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Terhoeven Petra . Deutscher Herbst in Europa. Der Linksterrorismus der siebziger Jahre als transnationales Phänomen . Oldenbourg Verlag , München 2014. 712 pp. Ill. [euro] 59.95.
When, on 9 May 1976, news broke that Ulrike Meinhof, a left-wing terrorist in her early forties facing life in prison, had hung herself in a Stuttgart prison cell, a wave of grief and anger swept through radical circles not only in West Germany itself but all over Europe. Demonstrations and furious press commentaries protested against the way German prison authorities and judges had handled this Cassandra of the left. Some radical commentators reprinted the accusation made by Meinhof's lawyers that she had not committed suicide but had actually been murdered by those in power to intimidate other revolutionaries in Germany and beyond. Others shrewdly stated that she had been suicided by state authorities: it had been a case of "zelfmoord op Ulrike Meinof", as Dutch left-liberal journalist Martin van Amerongen put it
Ulrike Meinhof was of course one of the most prominent members of the "Rote Armee Fraktion" (Red Army Faction, RAF), aka Baader-Meinhof Group, a militant urban guerrilla group she helped organize in 1970 together with Andreas Baader, Gudrun Ensslin, and a few other radicals living in West Berlin. In writing about the RAF, historians have for a long time largely ignored the fact that so much attention has been paid to this group outside Germany. They focused very much on Meinhof and the other founding members and, to a lesser degree, on later generations of left-wing terrorists, and on the personal and collective backgrounds that might explain their steps on the road to political violence. In addition, the counter-terrorist policies of West Germany's establishment and its counter-productive response to the challenge of violence and extremism attracted a lot of academic...