6 - Violence as a Woman's Identity? Terrorism and Gender

Summary

scheiß auf die gleichberechtigung der frau. wir wollen freiheit, wir wollen menschlichkeit.

[fuck equal rights for women. we want freedom, we want humanity.]

—Ulrike Meinhof, August 1974

THE LETZTE TEXTE SHOW Meinhof repeatedly negotiating her place in the group by identifying not herself but Andreas Baader as the guerilla incarnate. After her death, those texts may have helped the RAF reassure itself (and certainly informed its attempts to persuade the outside world) that perfect collectivity had existed to the very end. But taken in the context of other letters to the group, her self-positioning vis-à-vis Baader seems to reflect profound insecurity. “Not raf … but cunt” is how, on another occasion, she described herself, where “cunt” — I am going to argue — conflates the ideas “woman,” “capitalist,” and “traitor.”

Women who joined the revolutionary groups have largely denied any feminist impetus. “None of us came from the feminist movement,” asserted Inge Viett in 1997, choosing to forget or overlook Meinhof's journalistic engagement with women's liberation. The decision of the revolutionary women, as Viett recalls it, was to ignore gender issues in the common cause of armed struggle: “we simply took the decision, and then we fought and did all the same things as the men. There was no male-female question for us. The old ideas about gender roles weren't relevant to us in the underground groups.” Her memory of utopian simplicity — one simply cast off the fetters of gender and was free — coexists uncomfortably with reports and ample textual evidence that Baader designated the women he worked with Votzen (cunts) and Zofen (waiting- maids; in German, this has the added attraction of being an acoustic anagram of Votze), or indeed Bommi Baumann's recollection that masculine competitiveness played a significant role in the revolutionary groups: “the guy who pulls the toughest stunts gets to lead the way,” he remembers in his autobiography (Baumann, like Viett, was a member of the 2 June Movement). For all their claims to separateness, even the terrorists could not quit the gendered discursive context of 1970s West Germany.