Disciple of Despair

If Ulrike Meinhof had ever read Lenin's diatribes against "the tactics of despair"--meaning violent anarchism, which he saw as the self-defeating actions of "a petty bourgeois driven to frenzy"--she gave little sign of it. As co-leader and theoretician of West Germany's notorious Baader-Meinhof gang of far-left terrorists, she and her henchmen blasted a gory path of bombings, bank robberies and shootouts that continued even after her capture in 1972. Last week Meinhof used desperation's last resort against herself. Guards at Stuttgart's Stammheim prison, where she, along with three fellow terrorists, had been confined for a year, found Meinhof hanging from her cell window, a makeshift rope of toweling around her neck.

The suicide was the latest turn in the longest, most sensational terrorist trial that West Germany has known. The daughter of a museum director and once a prominent left-wing journalist, Meinhof, 41, already stood convicted of attempted murder in a 1970 prison raid that freed the gang's other namesake, Arsonist Andreas Baader, and began their paramilitary spree. One year ago she, Baader, now 33, and two other gang members--Jan-Carl Raspe, 31, and Gudrun Ensslin, 33--went on trial for a list of charges that included five counts of murder and 54 of attempted murder. Other Baader-Meinhof members are among 220 terrorists also in West German prisons, but the group clearly has some colleagues on the outside. Since the trial began, remnants of the gang still at large and fellow terrorists have bombed the West German embassy in Stockholm, killing two diplomats, shot it out with police in Cologne, murdered a West Berlin supreme court judge, and kidnaped a leading West Berlin politician, whom they traded for the release of five Baader-Meinhof followers.

Special Precautions. Meinhof's death brought more violence. Police armed with water cannons fought a pitched battle with 600 rampaging demonstrators in Frankfurt and quelled more rumbles in West Berlin, Munich and other cities. A West German soldier whose sympathy, police suspect, belonged to the terrorists was critically injured when a bomb he was carrying exploded near the Munich studio of the American Forces Network. Other bombs went off in Paris and Rome. At week's end authorities were taking special precautions to ensure that the dwindling number of young Germans who still follow Meinhof's black flag of anarchy did not try to salute her burial in West Berlin with a bloody farewell.

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