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Ulrike Meinhof: A Case in Rebellion
| Article
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11403 |
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Section : |
MODERN THOUGHT
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| Issue
Date : |
11 / 1986 |
6,439 Words |
| Author
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Albert Parry
Albert Parry as professor emeritus at Colgate University. He
has published more than a dozen books on, among other topics,
Soviet technology, Russian and American history, and
terrorism. |
There are several characteristics about Ulrike Meinhof's revolutionary mentality that deserve serious attention. Most significantly, it embodied both general Western and specifically German attitudes. The Baader-Meinhof gang, which she helped form and then successfully lead with Andreas Baader, expressed many of the same radical ideas and slogans as the New Left of the 1960s and 1970s elsewhere. Anti-imperialism, selectively turned against Western countries that had already shed their empires but rarely against the Soviets; opposition to the military strength of the United States and Western European states; and declarations of solidarity with Third World socialist regimes were all stances that could be found among American and French as well as German radicals of the 1960s and 1970s. Another general characteristic of the radical Left in this period is what the historian J.J. Roth has called its "apocalyptic politics." Like the French anarchist thinker Georges Sorel, the radical youth of the 1960s distinguished between mere force (which they identified with the adversary establishment) and "violence," which they exalted. The practitioner of violence, unlike the user of repressive force, was bringing into existence a new world and, moreover, awakening the salvageable elements of the present society to their moral responsibility. Like Sorel the Students for a Democratic Society and other representatives of the New Left in America, Europe, and Japan believed that middle-class democratic societies lacked heroism as well as compassion and therefore deserved to be utterly destroyed.
The Baader-Meinhof Gang clearly shared the revolutionary-apocalyptic ethos affecting academic and youth cultures outside of West Germany. To the extent they did so, they were influenced by radicals and radicalizing forces that, in some cases, emanated from the United States: campus protests against the Vietnam War the civil rights movement, and the SDS's rejection of middle-class cultural values going back to its founding Port Huron Statement in 1961. There is an old self confident German aphorism "Am deutschen Wesen geniesst die ganze Welt [the whole world benefits from what is essentially German)." In the 1960s and 1970s, German radicals drew doctrinal nurture from American campus protest movements. Yet, these in turn-and in confirmation of the old German aphorism-profited from the teachings of German radical emigres who had come to America in the 1930s. Herbert Marcuse, Eric Fromm, and other members of the Marxist-Freudian Institute for Social Research in exile forged the ideological instruments through which the American and European New Left expressed its contempt for their societies. Under the critical eye of these exiled radicals, bourgeois freedom became mere "repressive tolerance." It was also thought that the perpetuation
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