Ulrike Meinhof - The Path to Terror
( Ulrike Meinhof - Wege in den Terror )

Sascha Adamek, Johannes Unger
2006 - 60 min - Beta digital - Couleur - Allemagne

Sunday, May 9, 1976. Employees of the JVA Stammheim find the body of Ulrike Meinhof, a woman charged with being the leading member of a terrorist organization which declared war on the German state – the “Red Army Faction”. She was the most prominent member of the RAF.
Before her underground work she stated the left wing’s position as journalist and columnist of the magazine Konkret. She was regarded as one of the voices of the peace movement and of the extraparliamentary opposition. Then, in 1970, a break: Ulrike Meinhof participates in the violent freeing of Andreas Baader, who was convicted of the arson bombing of a department store. This operation is considered to be the birth of the RAF.
How could a Christian pacifist become a combative underground rebel? How could a renowned journalist become “enemy of the state”? Were the “German circumstances” responsible, like the left wing publisher and friend of Meinhof Klaus Wagenbach said at that time? Or was the “armed fight”, proclaimed by Ulrike Meinhof, rather an expression of very personal isolation and despair?