ABSTRACT
When Irene Georgens, a fellow Rote Armee Fraktion prisoner, abandoned her hunger strike in the autumn of 1974, Gudrun Ensslin was stern in her response. Writing to two fellow prisoners, she castigated what she viewed as Georgen’s lack of commitment; the struggle, in this conceptualisation, did not cease once RAF members had been imprisoned. Rather, prison was merely another front on which the struggle could be conducted. Something of Ensslin’s personality has been captured in this brief extract: what Julian Preece has termed her ‘combination of moralism and authoritarianism, her domination of those around her and subjugation to powerful men’.2 The common name ascribed to the RAF – the Baader Meinhof group, after Andreas Baader, Ensslin’s lover, and Ulrike Meinhof, a former journalist and the group’s chief ideologue – has tended to obscure the importance of Ensslin’s contribution both to the formation of the RAF and its subsequent violent campaign. To a certain extent Ensslin represents a median figure between the overt intellectualism of Meinhof and the overwhelmingly action-orientated, near-philistinism of Baader. Certainly, the doctor in Stammheim prison believed that she was the originator for much of the group’s campaign:
I had the impression that Gudrun Ensslin was the intellectual leader. With her cool, seemingly schizoid temperament she came up with appalling ideas that Ulrike Meinhof set down on paper as a former journalist, and that were finally approved or rejected by Baader.3
