine: in his version his friend Opitz falls in love with her, but it is he and not Opitz who carries home the trophy (the “precious prey,” Röhl calls her), after wooing her by waxing lyrical on the benefits of communism and playing her love songs on the juke box.