Lilith 16: 2007

Schiller's Children: Ulrike Meinhof and the Terrorist Performative

Leith Passmore

A seemingly reluctant male actor in a mini-skirt and high heels is forced before the curtain of the Thalia Theatre in Hamburg, and a wig, a pale trench coat and a text are subsequently pushed through the curtain. The actor puts on the wig and coat - both references to Red Army Faction (RAF) terrorist Ulrike Meinhof - and begins to read: an actor playing an actor playing a role which looks like Ulrike Meinhof. It is the 2006 premiere of Nicolas Stemann’s production of feminist playwright and Nobel Prize laureate Elfriede Jelinek’s text Ulrike Maria Stuart. The production is a complex integration of a nineteenth century German interpretation of a sixteenth century English story (Schiller’s Maria Stuart) and the historical construction of a twentieth century RAF terrorist (Ulrike Marie Meinhof). This paper argues that the Stemann and Jelinek’s work of theatre is a useful tool for redressing the history of Ulrike Meinhof, for what is dramatised is not the historical figure of Meinhof, nor a historical reality but history itself. There are two conceptions of Meinhof running through the work. The first is the contemporary historical understanding of Meinhof that is consistent with a long tradition of representing the violent feminine and female terrorist. The second suggests a way of moving beyond the first: the terrorist performative. The implications of this are significant for the history of Ulrike Meinhof because it offers an alternate to the traditional discourse of unnaturalness, the search for a female terrorist causality and the related distinction between pre-terrorism-Meinhof and post-terrorism-Meinhof.

Ulrike Marie Meinhof: Myth, Mother, Lover

Born in the early years of the Third Reich, Ulrike Marie Meinhof began public life in the late 1950s as a prominent student activist. She went on to become a journalist of substantial fame during the 1960s, due to her print, television and radio work on activism and particularly the student revolt of 1968. On 14 May 1970 she was involved in successful liberation of Andreas Baader from prison. This has traditionally marked the birth of the Baader-Meinhof Gang as the group was dubbed by the popular media, or, as the group’s members would later refer to themselves, the Red Army Faction.1 Meinhof enjoyed a great degree of infamy in the underground before her arrest in 1972 and this infamy only increased during her four years in prison. She took her own life on Mothers’ Day 1976, a date which coincided with the anniversary of V-Day. Terrorist acts of violence in the Federal Republic of Germany (FRG) peaked, in 1977, but the RAF survived its founding members and only officially disbanded in 1998.2

What remains of Meinhof today is largely rooted in the tradition of the representation of the violent female: Meinhof is understood in terms of an impressionistic femininity that is broken and flawed, hyper and exaggerated, or a surprisingly seamless conflation of the two. This paradoxical construction of the violent femme is motivated by the assumption that femininity and violent behaviour are mutually exclusive.3 Such a focus on ‘unnaturalness’ has a long tradition; be it nineteenth century criminology4 or recent medial constructions of female suicide bombers,5 the understanding of the violent or criminal female typically draws on mythical stereotypes. These include the ‘terrible mother’,6 the overly emotional or hysterical,7 even diseased 8 woman whose motivations are assumed to be domestic, familial or sexual, rather than ideological.9 The discourse of ‘unnaturalness’ around the female terrorist in turn reinforces the notion of ‘natural’ sexual difference.

It is these contemporary myths and present-day images of Meinhof which Jelinek and Stemann dramatise in Ulrike Maria Stuart.10 The play has no real plot in the traditional sense. It presents vague, chronological references to events in Meinhof’s life, from her entrance into the underground in 1970 until her suicide in 1976.11 There are also no characters as such, even the programme for the premiere was without a character list, the only names that appeared were those of the actors.12 Such a list would in any case have been impossible as the characters are fluid, and roles (as well as wigs, sunglasses...) are continually switched between actors. What emerges are bundles of associations which are built on texts borrowed from, amongst others, the RAF, Stefan Aust’s book Der Baader Meinhof Komplex (since it’s publication in 1985 the standard work on the history of the RAF) and former German President Roman Herzog.13 The point is not to present a historical reality, but history as history.

Stemann, in particular, was conscious that he belongs to a generation defined more by the events of 198914 than 196815 when he accepted the project. He admitted in an interview that he converted Jelinek’s ‘Princes in the tower’ from the providers of keywords, as they were in the Jelinek text, to three young men who represent a present caught up in a past, a younger generation dealing with the history of a preceding generation.16 Stemann also incorporates this confrontation with history and myth by having the ‘figures’ interact with, or at times morph into, their elderly alter-egos. Bringing the forever young RAF terrorists face to face with their very much mortal selves - replete with walking frames - has the added effect of making the immortalised images and popular mythology being presented on stage seem contrived, if not a little ridiculous.17

With specific regard to Meinhof, Jelinek and Stemann play with current cultural narratives present in her historical construction. Most notably they draw on both those of the broken – the ‘terrible mother’ – and the hyper-feminine – the ‘lusty revolutionary’. In the Jelinek text Meinhof is presented as the ‘terrible mother’ when she is addressed as Medea - a figure of Greek mythology who commits filicide after she is left for another woman.18 Much has been made of the real-life Meinhof abandoning her twin daughters in favour of a life in the underground as part of the RAF. The rejection of the mother role forms a central theme in the production: on stage a Meinhof figure says at one point ‘I’m sorry, I hate mothers, and although I am one myself, I can’t respond to the children, all of a sudden I can’t’.19 Her Mothers’ Day suicide has also been interpreted as a rejection of the traditional role of the mother, woman and the Federal Republic’s Nazi heritage in general because of the importance Mothers’ Day had assumed for celebrating the idyll of the Nationalist Socialist mother in the Third Reich.20

This is in line with a broader understanding of West German terrorism as a perversion of the women’s liberation movement. The link between the emancipation of women with female criminal activity is a notion dating back to the nineteenth century21 and this same link has been made between the feminist movement and terrorism in the 1970s.22 The head of the West German anti-terrorism squad went as far as to blame Germany’s high rate of female terrorist participation on the fact that German women were more emancipated than those of other nationalities.23 By having her two ‘queens’ (the Meinhof and Ensslin figures) compete for the attention of the one man, the Jelinek text also taps into the understanding of female terrorists as ‘cute little things who [fell] for the wrong chap’.24 On Stemann’s stage the competition takes the form of a tennis match using the head of a puppet as a ball, and later a duel on the recorder between the two ‘queens’.25 This scene evoke the ‘protestant, recorder-playing little girl’ image that dominates the image of Meinhof and Ensslin.26 The duels, which end with an elderly Baader appearing on stage and the two ‘queens’ moving towards him discarding bits of costume and becoming ever younger, also capture the competitive, romantic element present in, for example, Erin Cosgrove’s The Baader-Meinhof Affair (2003). Cosgrove frames the history of the Baader-Meinhof Gang in terms of the conventions of the trashy romance novel, picking up on the link between female sexuality and deviance, crime and terrorism.27 The RAF was after all an organization for which a crude understanding of the sexual revolution was subsumed into the armed struggle for the world-wide socialist revolution – a conflation of sexuality and terrorist identity summed up in Andreas Baader’s assertion that ‘fucking and shooting are one and the same.’28

By presenting the popular cultural remnants of Meinhof as just that, the Jelinek/ Stemann production can be seen as an extension of the decade-long exercise in deconstructing the RAF myth(s).29 Recent theatre which preceded Ulrike Maria Stuart which were understood as part of a pop-RAF phenomenon of the late 1990s (often recycling terrorist texts in a manner similar to Ulrike Maria Stuart) include A Monument for Gudrun Ensslin (1991),30 Baader, Remix 95 (1995),31 Hot Autumn (1997),32 The Human Weapon (1999)33 and Barbara Weber’s RAF Unplugged (2006).34

The deconstructed Meinhof myth and the recognition that the female terrorist in general has been constructed as culturally intelligible by framing her in terms of sexual difference begs the question: how do we get beyond stereotypical narratives and archetypical myths? Ulrike Maria Stuart not only asks the question but also offers an answer.

‘Terrorism is theatre’: The Terrorist Performative

Towards the end of the production director Nicolas Stemann steps onto the stage in a female wig and reads from the play’s text in an Austrian accent. The accent and familiar plait are references to Jelinek whose face is projected onto the set writ large behind him. Jelinek’s text has not been made available (although, a short official excerpt was posted online in the lead up to the premiere and is also treated here) and as director, Stemann cut, rearranged and added to the raw text so authorship falls to the Jelinek/Stemann figure that ended the show. This was a conscience move by Jelinek to ensure that the performative dimension remained at the fore of the production, that is that the focus was solely (and necessarily due the absence of a text) on the production and the process. By withholding the text Jelinek ensured that her and Stemann’s Ulrike Maria Meinhof was an act of communication, a process in and of itself.35

The notion of the performative first emerged in linguistics, in a series of lectures by J. L. Austin in 1955. In these Austin asked the question: when is saying something, doing something?36 The idea was brought across to cultural studies in the work of Judith Butler and others. Butler also begins with Austin but arrives at her understanding of the performative by incorporating the Derridean concept of ‘iterability’ to present gender as performative, as a reiterated and discursive act.37 Importantly, Butler describes performativity as a ‘dramatic and contingent construction of meaning’.38 The central concept is the role of language and of the process of communication in the creation of reality.

The performative has been incorporated into the contemporary theatre in the self reflexive relationship between director and author, author and text, actor and character, as well as a different conception of the ‘text’ and of language.39 Such performative dimensions are at the core of Stemann’s production.

Ulrike Maria Stuart brings its mediality very much to the surface, the process is made visible. The theatre is presented as theatre most obviously by the inclusion on stage of both the author and the director. Jelinek appears on stage four times: once when a telephone rings and an actor asks if it is ‘Elfriede’; once when an actor appears in human-sized vagina costume to recreate a real-life dialogue between Jelinek and fellow Austrian writer Marlene Streeruwitz; and twice in the closing scene - as a portrait and as one element of the composite Stemann/Jelinek figure.

The role-play is presented as role-play by the fluidity of the roles, and the stage is presented as a stage, by a second theatre curtain and a smaller revue stage on the theatre stage.40 This element of self reflexive role-play is also thematicised in the Jelinek text when a Meinhof figure talks of her suicide as a photo opportunity: as staged symbolism. She relates how it was not easy to position herself correctly for the camera – the bed had to be moved, the mattress laid before the window, the stool put on top of the mattress, all before she carefully tore her prison towel into strips and tied them first together, then around her neck.41

On stage, Stemann her Meinhof aided in the preparation of her noose by her elderly self, further alluding to the performative, myth forming element of Meinhof death. 42
The image created here is reminiscent of two works in particular, Gerhard Richter’s painting Hanged (1988) and Christoph Draeger’s installation Stammheim (2003). Richter’s Hanged is an impressionistic recreation of the photo taken by police of Gudrun Ensslin, another member of the RAF, hanging from her cell window. As part of his video installation, Draeger recreates the cells of RAF members Baader and Meinhof complete with Baader lying dead on his floor and Meinhof hanging from her window. Importantly, Draeger’s cells are only visible to audiences through the peephole of the cell door. This conscious inclusion, indeed highlighting, in Draeger’s work the perspective of the observer. Similarly Richter’s underlining of the process of production – here photography – resonates in Jelinek’s emphasis on her Meinhof character’s suicide as consciously staged with an audience in mind. The conception of Meinhof’s suicide as staged symbolism is not new. The symbolism of her V-Day suicide, it is argued, is her personal liberation from the fascist Federal Republic in the same way the world was liberated from the scourge of National Socialism when the Nazis capitulated to the Allies on 8 May 1945.

The performative dimension is further highlighted by Stemann via the use of language. In the production language is detached from character first by the lack of traditional ‘characters’, and in second because texts are spoken (indeed at times read) or repeated by various actors so that it is unclear who is speaking.43 The independence of language is clearly shown in one particular scene in which the audience was invited to take part in a ‘happening’ when water bombs were distributed and cardboard likenesses of Gerhard Schröder (former German Chancellor), Josef Ackermann (current CEO of the Deutsche Bank), Kai Diekmann (current chief editor of the BILD newspaper) und Johannes B. Kerner (television presenter) were offered as targets on stage. All the while, RAF phrases and slogans spilled forth in an endless loop; they lose all meaning and speech becomes part of the action, an act in itself.44 This repetitive quoting of RAF texts in a manner that renders them completely non- sensical is constant throughout the play, so that she who speaks the loudest, fastest and most consistently is heard. This language as action echoes speech act theory and Austin original thesis, it also challenges Meinhof’s self-perception of the frustrated journalist who only ever wrote/spoke/commented and never did anything.45

Ulrike Maria Stuart’s vision of the terrorist and terrorist behaviour as performative is consistent with a theory of a terrorist performative that has been developing over the past decades in the social sciences, but has yet been brought to bear on the history of RAF terrorism. This development in the amorphous field of terrorism research has occurred across disciplines, but stems from Austin’s notion of the ‘performative’ as well as sociologist Brian Jenkins’ 1975 assertion that ‘terrorism is theatre’.46 In developing such a communicative approach to terrorism, Jenkins’ ‘theatre’ analogy has been interpreted in a variety of ways by different scholars emphasising the production, reception or mediation of terrorist symbolism respectively. What remains constant is the conception of terrorist behaviour as a relationship with an audience and terrorism as a discursive construct.

Peter Waldmann developed a sociological model for understanding terrorist violence as primarily symbolic and terrorism as a communication strategy.47 Sociologist Mark Juergensmeyer draws on speech act theory and Austin’s ‘performativity’ to focus on the context and perception of the act of terrorism – he writes of acts being ‘performed’ and crime scenes as ‘stages’.48 In recent decades, the relationship between terrorist and audience has been framed in terms of theatre and dramaturgy, which go beyond the sociological understanding. Daniela Klimke, for example, recently cited Jenkins in her calls to analyse the terrorist attacks on 9/11 in terms of a model of theatricality, that is, a more literal take on ‘theatre’.49 Klimke calls attention to how terrorist attacks are received. Along these lines, a recent theatre-studies forum addressed terrorism in terms of the generic conventions of dramatic tragedy.50 Similarly, Neal Gabler understands the attack of 9/11 to have been consciously carried out in filmic language easily understood by a Western audience.51

This understanding of terrorism as having a strong performative element, that is, as a communicative process, means the terrorist and terrorism can become part of the analysis and not merely subject to definition prior to analysis. It also means Meinhof’s journalistic articles, terrorist violence, texts from the underground and prison declarations can exist to this extent on the same methodological plane. Though such an approach has been developing in the field of terrorism research for some decades, it was not a historian, but a playwright and her director who used it to better understand the history of RAF terrorist Ulrike Meinhof. This has important implications for the Meinhof story: it dismantles an ever-present discontinuity which is largely founded on, or exaggerated in terms of, gendered discourses of terrorist causality.

Radical Without a Cause

Irrespective of author or methodology the history of Ulrike Meinhof has been told in two halves, a situation that is linked to the discourses surrounding female terrorism and the focus on causality. A number of ‘snapping points’ have been proffered as the exact point of Meinhof’s radicalization which tap into gendered causalities, which in turn rest on the assumptions of an unnatural female terrorist, familial motivations, emotional irrationality, or romantic motivations. Such ‘snapping points’ include surgery in 1962 to insert a silver clasp around an aneurism in her brain,52 her 1969 marriage breakdown,53 and, most obviously, the liberation of Andreas Baader in 1970.54 What remains constant, however, is the ‘before and after’ narrative.

The ‘before-and-after’ narrative has been the staple of personalised accounts of Meinhof’s life. In his biography Ulrike Meinhof. A Life in Contradiction55 (1988), biographer Mario Krebs actively seeks to accentuate contradictions and contrasts. Krebs presents on the one hand a young, pacifist journalist who is a good-looking family woman, reared by pious parents who were resistors under the National Socialist regime. On the other, he describes the wild, wanted terrorist with the short-hair (famous from photos of her arrest), who abandoned her family. The biography not only benefits greatly from the dramatic tension between these two extremes, but is entirely built around it.

A subsequent biography by Alios Prinz, Rather Enraged than Sad. The Life Story of
Ulrike Meinhof (2005)56, follows the Krebs-model and juxtaposes the Christian pacifist with the dangerous terrorist, the high-flying, lone-star journalist with the submissive gang-member. In 2006 Meinhof’s daughter Bettina Röhl revealed the religious piety of her grandparents’ household and their resistance to the Nazis to be highly exaggerated in her largely biographical account of her parents’ journalistic activities.57 Despite this recognition, Röhl also perpetuated the narrative of discontinuity by writing a ‘before’ - the biographical account of the magazine konkret - and a (forthcoming) ‘after’ - a book to pick up the story after circa 1969, where the first finished.58

It is not only the exaggeration of the extremes, but existing historical continuities which support the argument against Meinhof’s sudden and perverse radicalisation - not against Meinhof’s radicalism, rather the narrative of radicalisation. In December 2006, Jürgen Seifert wrote of Meinhof’s entrance into the underground as a ‘small qualitative step’, a description he justified by citing Meinhof’s long history of illegal and clandestine activity, particularly her work with the illegal Communist Party of Germany (KPD).59 Meinhof was closely involved with the KPD and during the five years that she was a member she lived with a continuous and very real threat of arrest and imprisonment.60 The financial dependence of konkret on the ‘other side’ also meant secret meetings and concealing the funds. Klaus Röhl has said of these early konkret years that he and Meinhof lived with one foot constantly in prison.61

In addition, Meinhof always worked as a member of a group. Her work on the konkret editorial collective and her articles, and at times cover designs 62 were often produced in the context of a lead-article and accompanied by artwork and therefore must be understood as part of the whole magazine.63 This aspect has been increasingly overlooked, in part due to the anthologies of her work which present selected texts as stand alone pieces.64 Likewise, it is clear from the style and content of the major RAF declarations ‘The Urban Guerilla Concept’,65 ‘Serve the People. Urban Guerilla and Class Struggle’66 and ‘The Black September Action in Munich. On the Strategy of the Anti-imperialist Struggle’67 and the drafts for the planned fourth position paper ‘bassa’, that RAF texts were penned by Meinhof as a collective member - that is written by Meinhof with input from Baader and Ensslin.68

Such historical continuities and the increasing recognition of the traditional overemphasis placed on causality, requires a methodological shift which can handle the variety of sources available after twenty years of involvement in shaping public discourse as both a journalist and a terrorist. This can be achieved by analysing the Meinhof’s ‘texts’ - her works and those of her actions with a performative element - in terms of the terrorist performative. How can historians deal with the discursive continuity evident in Meinhof’s journalistic and terrorist writings; how did RAF bombings of US Army headquarters contribute to, or in part create, its rhetoric of anti-imperialism; what role did the violence of self-starvation play in discourse of anti-fascism: these are all important questions for historians and addressing them offers a genuine way to move beyond the gendered narratives which have dominated the Meinhof-historiography to date.

Conclusion

Despite the intertextual references which - in the title alone - span centuries of German history and literature, Nicolas Stemann’s 2006 premiere of Elfriede Jelinek’s Ulrike Maria Stuart is not a production about a bygone era, it is a work very much focused on the contemporary conception of a period in West German history. It is, then, about history today not a reality in the past, and in this sense it is appropriate to use this piece of theatre to redress the writing of history about the terrorist Ulrike Meinhof. The production continues the decade long deconstruction of the Meinhof myth(s) in that it presents them by revealing the mediality behind the creation of the ‘Meinhof’ figure. This alone would have been, while interesting, neither groundbreaking nor terribly new. However, the production goes a step further and suggests a way beyond endless deconstruction.

The performative dimension of Stemann’s production of Jelinek’s text and the presentation of the language of the RAF - and that of Meinhof, the ‘voice of the RAF’ - as a performative act, finds its social-scientific counterpart in the growing tendency in the literature across disciplines to conceive of terrorism as discursively created and terrorist violence as symbolic violence with a significant performative element.

This terrorist performative liberates the history of West German terrorism and Ulrike Meinhof from unhelpful stereotypes, myths and gendered narratives. The most fundamental corrective for the historiography of Meinhof is the move beyond the narrative of radicalisation which founded in the deep-rooted fascination with the violent female and what makes her violent. Far from being an exercise in character redemption (the domain of sympathizers and biographers over the last decades), or an ambivalence towards terrorist violence, the liberation here is methodological and allows for an overdue continuity in the history of the RAF terrorist Ulrike Meinhof.

Leith Passmore
University of Western Australia

Endnotes

1. Here ‘traditionally’ because the group was formed after the liberation or as a result of the liberation during which a security guard was shot and the individuals fled the scene. Consequently, this event is increasingly being seen as a non-RAF event.
2. For the official 1998 declaration see http://www.rafinfo.de/archiv/raf/raf-20-4-98.php (accessed 27 March 2007); Some argue cease-fire communiqué of April 1992 was the practical end of the RAF, see Dennis A. Pluchinsky, ‘Germany’s Red Army Faction: An Obituary’, Studies in Conflict and Terrorism, no. 16 (1993): 135- 157.
3. B. L. Nacos, ‘The Portrayal of Female Terrorists in the Media: Similar Framing Patterns in the News Coverage of Women in Politics and in Terrorism’, Studies in Conflict and Terrorism, no. 28 (2005): 435; C. D. Ness, ‘In the Name of the Cause: Women’s Work in Secular and Religious Terrorism’, Ibid., 354.
4. Rhiannon Talbot notes how the gendered representation of the female terrorist is consistent with a longer history in the field of criminology, ‘Myths in the Representation of Women Terrorists’, Beire-Ireland: A Journal of Irish Studies, vol. 35, no. 3 (2000): 169-170; Sharon Pickering and Amanda Third, ‘Castrating Conflict: Gender(ed) terrorists and terrorism domesticated’, Social Alternatives, vol. 22, no.2 (2003): 8.
5. See, T. T. Patkin, ‘Explosive Baggage: Female Palestinian Suicide Bombers and the Rhetoricof Emotion’, Women and Language, vol. 27, no. 2 (Fall 2004): 79-88; D. Berkowitz, ‘Suicide Bombers as Women Warriors: Making News Through Mythical Archetypes’, Journalism and Mass Communication Quarterly, (2005): 607-622; Nacos, 435-451.
6. Nacos, 445.
7. Clare Bielby, ‘“Bonnie und Kleid”: Female Terrorists and the Hysterical Feminine’, http://forum.llc.ed.ac. uk./issue2/bielby.html, accessed 3 December 2006.
8. The decades since Meinhof’s death have seen a number of examinations of her brain (which was not buried with her body). The interest in her brain ties into two longstanding explanatory narratives in criminology: the ‘born killer’ and the ‘diseased woman’.
9. Nacos, 440.
10. Sonja Anders and Benjamin von Blomberg, ‘Jelinek-Texte auf dem Weg zum Stück. Über dramaturgische Extrembedingungen’, in Ulrike Maria Stuart, ed. Ortrud Gutjahr (Würzburg: Königshausen und Neumann, 2007), 109.
11. Ortrud Gutjahr, ‘Königstreit. Eine Annäherung an Elfriede Jelineks Ulrike Maria Stuart und ein Blick auf Friedirch Schillers Maria Stuart’, in Ulrike Maria Stuart, ed. Ortrud Gutjahr (Würzburg: Königshausen und Neumann, 2007), 30.
12. Gutjahr, 22.
13. Gutjahr, 34.
14. The fall of the Berlin Wall.
15. The height of the student rebellion in West Germany.
16. Nicolas Stemann, ‘“Das Theater handelt in Notwehr, also ist alles erlaubt.” Ein Interview’ in Ulrike Maria Stuart, ed. Ortrud Gutjahr (Würzburg: Königshausen und Neumann, 2007), 136.
17. This was also the intention behind Stemann’s inclusion of the eldery RAF figures, Stemann, 137.
18. Elfriede Jelinek, Ulrike Maria Stuart. Königinnendrama Ausschnitt, http://www.manuskripte.at/texte/ elfriede%20jelinek-1.pdf (accessed 20 of October, 2006).
19. ‘Es tut mir leid, ich hasse Mütter, und obwohl ich selber eine bin, kann ich den Kindern nicht mehr antworten, kann auf einmal nicht mehr’, see Helga Gallas, ‘Suchfigur Ulrike Meinhof in Elfriede Jelineks Ulrike Maria Stuart’, in Ulrike Maria Stuart, ed. Ortrud Gutjahr (Würzburg: Königshausen und Neumann, 2007), 98.
20. See, E. D. Heineman, ‘Whose Mothers? Generational Difference, War, and the Nazi Cult of Motherhood’, Journal of Women’s History, vol. 12, no. 4 (2001): 138-163.
21. Otto Pollack argues for the link between the emancipation of women and violent crime in The Criminality of Women (New York: Perpetua Edition, 1961), 58-76; Ngaire Naffine critiques this thesis in the context of the 1970s in Female Crime: the Construction of Women in Criminology (London: Allen & Unwin, 1987), 89-103.
22. See, D. E. Georges-Abeyie, ‘Women as Terrorists’; D. Kramer, ‘Ulrike Meinhof: An Emancipated Terrorist?’, European Women on the Left. Socialism, Feminism, and the Problems Faced by Political Women, 1880 to the Present, eds J. Slaughter and R. Kern (Westport: Greenwood Press, 1981).
23. As cited in E. MacDonald, Shoot the Women First (London: Arrow Books, 1991), 200.
24. MacDonald, 6; Robin Morgan presents the terrorist as a hyper-male: as a demon lover, a ‘living weapon. Whatever he does at first appalls, then becomes faddish. We are told that women lust to have him. We are told men lust to be him.’ R. Morgan, ‘Demon Lover’, Ms., (December 2001/January 2002): 18.
25. Gutjahr, 26-28.
26. ‘Das evangelische Blockflöten-Mädchen’, Mario Krebs, Ulrike Meinhof. Ein Leben im Widerspruch (Reinbeck bei Hamburg: Rowohlt, 1988), 28. The contextual link between Protestantism and female terrorism in West Germany is a popular one and one which often gathers around the biographies of Ensslin and Meinhof in particular, see for example, I. Korte-Pucklitsch, ‘Die Töchter aus gutem Hause oder Die protestantische Ethik und der Geist des Terrorismus’, Frauen und Terror. Versuche, die Beteiligung von Frauen an Gewalttaten zu erklären, ed. S. v. Paczensky (Reinbeck bei Hamburg: Rowohlt, 1978) 37-45; G. Rohrmoser and J. Fröhlich, ed. ‘Ideologische Ursachen des Terrorismus’, Analysen zum Terrorismus 1. Ideologien and Strategien, Federal Ministry of the Interior (Opladen: Westdeutscher Verlag, 1981) 274-339; J. Herrmann, ‘“Unsere Söhne und Töchter”. Protestantismus und RAF-Terrorismus in den 1970er Jahren’, Die RAF und der linke Terrorismus, Band 1, ed. Wolfgang Kraushaar. (Hamburg: Hamburger Edition, 2006) 644-656. In 2006, however, Bettina Röhl (Meinhof’s daughter) argued that the cliche this image is built on represents the family life Meinhof’s parents’ generation more closely than the environment in which Meinhof grew up, see Bettina Röhl, So macht Kommunismus Spaß! (Hamburg: Europäische Verlagsanstalt, 2006).
27. E. Cosgrove, The Baader-Meinhof Affair (New York: Printed Matter, 2003). Sexuality has long been associated with female deviance, crime and terrorism. Pollack was of the opinion that women’s crime was primarily sexually motivated, see Pollack, and the argument that the hormonal imbalances often linked to aggressiveness were caused by promiscuity and excessive sexual freedom was present in academic discourse as late as the 1980s, see Georges-Abeyie, 77. Female homosexuality and bisexuality have been noted as both associative and causal factors of female terrorism, see Georges-Abeyie, 77; Nacos, 445.
28. A cited in Bettina Röhl, 609.
29. Henrik Pedersen, ‘Terror on the stage: the German ‘Red Army Faction’ (RAF) as political performance’, in Violence, Culture and Identity. Essays on German and Austrian Literature, Politics and Society, ed. H. Chambers (Bern: Peter Lang, 2006), 327-342.
30. Ein Denkmal für Gudrun Ensslin.
31. Baader, Remix 95 combines RAF texts with works from Thomas Bernhard, William Borroughs, Rainald Goetz.
32. Heißer Herbst, see Henrik Pedersen, ‘RAF auf der Bühne. Inszenierung und Selbstinszenierung der deutschen Terroristen’, Trans. Internet-Zeitschrift für Kulturwissenschaften, no. 9 (2001), available from http://www.inst.at/ trans/9Nr/pedersen9.htm, accessed 20 December 2006.
33. Die Waffe Mensch, see Pedersen, ‘RAF auf der Bühne’.
34. The script for RAF Unplugged is not only taken straight from RAF texts but the actors read their lines from notes placed around the stage, see R. Spinnler, ‘Wie Andreas Baader zur Pop-Ikone wird’, Stuttgarter Zeitung, 25 March (2006); A. Guhlich, ‘“RAF Unplugged”’, Stuttgarter Zeitung, 25 March (2006); I. Bazinger, ‘Ein dreidimensionaler Theatercomic mit hohem Tempo – Terror als Mode: “RAF Unplugged” im HAU’, Berliner Zeitung, 4 April (2005).
35. Gabriele Klein, ‘Der entzogene Text. Performitivität im zeitgenössischen Theater’, in Ulrike Maria Stuart, ed., 24 Ortrud Gutjahr (Würzburg: Königshausen und Neumann, 2007), 66.
36. J. L. Austin, How to do Things With Words (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1975). Austin first outlined the ‘performative’ in a series of lectures in 1955.
37. Judith Butler, ‘Buring Acts: Injurious Speech’, in Performativity and Performance, eds. Andrew Parker and Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick (New York: Routledge, 1995); 205. Butler develops her notion of performativity in Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (New York: Routledge, 1990) and builds on it in Excitable Speech: a Politics of the Performative (New York: Routledge, 1997) and Undoing Gender (New York: Routledge, 2004).
38. Butler, Gender Trouble, 139.
39. For more on the postdramatic theatre in the context of Ulrike Maria Stuart see, Klein.
40. Gutjahr, 20.
41. Jelinek.
42. Gutjahr, 29.
43. Gutjahr, 22-23.
44. Gabriele Dürbeck, ‘Monolog und Perücke. Nicolas Stemanns Inszenierungen von Elfreide Jelineks Das Werk, Babel und Ulrike Maria Stuart’, in Ulrike Maria Stuart, ed. Ortrud Gutjahr (Würzburg: Königshausen und Neumann, 2007), 89-90.
45. Gudrun Ensslin played on this insecurity by telling Meinhof: ‘You only ever write, we do something!’ [‘Du schreibst immer nur und wir tun etwas!’], as cited in K.R. Röhl, Fünf Finger sind keine Faust (Cologne: Kiepenheuer & Witsch, 1974), 416.
46. Brian Jenkins, International Terrorism. A New Mode of Conflict (Los Angeles: Crescent Publications, 1975), 4.
47. Peter Waldmann, Terrorismus. Provokation der Macht (Munich: Murmann, 2005). Waldmann’s interpretation of ‘theatre’ – the production of terrorist symbolism – enjoys wide acceptance. This acceptance is often also implicit. See, G. Weimann and C. Winn, The Theatre of Terror. Mass Media and International Terrorism (New York: Longman, 1994); A. P. Schmid and J. de Graaf, Violence as Communication. Insurgent Terrorism and the Western News Media (London: SAGE Publications, 1982); Mark Juergensmeyer, Terror in the Mind of God. The Global Rise of
    Religious Violence (London: University of California Press, 2001); Andreas Elter, ‘Die RAF und die Medien. Ein Fallbeispiel für terroristische Kommunikation’, in Die RAF und der linke Terrorismus. Band 2, ed. W. Kraushaar (Hamburg, Hamburger Edition, 2006), 1060-1074.
48. Juergensmeyer, 121-147.
49. D. Klimke, ‘Zeichen des Terrors’, Institut für Sicherheits- und Präventionsforschung, available from http:// www.isip.unihamburg.de/04%20Texte/Klimke%20Zeichen%20des%20Terrors.htm, accessed 10 January 2007.
50. ed. D. Román, ‘A Forum on Theatre and Tragedy in the Wake of September 11, 2001’, Theatre Journal, no. 54 (2002): 95-138.
51. N. Gabler, ‘This Time, the Scene was Real’, New York Times (16 September 2001); see also, R. Schechner, ‘Jihad/terrorism as performance’, Performance Studies. An Introduction (New York: Routledge, 2002), 280.
52. The debate surrounding Meinhof’s brain has in recent year’s moved from questions of causality to questions of culpability: as recently as July 2007 in a double interview in Der Spiegel with neuroscientist Hans Markowitsch and social scientist Jan Phillip Reemtsma, a tumor in Meinhof’s brain was used, in the context of her ‘radicalisation’, as a focal point to discuss the culpability of criminals, see ‘“Neuronen sind nicht böse”’, Der Spiegel, no. 31 (2007): 120.
53. Bielby.
54. The 1970 liberation of Andreas Baader is commonly taken as the birth of the Baader-Meinhof Gang. What is less well founded is the assumption that this event represents a sudden radicalisation in terms of Ulrike Meinhof’s life.
55. Krebs.
56. Alios Prinz, Lieber wütend als traurig. Die Lebensgeschichte der Ulrike Meinhof (Berlin: Suhrkamp, 2005).
57. See, Bettina Röhl.
58. Bettina Röhl revealed her plans for a second book to focus of the second half of the story in a 2006 interview, see ‘“So lebten die Fettaugen”’, Das Parlament, no. 23/24 (2006): 15.
59. Jürgen Seifert, ‘Ulrike Meinhof’, Die RAF und der linke Terrorismus, Band 1, ed. Wolfgang Kraushaar (Hamburg: Hamburg Edition, 2006), 351.
60. Krebs, 72.
61. As cited in Krebs, 99.
62. Krebs, 74.
63. Bettina Röhl, 409.
64. See, eds K.R. Röhl and H. Leib, Ulrike Meinhof. Dokumente einer Rebellion: 10 Jahre konkret-Kolumnen (Hamburg: konkret Buchverlag, 1972), Ulrike Meinhof, Deutschland, Deutschland unter anderem (Berlin: Verlag Klaus Wagenbach, 1995); Ulrike Meinhof, Die Würde des Menschen ist antastbar (Berlin: Verlag Klaus Wagenbach, 2004).
65. RAF, ‘Das Konzept Stadtguerilla’, Rote Armee Fraktion. Texte und Materialien zur Geschichte der RAF, ed. ID- Verlag (Berlin: ID-Verlag, 1997), 27-48.
66. RAF, ‘Dem Volk dienen. Stadtguerilla und Klassenkampf’, Rote Armee Fraktion. Texte und Materialien zur Geschichte der RAF, ed. ID-Verlag (Berlin: ID-Verlag, 1997), 112-144.
67. RAF, ‘Die Aktion des Schwarzen September in München. Zur Strategie des antiimperialistischen Kampfes’, Rote Armee Fraktion. Texte und Materialien zur Geschichte der RAF, ed. ID-Verlag (Berlin: ID-Verlag, 1997), 151- 177.
68. Hand written drafts by Meinhof and comments on the drafts by Ensslin can be found in the German National Archive, B 362, 3369; B 362, 3133.