 |
This article needs additional citations for verification. Please help improve this article by adding reliable references. Unsourced material may be challenged and removed. (December 2008) |
| Gudrun Ensslin | |
|---|---|
 Gudrun Ensslin from a wanted poster in 1972. |
|
| Date of birth: | August 15, 1940 |
| Place of birth: | Bartholomä, Germany |
| Date of death: | October 18, 1977 (aged 37) |
| Place of death: | Stuttgart, West Germany |
| Major organizations: | Red Army Faction |
Gudrun Ensslin (German pronunciation: [ˈɡuːdʁuːn ˈɛnsliːn]; 15 August 1940 – 18 October 1977) was a founder of the German terrorist group Red Army Faction (Rote Armee Fraktion, or RAF, also known as the Baader-Meinhof Gang). After becoming involved with co-founder Andreas Baader, Ensslin was influential in the politicization of Baader's voluntaristic anarchistic beliefs. Ensslin was perhaps the intellectual head of the RAF.
Contents |
Early life
Ensslin was born in the village of Bartholomä in Baden-Württemberg, Germany, the fourth of seven children. Her father, Helmut Ensslin, was a pastor of the Evangelical Church in Germany (EKD). Ensslin was a stereotypical good girl, who did well at school and enjoyed working with the Evangelical Girl Scouts[1]. and doing parish work for the Church organizing Bible studies. In her family, the social injustices of the world were often discussed and Gudrun is said to have been sensitized to social problems in West Germany and the world as a whole. At the age of eighteen, Gudrun got the chance to spend a year in the United States of America, where she attended high school in Warren, Pennsylvania. She graduated in the Honor Group at Warren High School in 1959. After graduating from her German high school[2] she received a scholarship from the Studienstiftung des deutschen Volkes, like her partner Bernward Vesper and like Ulrike Meinhof and Horst Mahler, two other members of the Red Army Faction, due to her excellent exams. Gudrun went to study education, Anglistik (English Studies) and Germanistik (German Studies) in Tübingen, where she met Bernward Vesper in February, 1962[3].His father, had been a best-selling author before the First World War, joined the NSDAP in 1931 and to his death in 1962 kept a pro-Nazi stance. The son was marked by his embittered father and to the end his texts, posthumously edited as Die Reise (The Trip) are an explosive mixture of radical left-wing and radical right-wing views. Gudrun Ensslin then seems to have had the same ideas and ideals as her boyfriend[4]. Both started to publish a Will Vesper Collected Works, but it did not sell. In Tübingen, together with two other students, Ensslin and Vesper organized a student workshop for new literature out of which came a shoestring publishing business called Studio neue Literatur. The first book produced was an anthology of poems against the bomb, with many well known poets from all German speaking countries.[5] and a bilingual edition of poems by Gerardo Diego. In 1963/'64, Gudrun Ensslin made her elementary school teacher's diploma. In 1965 Gudrun's younger sister Johanna married Günther Maschke, then a revolutionary marxist poet and member of the SituationistSubversiven Aktion (like Rudi Dutschke), now a leading conservative antidemocratic intellectual and editor of Carl Schmitt. Also in 1965 Gudrun and Bernward got engaged. They had moved to West Berlin in the summer of 1964, Gudrun to finish her thesis on Hanns Henny Jahnn at the Free University. Both were active on the democratic left-wing, they had a well-paid job working for the SPD, they demonstrated against new security laws, the war in Vietnam, for the right to demonstrate, an Allied Powers arms show[6]. Bernward Vesper neglected his studies, read an enormous amount of books and from 1966 published (with friends) a serious and important series of pamphlets and paperbacks, the Voltaire Flugschriften.
In May 1967, Ensslin gave birth to their son Felix Robert, but their relationship was already finished, as she told Vesper in February, 1968, when she ended it finally by phone[7]. Gudrun had met Andreas Baader in July or August, 1967 and they soon began a love affair. Baader had come to Berlin in 1963, to escape ongoing troubles with the Munich justice system and also to dodge the draft. The young criminal in and out of youth arrest and prison became the man of Gudrun Ensslin's life.[8].
A strange artifact from this time is an experimental film Ensslin participated in entitled Das Abonnement (The Subscription) [9].
Leader of the RAF
In June 1967 Ensslin participated in political protests against the Shah of Iran, who was visiting Germany at the time. Though the Shah was viewed by governments in the West as a reformer, his regime was dictatorial against political opponents, and the state police force (SAVAK) was believed to routinely torture prisoners. Fights broke out between pro-Shah and anti-Shah factions and peaceful demonstrations turned violent. During the opera house demonstration (Deutsche Oper Berlin) an innocent young man by the name of Benno Ohnesorg was shot in the back of the head by a police officer. (The organisation known as the Movement 2 June, which would become Berlin's own urban guerilla organization called itself after this event.) The very night, Gudrun Ensslin is said to have angrily denounced West Germany as a fascist state at a Sozialistischer Deutscher Studentenbund meeting.[10]
The police officer, Karl-Heinz Kurras (who was revealed in 2009 to be an undercover Stasi agent), was charged with manslaughter and acquitted of the charge on 23 November 1967 causing a public outrage. Things cooled down however, and this was one thing enraging Gudrun Ensslin. She had left Bernward Vesper and her child for good early in 1968 and now she, Andreas Baader and Thorwald Proll decided to escalate the fight against the system. They left Berlin around March, 20., in Munich decided on the fire-bombing of department stores in Frankfurt am Main, where a SDS congress took place. Together with Horst Söhnlein they left for Frankfurt on April, 1.
On the night of 2 April 1968 two fires were set in two department stores in Frankfurt. Baader, Ensslin, Proll and Söhnlein for some reason or another stayed in Frankfurt and were arrested three days later. In October 1968 they were sentenced to three years in prison for arson, but were released pending an appeal in June 1969 and fled when the appeal was dismissed. Baader was arrested on 3 April 1970. Ensslin, Ulrike Meinhof, who was at that time a well-known leftist polemicist, and two other women freed him on 14 May 1970. One person was shot. This was the beginning of the gang's violent crimes, and the RAF. Ensslin became one of the most wanted people in Germany. She was arrested in a boutique on 8 June 1972 in Hamburg.
Death
Several attempts to free her from prison, through hostage-taking by sympathizers and so-called members of the 2nd generation of the RAF, failed. One was the abduction of Hanns-Martin Schleyer on 5 September 1977, and when this failed to work, the hijacking of a Lufthansa airliner on 17 October. When the airplane was stormed by a German anti-terrorist unit, Schleyer was killed. Ensslin was found hanging in her cell early in the morning of 18 October, while Baader was found shot dead in his own cell and two other imprisoned members of the RAF were also found with life-threatening injuries (one died, one recovered). Officially, Ensslin's and the other deaths were ruled suicides. However, sympathizers and Irmgard Möller, the only surviving RAF member imprisoned at Stammheim Prison, insisted that the deaths had been extrajudicial executions.[11] The exhaustive study of the RAF by Stefan Aust (revised in 2009 as "Baader-Meinhof: the inside story of the RAF") is categorical in finding the deaths suicides.
Ensslin's life story was fictionalized into the film Marianne and Juliane; she is also a major character in the film Der Baader Meinhof Komplex.
See also
References
- ^ "Als Jugendliche wird sie Gruppenführerin beim Evangelischen Mädchenwerk und aktive Gemeindehelferin, die die Bibelarbeit leistet", Gerd Koenen, Vesper, Ensslin, Baader, Köln, Kiepenheuer & Witsch, 2003, p. 93
- ^ the Stuttgart Königin Katharine-Stift, Konen, p. 93
- ^ Koenen, p. 20
- ^ Koenen, p. 27
- ^ Gegen den Tod, Stimmen deutscher Schriftsteller gegen die Atombombe, Bernward Vesper, editor, Stuttgart-Cannstatt (Ensslin's parents address), 1964
- ^ Koenen, p. 121, 124
- ^ Koenen, p. 134
- ^ Koenen, p. 22
- ^ Schröder & Kalender » Blog Archive » Making of Pornography (15)
- ^ Koenen, p. 124
- ^ Dugdale-Pointon, T. (29 August 2007). "Gudrun Ensslin (1940-1977)". http://www.historyofwar.org/articles/people_ensslin.html. Retrieved 4 April 2009.
Other references
- Ellen Seiter, "The Political Is Personal: Margarethe von Trotta's Marianne And Juliane" Journal Of Film And Video 37.2 (1985) : 41 - 46.
- Film: "Marianne and Juliane", with original German title "Die bleierne Zeit", directed by Margarethe von Trotta in 1981.
- Book: Hitler's Children by Jillian Becker [1]
- Book: Televisionaries (Televisionaries: the red army faction story 1963-1993) by Tom Vague [2]
- Book:"High School Graduates of Warren, Pennsylvania 1889-1995"
Warren, PA: Warren Bicentennial History Committee, 1995. Oliphant, Nancy (editor)
External links
This entry is from Wikipedia, the leading user-contributed encyclopedia. It may not have been reviewed by professional editors (see full disclaimer)
