Ulrike Marie Meinhof (7 October 1934 – 9 May 1976) was a German left-wing journalist and founding member of the Red Army Faction (RAF) in West Germany, commonly referred to in the press as the "Baader-Meinhof gang".

[3] Meinhof, who took part in the RAF's May Offensive in 1972, was arrested in June of that year and spent the rest of her life in custody, largely isolated from outside contact.

Her father Werner Meinhof, a curator of Jena Museum, died of cancer in 1940, causing her mother to take in a boarder, Renate Riemeck, to make money.

In 1957, she transferred to the University of Münster, where she met the Spanish Marxist intellectual Manuel Sacristán[11] (who later translated and edited some of her writings), joined the Sozialistischer Deutscher Studentenbund (SDS), the German Socialist Student Union.

[13][14] In 1959, Meinhof joined the banned Communist Party of Germany (KPD)[15] and later began working at the magazine konkret, a monthly which, until 1964, had clandestine financing from the East German government.

[16] Konkret was widely read by student activists and progressive intellectuals, and as its chief editor from 1962 to 1964, Meinhof was able to elicit contributions from established journalists and authors.

[17] On 2 June 1967, Meinhof's exposure in konkret of German complicity in supporting the Pahlavi dynasty helped rally students to a demonstration in West Berlin against the visit of the Shah of Iran.

She was co-signatory, along with intellectuals including Ernst Bloch, Noam Chomsky, Eric Hobsbawn, Ernest Mandel, and Jean Paul Sartre, of the final declaration.

[23] The attempted assassination of SDS leader Rudi Dutschke on 11 April 1968 provoked Meinhof to write an article in konkret demonstrating her increasingly militant attitude and containing perhaps her best-known quote: Protest is when I say this does not please me.

[24][25] Later that year, her writings on arson attacks in Frankfurt as protests against the Vietnam War resulted in her developing an acquaintance with the perpetrators, most significantly Andreas Baader and Gudrun Ensslin.

She stated that neither she nor her collaborators wanted to give a left-wing alibi to the magazine that sooner or later "would become part of the counter-revolution, a thing that I cannot gloss over with my co-operation, especially now that it is impossible to change its course".

[27]: 352–354 Perhaps her last work as an individual was the writing and production of the film Bambule [de] in 1970, where she put focus on a group of West Berlin girls in juvenile detention; by the time it was scheduled to be aired, she had become wanted for the breakout of Andreas Baader, and its broadcast was delayed until 1994.

[29] After securing a contract from Wagenbach, Meinhof petitioned authorities to allow Baader to travel from Moabit Prison to an institute for social research in the Dahlem district of Berlin.

She and other RAF members attempted to kidnap her children so that they could be sent to a camp for Palestinian orphans and educated there according to her desires; however, the twins were intercepted in Sicily and returned to their father, in part due to the intervention of Stefan Aust.

The most significant of these is probably The Concept of the Urban Guerrilla, a response to an essay by Horst Mahler, that attempts to set out more correctly their prevailing ideology.

[37] On 14 June 1972, in Langenhagen, Fritz Rodewald, a teacher who had been providing accommodation to deserters from the U.S. Armed Forces, was approached by a stranger asking for an overnighting house the next day for herself and a friend.

[50][51] Meinhof's last appearance in court was on 4 May 1976, in a hearing the defendants had requested in order to provide evidence about the participation of West Germany in the Vietnam War.

They also discussed whether Meinhof could testify as a witness at the International Law Conference in Geneva where a delegation of lawyers planned to denounce the measure of detention in solitary confinement.

He claimed that there was not the least sign of depression or lack of interest on her part and that it was an animated discussion in the context of which Meinhof explained the group's point of view.

He conveyed the desire of the Red Brigades to contact her and described the conditions of detention in Italy where prisoners were not held in isolation (except Renato Curcio) and were politically active.

Two hours later Professor Rauschke together with Hans Joachim Mallach performed the official autopsy in the general hospital of Stuttgart from 11:45 a.m. until 12:45 p.m., whose outcome was "death by hanging beyond doubt".

On 11 May a second autopsy was performed on demand of Wienke Zitzlaff by Werner Janssen and Jürgen Schröder, even though the brain, a lot of critical organs, and tissue parts had been previously removed from the body.

Janssen concluded that the most probable cause of death was "suicide by hanging", however in order to come to a definite conclusion he insisted to be given access to the report of the first autopsy, something that never happened.

Some of the points usually mentioned are: The book Lieber wütend als traurig (Better angry than sad) by Alois Prinz was intended as a mainly faithful account of Meinhof's life story for adolescents.

In 1978, Dario Fo and Franca Rame wrote the monologue Moi, Ulrike, je crie... [62] The 2010 feature documentary Children of the Revolution tells Meinhof's story from the perspective of her daughter, journalist and historian Bettina Röhl.

In 1975, the Italian singer-songwriter Claudio Lolli published the song Incubo Numero Zero (Nightmare #0), with the verse "turn off the light, thought Ulrike", and more.

Electronica act Doris Days created a track entitled To Ulrike M., in which there is a passage spoken in German throughout the song, presumably an archived audio file from Meinhof herself.

Der Plan, the electronic music group from Düsseldorf published 2004 the song Ulrike, as part of the Die Verschwörung album.

German Neue Deutsche Härte band Rammstein feature Meinhof, played by lead singer Till Lindemann, in the music video to their 2019 song Deutschland.

[65] The English anarcho punk band Lead By Nik Turner & Judge Trev Thoms Inner City Unit released a 7 Single In 1980 Solitary Astray Astrid Proll And B Side So t ry As id This Single Was Originally Called Solitary Astrid But Was Changed To Avoid Controversyhttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inner_City_Unit https://musicbrainz.org/release/3af980f0-899b-404e-be8f-c81f80dca65e Works of the Red Army Faction