Ulrike Meinhof has hanged herself in her jail cell. Few Americans knew her name before last month, but she was a leader of the notorious Baader-Meinhof gang in West Germany. Four years ago the gang made a number of terrorist attacks, killing at least five persons; it also helped other groups coordinate similar deeds. The Baader-Meinhof people have been on trial for nearly a year under maximum security conditions.
What was going on in Ulrike Mein-hof’s mind? There were few harder boiled ideologists than this 41-year-old woman, and ideology, displacing the real world, serves its adepts as a source of direction, justification, and energy. Why did she give up the fight? She left no suicide note to inform us. One looks, however, to Dostoevsky’s masterpiece, Crime and Punishment, for a possible explanation.
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