5 - Violence as Identity: Prison Writing, 1972–76

Summary

wenn deine identität kampf ist, … wir können nicht unterdrückt werden, wenn wir nicht aufhören zu denken und zu kämpfen.

[if fighting is your identity … we can't be oppressed, as long as we don't stop thinking and fighting.]

—Ulrike Meinhof, October 1974

THE IMPRISONED RAF still identified as a fighting unit, but the only means of doing battle and cohering as a group was, now, via language: “in solitary,” wrote Holger Meins, “the typewriter is THE means of production and communication (“in der iso ist die schreibmaschine DAS produktions- und kommunikationsmittel”).

Solitary confinement characterized the prison experience of the RAF. Immediately after their arrests in June and early July 1972, core members were held carefully apart: Ulrike Meinhof in Cologne-Ossendorf, Andreas Baader in Schwalmstadt (between Frankfurt and Kassel), Holger Meins in Wittlich (north of Trier, in the Eifel), Jan Carl Raspe in Cologne, Gudrun Ensslin in Essen, and Irmgard Möller in Rastatt, near Baden-Baden. Isolating the revolutionaries from each other was an immediate move toward undermining a dangerously potent group identity. They were also isolated from other inmates in their respective institutions, for fear of the “politicization of prisons” and “uprisings behind bars,” as a court decision summarized it. That caution was not misguided: a note written by Baader in 1973 suggests the RAF sought to release its members from isolation precisely so that they could agitate politically and organize prison uprisings.

After her arrest on 15 June, Meinhof was held in solitary confinement in an otherwise empty wing of Cologne-Ossendorf prison. The cell had previously housed Astrid Proll, who had spent eight weeks there from late November 1971 until mid January 1972, and a further two months from 12 April to 16 June 1972. Meinhof moved in the day Proll moved out, and remained for a total of 273 days — almost eight months — in isolation. Her description of her conditions, written down soon afterwards in a note entitled “daten/fakten” (dates/facts) runs:

einhafthaus, ziemlich am rand der anstalt, insgesamt nur 6 zellen, vom übrigen anstaltsbetrieb nach innen und außen geräuschisoliert, als einziger gefangener dadrin. dazu: dauerbeleuchtung, außer oberlicht geschlossne [sic] fenster, fliegendraht, wände und mobiliar weiß — verbot, was dran zu hängen; alle 15 min. spionkontrolle.