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When someone has been at the centre of an ideological confrontation that involved violence and deaths on both sides, as Ulrike Meinhof was, the chances of a fair, rounded, and non-sensational public presentation of that person are slight. Portrayals of women terrorists in the German media and other documentation of the 1970s were frequently crass. It is the intention of this essay not to focus on the lack of subtlety itself, but rather to look into the history and background of the ideas that still shape Meinhof in the public imagination, even now, and to start to put them in the context of a history of ideas about violent and criminal women. Whatever she may have been like as an individual, Meinhof is now a thoroughly constructed historical figure, and a discourse emerges in accounts of her life and person that has recognisable tropes and patterns.
High-profile media cases now and in recent years suggest that the cultural reception of women who commit violent crimes is coloured by gendered expectations. Commentators tend to be far more shocked by violent women than by violent men, and women criminals are generally perceived as more reprehensible and more repugnant than their male counterparts: they are 'doubly deviant, doubly damned'.1 In the British context, Myra Hindley and Rosemary West are high-profile examples. The BBC described West as a 'murderess most foul', and cruder, less literary insults accumulated in the popular press. Hindley was, and still is, cast as a 'female icon of evil'.4 In both cases the notion of absent motherliness is a particular concern, where absent paternal instincts are never a focus in accounts of their male accomplices. 'Bad mother' is just one of a number of blame categories used for the vilification of women offenders5 - no surprise, then, that the culturally hypersensitive Elfriede Jelinek recently cast Meinhof not only as Mary Stuart but as Medea.6
Ulrike Marie Meinhof (1934-76) was a mother, a high-profile journalist and a media intellectual before she co-founded a terrorist organisation. In 1968 Meinhof had reported for the journal she also edited, konkret, on acts of arson committed in Frankfurt department stores by Andreas Baader and his partner Gudrun Ensslin, in protest against the war in Vietnam. After the trial...