Extract from Michael Mitchell's translation

Hans Martin Enzensberger's Tumult

Later Ulrike Meinhof sent me a secret message from the underground by a roundabout route. Go-betweens guided me to a safe house in Hamburg where she had barricaded herself in with her fellow outlaws. She had summoned me in order to deliver the orders from their little group that now went under the grandiose name of Red Army Fraction. The pastor's daughter Gudrun Ensslin, who had turned into a guns and clothes fetishist, was also present. Undisputed leader of this phantom army was the abominable Andreas Baader, a crook on the run who had worked as a model for a gay magazine and loved most of all, apart from himself, fast cars. The women had submitted to him unconditionally. He treated them like a pimp. Ulrike despairingly went on about the necessity of bringing down the ‘system’ by violence. I told her that I had no truck with that sort of fantasy. Baader pronounced judgment. I was unanimously declared a coward because I had no desire to take part in their tests of courage. What I didn't tell them was that thirty years ago a ‘troop leader’ of the Hitler Youth had made very similar demands on me: I was to jump down from a high wall, just to prove to that supervisor that I wasn't a scaredy cat. It didn't make sense to me.

I heard no more from poor Ulrike Meinhof, who eventually committed suicide. It was the courts and the Federal Criminal Investigation Department, the media and the authorities responsible for defending the constitution that finished her off.