Ulrike Meinhof is a historical riddle, an enigmatic woman, who like most people, can only be understood within the context of her time. She seized a historical moment and the possibilities it offered, a moment of the starkest contradictions in postwar Germany, a moment that spans Germany’s coming to terms with its partially suppressed Nazi past, the student movement of 1968, and the re-unification, which Ulrike Meinhof did not witness, and could probably not have imagined. [...] It is tragic to read her engaged Texts about outsiders (she was especially concerned about institutionalized) and find the tone of her work getting more and more apodictic, demanding, and self-righteous, a tone that in the end tramples everything down, every possible objection, perhaps from desperation because her Texts have so little influence, perhaps for private reasons; and then to have a brutally commanding tone set in that is already very like pitiless barked commands we find later in her later Texts from the underground, commands that today seem to carry the echo of the dark era she detested. And the way Meinhof was destroyed within and by the group she had joined and that became her life, in a situation that seemed to offer no exit but suicide by hanging – this remains incomprehensible to me, as does any suicide. Terrifying and tragic, but also a missed opportunity for society to learn from this woman when she still had something to say that we could understand if only we wanted to.