Palaces and prisons

S made me a Palace of Butter. This was prior to visiting the gardens of Schloss Charlottenburg. There was an impressive range of different kinds of park benches and a very tall obelisk style contemporary art sculpture there. The sculpture was carved at the base on all sides in four different languages. The text said something about how March 11 could be a significant day.

On 11 March in Stuttgart in 1976, a second post-mortem was conducted on the body of Ulrike Meinhof’s at the request of her sister Weinke Meinhof and the Baader-Meinhof defence lawyers. The presiding examiner, Dr. Werner Janssen, issued a statement after the examination: "...Frau Meinhof suffered death by hanging. The findings of the examination so far available give no grounds for suspecting any extraneous factors.”

‘Der Baader Meinhof Komplex’, a 2008 film about the Baader-Meinhof Gang, has been in cinemas across Germany since September 25th. It’s release has been controversial here and there have been mixed reviews. Unsurprisingly in a film that spans almost ten years of German history there’s a lot of information, a multitude of characters and story twists. The film makes clear that Gudrun Esslin was the most powerful and ruthless member of the group and I almost felt sorry for her that her name was not immortalised in the gang’s title rather than her boyfriend Andres Baader and the journalist Ulrike Meinhof.

In an interview in June 2007, Mia Bloom, assistant professor in the School of Public and International Affairs at the University of Georgia, answered questions relating to women involved in global terrorism in which she stated: “There are several examples of women's leadership in such organizations. The most famous is Ulrike Meinhoff after whom the Baader-Meinhoff group was named. But the actual leader of the group was named Gudrun Esslin.”

In 2002 German director Christopher Roth entered his film ‘Baader’ into competition at the Berlin Film Festival. Critics of the film stated that Andres Baader and Gudrun Esslin were given a hip, Bonnie and Clyde style treatment. The festival audience were said to be totally astonished by the directors decision to stage Baader’s death as a sensational and heroic one by hail of bullets, when in reality he had committed suicide in a German prison cell in 1977.