3 - The Shrinking Circle (1970–72): From Die Rote Armee aufbauen to the May Bombings

Summary

Kontakte, Beachtung zu haben gehört zu meinem Beruf als Journalistin und Sozialist, verschafft mir Gehör über Funk und Fernsehen … Menschlich ist es sogar erfreulich, deckt aber nicht mein Bedürfnis nach Wärme, nach Solidarität, nach Gruppenzugehörigkeit.

[Gaining contacts and recognition is part of my profession as a journalist and socialist, means people listen to me on radio and television … On a human level I even enjoy it, but it doesn't satisfy my need for warmth, for solidarity, for the feeling of being part of a group.]

—Ulrike Meinhof, Autumn 1967

AT ELEVEN O'CLOCK on 14 May 1970, an armed group entered the reading room of the Social Studies Institute of West Berlin's Free University,

where Andreas Baader and Ulrike Meinhof were sitting. Medical student Ingrid Schubert, nineteen-year-old Irene Goergens (a former inmate of the Eichenhof home in which Bambule was filmed), and two masked accomplices — subsequently supposed to have been Gudrun Ensslin and Hans-Jürgen Bäcker — burst in. Ironically it was Bäcker, hired by the group as a “specialist” for the occasion, who panicked and fired his gun, but it was Meinhof's photograph that appeared the following day on “wanted” posters across the Federal Republic.

Baader had jumped bail with Ensslin on 10 June 1969, abandoning the Staffelberg project when their appeal against three-year prison sentences for arson was turned down. The couple traveled to Paris. On the advice of their lawyer Horst Mahler — who had hopes of using them to realize his plans for an armed underground organization that would spark the revolution in West Germany — they returned in January 1970, taking refuge in Meinhof's apartment in Berlin. Discussions about the formation of a guerilla organization, drawing on the Latin American model, began. On 4 April, however, Baader was re-arrested, after being stopped in his car by a police patrol — probably after a tip-off from Peter Urbach, the same government agent who had provided the anti-Springer demonstrators of 1968 with their Molotov cocktails. He was taken to Berlin's Tegel prison to serve the remainder of his sentence.

His fellow guerillas-in-waiting had been counting on his charisma and energy.