A daughter's revenge | Focus
Germany is on tenterhooks waiting to see if a book by the daughter of terrorist Ulrike Meinhof will lift the lid on the Left's firebrand past, reports Kate Connolly from Berlin
Whenever school friends asked about her parents, Bettina Röhl's answer rolled off her tongue. 'My mother's dead, and my father was the editor-in-chief of the left-wing magazine Konkret .'For the teenage Bettina, that was her childhood in a nutshell and, as far as she was concerned, no further information was necessary beyond the cold, off-pat response. But the past is not so easily parcelled up and put away. Especially when you are the daughter of the late Ulrike Meinhof, co-leader of the terrorist Baader-Meinhof Gang which later became the Red Army Faction.
Twenty-five years after her mother's death, Röhl, a Hamburg-based freelance journalist, claims she will lift the lid on the German radical Left of the 1970s in an explosive book, Sag Mir Wo Du Stehst (Tell Me Where You Stand), due to be published in April.
Just what Bettina Röhl stands for has sparked a huge debate in a country which has undergone denazification and the integration of a major communist state in less than two generations and where who you are and what you stand for means something far more complex than in most other European lands.
Her book, believed to be a tirade of hate against the radical Left, has already been interpreted by sociologists as Röhl's way of dealing with her tortuous past, embodied in the ghost of a mother who friends say was torn between her militant activities and her children. On her website Röhl describes simply how she 'suffered under the split personality of Ulrike Meinhof'.
As a child, Röhl sat on the laps of left-wing terrorists. She was witness to their plans to free Andreas Baader from jail as well as their violent street battles. At the age of seven she and her twin sister, Regine, were abducted by extreme left-wing activists and whisked abroad, destined for a terrorist training camp, until they were rescued by journalist friends of their parents.
There followed her parents' bitter divorce. Then in 1976, at the age of 14, she was confronted with the news that her mother, whom she had rarely seen following her arrest in 1972, had hanged herself in her Stuttgart prison cell.
Horst Mahler, the essential founder of the Red Army Faction and a close Meinhof friend who held Röhl on his knee as a child and has been interviewed by her for the book, claims that Röhl's motivation is based purely on emotion. 'She's completely unpolitical,' he told The Observer . 'These girls felt that their mother was not in love with them and this is the most dangerous wound, which she is now trying desperately to heal.' He believes Röhl may have others behind her who have convinced her to 'come out'.
'She may well have someone behind her persuading her to do this,' he said. 'But in essence she has a deep and long-lasting problem with her mother and is writing a book to rid herself of this.'
Instead of devoting her life to defending her iconic mother, who is still revered in many liberal circles in Germany, particularly for her anti-fascist stance, Röhl, described this week by Germany's influential Die Welt newspaper as 'the embodiment of the suppressed truth of German left-wing radicalism', internalised her bitterness and for years has kept up a relentless campaign of revenge against the political Left.
Her campaign reached its zenith this month when she produced photographs from 1973 showing a helmeted Joschka Fischer, Germany's Foreign Minister and Vice-Chancellor, beating a fallen policeman during a demonstration in Frankfurt.
According to Wolfgang Kraus-haar, a leading specialist on the history of the student movement at the Hamburg Institute for Social Research, Fischer was 'one of the central figures of the left-wing radical theme in the 1970s', and has become 'the most prominent of them all'. In short, Fischer, who never had any personal contact with Meinhof, offers Bettina Röhl the chance to grapple very publicly and in the highest echelons of German politics with her painful past. On her website she goes so far as to talk of wanting to exorcise the 'ghost of Fischer'. Last week she wrote to President Johannes Rau announcing that she was pressing for Fischer, today Germany's most popular politician, to be investigated on suspicion of attempted murder.
Röhl claims that Fischer was the main advocate behind the decision to use petrol bombs in a 1976 demonstration in which a policeman almost died of his horrific burns. 'From all the information I have, I have drawn the conclusion that Josef Martin Fischer was par excellence the leading figure in the violent group [in the demonstration] and effectively helped to set up violent groups acting in parallel,' she writes.
In the lengthy letter written in a bitter tone, and in which the 38-year-old strangely makes no reference to her relationship to Ulrike Meinhof, Röhl said of Fischer: 'He was obsessed with violence, wanting to take nothing from this violence other than to gain political power in his own environment.' His recent public apology for his past she denounces as an 'unbearable farce'.
Fischer has reacted to the biggest blow to his political career so far by admitting 'yes, I was a militant', but insisted in Stern magazine that he always staunchly rejected the 'armed fight' and fought against it. But he still defends his actions, stating he was part of a 'democratic awakening' which stood for liberation from the post-war era when public life was riddled with Nazis. But despite public support for Fischer, and a forthcoming Hollywood film called Green Life in which Ethan Hawke and Al Pacino will play the young and old Fischer, Röhl may have lit a fire which the politician may find hard to extinguish.
The lawyer of Jürgen Weber, the policeman burnt in the demonstration in which Fischer was involved, announced last week that he had not ruled out filing a civil lawsuit against Fischer, claiming he was 'morally responsible' for Weber's horrific injuries caused by 60 per cent burns.
Political commentators are now seriously considering whether Fischer will manage to weather the storm. From her point of view, Röhl's timing could not be more perfect. On Tuesday Fischer is due to give evidence at the trial in Frankfurt of his radical student friend Hans Joachim Klein, who took part in a murderous raid in 1975 on an Opec Oil Ministers' meeting in Vienna. Klein, who last year declared Fischer to be his 'greatest idol', has been charged with kidnapping and involvement in the murder of two bodyguards and a delegate in the raid.
Fischer's seamless transition (his CV on the Foreign Ministry website is mysteriously silent over a 34-year gap) from left-wing radical to charismatic politician and Vice-Chancellor, while triggering the ire of Röhl, has caused Germans to do some serious soul-searching about just how much a leopard is able to change its spots.
'How wild were the others?', Bild, the tabloid newspaper, asked last week, showing irreverent photographs of members of the present Social Democrat-Green coalition in their hippy days. Alongside Fischer there was Chancellor Gerhard Schröder, who has spoken of his Marxist past and his role as a lawyer representing Horst Mahler, as well as a sideburned Otto Schily, now Interior Minister, who also defended Red Army Faction terrorists Gudrun Ensslin and Andreas Baader.
In short, it is difficult to find a nationally prominent left-leaning politician who was not in some way involved in the radical Left. Fischer's past is 'the past of an entire generation', says Renate Künast, outgoing leader of the Greens.
While many of the politicised members of the Sixties and Seventies generation were, like Fischer, absorbed into the mainstream, others have remained on the margins. Röhl's father, Klaus Rainer Röhl, who fought alongside Meinhof and edited Konkret, now works as a commentator for Die Welt am Sonntag. He split from all forms of socialist utopia years ago and has since joined New Right circles.
Most famously, Meinhof's close friend and former left-wing terrorist Horst Mahler is now a spokesman for the extreme-right German Nationalist Party. He is convinced that 'if Ulrike was alive and knew what I know now, she would also have gone in the same direction'.
Tell Me Where You Stand, the title of Röhl's book, is taken from a famous song composed by the GDR singer/songwriter Hartmut König at the end of the Sixties, aimed at the young East Germans who were rebelling against the old authorities:
'Tell me where you stand and which way you're going!/Backwards or forwards, make up your minds!'
It has been interpreted as a direct dig at Fischer and his cronies. But it is not only Fischer who has had problems with the publication of the now infamous photographs that picture him at the centre of a protest.
Röhl herself has come under fierce attack for the way in which she procured the pictures and film, and then sold them on at a huge profit to herself.
The photographer whose pictures Röhl has displayed on her website has started legal proceedings against her, and last Wednesday a state court barred her from further distributing them.
In her orchestrations of the media to expose her story, Röhl herself has managed to remain infuriatingly elusive.
Repeated attempts by The Observer to contact her have proved fruitless, and even her publisher, the Cologne-based Kiepenheuer und Witsch, seemed reluctant to promote her.
A journalist from the daily Die Welt who did manage to secure an interview date with her submitted his written questions in advance, only to have them rejected. The interview was abandoned.
The only concrete explanation from the woman herself as to what had motivated her in her hate campaign against Fischer is a paragraph in her letter to the President. She has had many emails posing the same question.
'As if this could be a question,' she says. 'The truth is in and of itself the motivation, so that the only appropriate way to put the questions can be: why does someone want to suppress the truth or not want to admit it?'
Useful links:
ncG1vNJzZmivp6x7tbTEoKyaqpSerq96wqikaKeSqLKzwsSrZp%2Bnk6rAcL%2FTqKmyZ2Bhg3p8kmVra2pgaIJtfI9nn62lnA%3D%3D