An affect-theory approach to Ulrike Meinhof’s
letter from a prisoner in the isolation wing
Dimitrios ChatzicharalampousMA Semiotics - University of Tartu
e-mail: [email protected]
IntroductionUlrike Meinhof (1934-1976) was the enfant terrible of the
discontented Left in post-Nazi West Germany from the mid-1950s
until the mid-1970s. Her life and activity as a public figure
were split and shared between two discontinuous social
topologies: first, as a reputable journalist and intellectual
of the left wing, she earned the respect of the German
intelligentsia by elaborating a notable political polemics,
which acquired systematic character particularly during the
period between 1959 and 1969 (when she worked as a central
columnist for the left-wing magazine konkret); subsequently, her
breakthrough into the underground world of terrorism, as a co-
founding member, intellectual core and central figure of the
radical-left, anti-imperialist, urban-guerilla organization
RAF - Rote Armee Fraktion (Red Army Faction), rendered her one of the
most wanted persons by the state apparatus of West Germany
during the period between 1970 and 19721.
1 For a comprehensive biography of Ulrike Meinhof, see: Ditfurth 2007 (inGerman, not translated in English).
1
On 15th June 1972 she was arrested and directly
transferred into Cologne-Ossendorf prison, where she was held
in confinement in a cell within an empty medical wing2 under
conditions of isolation and sensory deprivation for eight
consecutive months, from 16.06.1972 to 09.02.1973, before she
was moved into another section of the prison. During that
period she wrote a text that came to receive the title ‘brief
einer gefangenen aus dem toten trakt’ (translated as ‘letter from a prisoner
in the isolation wing’ [literally: dead wing]), whereby she “tried to
describe her physical and linguistic symptoms” (Colvin 2009:
152), or better “the physical and psychic experience of
isolation” (Bauer 2008: 75).
This letter constitutes the primary object of analysis
for the present essay, in juxtaposition with a second one,
complementary to it, which was elaborated during the second,
significantly shorter period of Meinhof’s confinement in the
dead wing, under similar –but lighter- conditions, namely
during December 1973 for half month3. The analysis of these
texts will be attempted through the prism of affect theory,
more specifically by making use of Brian Massumi’s relevant
elaborations. Before proceeding to the axes of this analysis,
2 According to Sarah Colvin: “The wing in which Meinhof was held –officially called Abteilung für die psychiatrische Untersuchung weiblicher Gefangener(Section for the Psychiatric Examination of Female Prisoners)- was known tothe resident psychiatrist Dr. Bernd Götte as the stille Abteilung (silentsection). The RAF called it the toter Trakt (dead wing): a designation thatalludes to the feelings of hopelessness and misery experienced there, butalso an intention ascribed to the state to drive the prisoners to suicide,or at the very least to cause severe mental deterioration. Götte’s ownterm, ‘silent section’, describes (even if unintentionally) the loss oflanguage experienced by isolated prisoners.” (Colvin 2009: 152)3 Both letters are attached as an Appendix to the present essay. Forreasons of economy, only their English translation has been included.
2
a prerequisite contextualization will be provided, regarding
the conditions of Meinhof’s confinement that illuminate these
letters, but as well the theoretical work that has been done
with regard to the latter.
Contextualization of the lettersThe issue of the actual conditions of Meinhof’s confinement in
the isolation wing / silent section / dead wing of Cologne-Ossendorf
prison and their significance has been a strongly disputed
one, since it has been mediated by and has itself constituted
a valuable vector for mutually opposing and counteractively
operating sets of wider discourses, the credibility of each of
which is contingent upon discrediting the other. As Sarah
Colvin notes:
It quickly became the standard RAF position that the conditions in which
they were held amounted to ‘state terrorism’. That kind of polemic led
to a situation where many regarded and still regard claims that group
members experienced serious suffering in solitary confinement as pure
propaganda. /…/ Nervousness about being deemed a ‘sympathizer’ may be in
play here (the discourse of terrorism /…/ is black-and-white, and there
is little tolerance for those who seek a space in between). (Colvin
2009: 150-151)
Whereas, though, solitary confinement characterized the
treatment of almost all the imprisoned members of RAF, in the
particular case of Meinhof (and some other members of the
group4), another more aggravating factor was also at work: the
4 Examples are the cases of Gudrun Ensslin and Astrid Proll, though withdifferentiated duration.
3
sensory deprivation, which led to highly-contested claims
about Vernichtungshaft (annihilation custody) (see ibid: 153).
Through a cross-reading of sources regarding the actual
conditions of Meinhof’s confinement in the dead wing –whose
general attitude fluctuates on the spectrum of sympathy-
neutrality-demythification towards RAF claims5- we can
extrapolate some common factual denominators at least about
the period of Meinhof’s first eight months, which suggest the
crucial context of the first letter examined here6: her cell
was isolated in an “otherwise empty wing” (C: 149), it was
“specially soundproofed” (S, M: 238), so that “no sounds from
the outside or inside of the prison could be heard” (B: 75),
it was “painted bright white” (S, M: 238) and had “entirely
white furnishings” (B: 75), it had “a single grated window
covered with fine mesh” (S, M: 238) and “a single bald neon
light” (ibid), which “should be left on day and night” (P:
38). Furthermore, “contact with other prisoners was not
allowed, and Meinhof was excluded from all prison activities”
(B: 75), and, as was the case with all RAF prisoners, she was
entitled only to “half-hour visits once a fortnight” (C: 151)
by family members and lawyers. The issue of being “allowed [to
have] radios, newspapers, typewriters, and books in their
cells” (ibid) is intractable when it comes to the conditions
of the first eight months of Meinhof’s confinement, and
although it is explicitly registered by Meinhof herself in her5 Respectively, these sources are: Smith, Moncourt 2009; Bauer 2008; Colvin2009; Passmore 2009.6 For reasons of economy of space, the in-text references mentioned in thisparagraph will be codified as follows: ‘S, M’ stands for Smith, Moncourt2009; ‘B’ stands for Bauer 2008; ‘C’ stands for Colvin 2009; ‘P’ stands forPassmore 2009.
4
second letter, it becomes rather questionable regarding her
first time in the dead wing. Passmore observes that “the
initial prison conditions experienced by the RAF leadership
group were severe” in contrast with the “general but slow
trend of relaxing conditions” (P: 38) through the time; this
relaxing tendency is already reflected in the slight
betterment of conditions during Meinhof’s second time in the
dead wing, when, for example, the “permanent lights-on” factor
was eliminated, as she herself registered this in a correction
of “factual inaccuracies” (see C: 151).
What is rather interesting, and the reason why all these
facts are mentioned here in such detail (apart from serving as
necessary contextualization for the analysis that will
follow), is that the theoretical approaches which have been
attempted with regard to these two texts by Meinhof –
considering particularly the recent, English-speaking relevant
literature- tend to examine them only as subordinate fragments
of the overall RAF discourse, solely acknowledging in them an
either strategic or otherwise serving function with a view to
the collective “project or ‘struggle’ [of RAF prisoners] /…/
to maintain their identity as fighters” (Colvin 2009: 155),
and to construct discursively and publicize the image of a
‘terrorist state’. This approach is to a great extent
plausible and supported by evidence, such as the fact that,
according to Colvin, the first letter of Meinhof was written
“at the request of her attorney Klaus Croissant” (ibid: 152).
Passmore, furthermore, reveals a January 1974 “discussion
between Meinhof and the lawyers in which it was decided to use
5
the poem [i.e. the letters] externally” (Passmore 2009:49-50),
from which he concludes that “this discussion seems to answer
the question /…/ as to whether this text was really a poetic
transcript of a prison experience or a literary complaint
composed for the purposes of the campaign” (ibid: 50, footnote
125). Passmore himself, on the other hand, has previously
acknowledged that:
It is also clear, however, that they [i.e. the RAF prisoners] suffered
terribly under earlier prison conditions: in February 1973 [i.e. at the
point of Meinhof’s release from her first dead wing confinement] one of
Cologne-Ossendorf prison’s own medical experts, Dr. Goette, found that
‘in the case of Ms [Meinhof], whom I have twice examined, the limit of
her resilience, in psychiatric terms, has now been reached’. (emphasis
in the original) (ibid: 38)
The purpose of exposing all this seemingly superfluous
information is not of course to investigate or restore some
sort of historical truth and justice around the matter, but
quite the opposite: to show that approaches which examine
these two texts as one and the same, and as a mere component
of overarching, collective, discursive strategies, in other
words approaches which deploy solely the methodological
triptych historicism-materiality-discourse in the Foucauldian
framework of power relations, run the risk of reducing and
subordinating the actual complexity of such textual and
contextual instances that involve “linking of the /…/ prison
experience to the human body” (ibid: 49), into the cognitive
pretext or afterword of political strategies. Meinhof’s texts
appear to provide unique insight into the living, embodied
experience of isolation and sensory deprivation, which,
6
embedded as it is undoubtedly in a certain, authoritative and
discursively prescribed context of imprisonment conditions,
and serving -as it has been shown by the abovementioned
authors- a distinct, strategic, counterdiscursive line, cannot
be accounted for exclusively or totally by corresponding
approaches. The missing part of these approaches will be
heuristically accessed in the subsequent sections of this
essay, using the prism of affect theory, which advocates the
inadequacy of views that hold “the body /…/ as a surface upon
which discourse is inscribed rather than as something which is
known ‘from within’” (Brown, Tucker 2010: 6).
The letters as documents of affective forcesThe privileging of corporeality by affect theory does not
divorce body from mind in yet another dualist fashion. It
rather apprehends “the real powers of affect /…/: a body’s
capacity to affect and to be affected” (Seigworth, Gregg 2010: 2)
as the fundamental condition for perception and cognition to
take shape; the latter are regarded as progressively ‘higher’
functions, as capturing forces of the material flux in which
the body participates, thus feeding it back (by circumscribing
its potential through actualization) and being fed back by it
(by its virtual residue, whose residual character is
susceptible of being sensed as such). The analysis of an event
from the perspective of affect theory, then, has to begin from
the premise that “affect is this two-sidedness [i.e. the
simultaneous participation of the virtual in the actual and
the actual in the virtual] as seen from the side of the actual thing, as
7
couched in its perceptions and cognitions” (Massumi 1995: 96,
emphasis in the original). The letters of Meinhof, then,
should be regarded from the perspective of affect theory as
expressions of the “situated standpoint of the actual thing as it
extracts a foothold in the material flux” (Brown, Tucker 2010:
9), whereas this material potential or intensity has to be
traced, vaguely sensed or re-configured through the
expressive-textual slippages, lapses, and deferments.
We have first to acknowledge that in both letters, what
is registered by Meinhof is a state of affectedness, namely a
state of attendance of the body to the impingements (a term of
Spinoza preferred by Massumi, see 1995: 92) of a persistent
material context (the cell). The first movement of abstraction
noted by Massumi is the feeling itself: “The body infolds the
effect of the impingement –it conserves the impingement minus the
impinging thing” (ibid). The documentation of the feeling
attempted by Meinhof, then, is the product of the second
movement of abstraction, namely the “conscious reflection
[which] is the doubling over of this dynamic abstraction on
itself” (ibid: 93). This documentation has by definition
entered the signifying order of language, whose resources it
consciously employs in order to capture, immobilize, filter,
and refine the simultaneously unfolding flux of intensity as
it impinges upon the body. In other words, the intensity of
affect that emerges in the in-between space of the biological
body and its material context (cell) becomes perceived as
feeling, and then feeling becomes cognized and linguistically
circumscribed. This character of the letters is rendered
8
explicit by the deployment of a specific expressive structure,
which is dominant in the first letter, whereas it seems to
have receded in the second: the repetitive phrase “the feeling
[that]…” (“das Gefühl /…/”) inaugurates most of the
fragmentary sentences of the first letter, wherein it appears
15 times, while in the second it only appears three times.
The function of this repetitive phrase can be understood
not only as a running thread that brings cohesion to an
otherwise fragmented discourse, but further and foremost as a
significatory anchorage, and therefore as the stable starting
and returning point of a precarious endeavor of exploration
and fumbling within the signifying demands of representation.
The attempts of Meinhof to capture linguistically her affected
state are doomed to a gestural character; they are performed
upon satellite trajectories around the dominant, all-
encompassing, yet never-complete signifier: ‘the feeling’.
What is meant here by ‘never-completeness’ does not refer to
the ‘natural’ incompleteness of this signifier, which rests on
supplementation and explication in order to be specified in
shifting contexts and circumstances, but quite the opposite:
the never-complete character of ‘the feeling’ here reveals the
constant attendance of the body, from perception to cognition,
even to (or, as will be shown later, due to) its ever-
identical impingements by the invariable context of the
isolated and soundproofed cell. This never-completeness
becomes apparent in the text through the surplus of
signification deployed in order to represent the same
intensity induced by isolation and sensory deprivation. This
9
surplus betrays the constant slippage of the signified
intensity, its deferral throughout the text: the repetition of
this stable phrase, differentially completed at each sentence,
reveals that each sentence in isolation is only complete until
the next sentence appears and re-informs it, and further, that
one can extrapolate a whole set of sentences that do not, but
could appear in between the existing ones and after the last
one is articulated, with the same gestural and self-deferring
status.
The never-complete character of ‘the feeling’ becomes the
leakage point through which we can get a glimpse of the
ineffable status of affect, of the virtual character of
intensity. According to Massumi, “the level of intensity, is
characterized by a crossing of semantic wires /…/ This is to
say that it is not semantically or semiotically ordered /…/
When asked to signify itself, it can only do so in a paradox”
(Massumi 1995: 85). This is what we witness in Meinhof’s
letters, especially the first one. The significations
attempted are not only incomplete and self-deferring, but they
find a provisional completion through the paradox, the
contradiction. Meinhof elaborates the expression of feeling,
and therefore the momentary capture of intensity, through
contradictory propositions, which can be organized
semantically under five predominant categories, all of which
are pertinent to the sensory realm, yet deployed in a manner
that traverses their distinct sensory modality towards the
synaesthetic; according to Massumi, “affect is synaesthetic,
implying a participation of the senses in each other” (ibid:
10
96). These five categories are: heat and cold, loudness and
silence, solid and liquid state, motion and rest/acceleration
and deceleration, expansion and contraction.
More specifically: the thermal element fluctuates between
“freezing”, “cold”, “fever”, “burning”, and “boiling”; the
acoustic element (“terrifying euphoria that you’re hearing
something”) is juxtaposed to the interoceptive sense of
phonation and simultaneously exteroceptive sense of self-
audition, itself oscillating between “mute”, “speaking at a
normal volume”, “shouting”, and “yelling”, becoming
“absolutely unbearable” when it comes to “the sounds sibilants
make”; solid state and dryness (“brain /…/ like baked fruit”)
is followed by liquid state (“pissing the soul out of your
body, as though you can’t hold water”); the sense of motion is
transposed to the cell, being either constant (“you can’t get
rid of the feeling of moving”) or paused (“the cell is
moving /…/ it suddenly stops”), or to the time, which is set
in motion (“flowing away”) or immobilized (“time and space are
encapsulated within each other”); in the second letter,
Meinhof inserts the sense of velocity, which is either minimal
(“one moves in slow motion”) or maximal (“acceleration causes
your skin to flatten”, “rollercoaster ride”, “speed from 240
to 190”); expansion and contraction refers to the
interoceptive sense induced in the head –brain and skull-
which is either “exploding”, “tear[ing] apart, burst[ing] wide
open”, or “shriveling up”, later “expanding again”.
All these polarities which belong to the signifying order
attempt to capture paradoxically the same feeling, and it is
11
only in few instances of them that an actual shift of
impinging stimuli gives rise to an actual shift of feeling
(as, for example, in the description of the feeling of having
a bath, which “means thawing for a moment, and can last a few
hours”). When Meinhof writes “the feeling your head is
exploding” and shortly afterwards “the feeling your brain is
gradually shriveling up, like baked fruit”, she employs
contradictory language with regard to the same experiential
referent. Equally, when she writes “you’re freezing” and then
“the feeling of burning out inside”, there is no shift of
feeling experienced, but rather a shift of focus of the bodily
attendance to the same intensity, stratified in levels and
permeating all of them, from the skin to the depth of the
body, leaving differential traces, so that their experienced
interconnectedness leads to paradoxical articulations.
Massumi observes that “intensity is embodied in purely
autonomic reactions most directly manifested in the skin –at
the surface of the body, at its interface with things”
(Massumi 1995: 85). This holds true for several instances in
the letters where skin becomes the locus of intensity (for
example, “you’re trembling”, “you’ve been flayed”,
“acceleration causes your skin to flatten”), but what
dominates particularly the first letter is the sensation of
the depth of the body, of its content: the body turns its
perception inwards, and this is reflected in the signifying
order through the predominance of introspective expression.
The sensation of the body-within ascertains that, from the
perspective of affect theory, “bodies [are] defined not by an
12
outer skin envelope or other surface boundary but by their
potential to reciprocate or co-participate in the passages of
affect” (Seigworth, Gregg 2010: 2). Meinhof reveals,
especially in her first letter, an interoceptive dismantling,
a perceptual awareness of the distinctiveness of body parts
that are vital to her: “head”, “skull”, “spinal column”,
“brain”, more poetically “soul”, suffering “headaches”,
“growing mute”. The affectual emphasis placed on the upper
part of the body, namely the head and its compartments, is
directly associated with Meinhof’s social occupation as a
writer and a thinker, endangered in this context of
imprisonment conditions. At this point, another ascertainment
comes forth:
The body doesn’t just absorb pulses or discrete stimulations; it infolds
contexts, it infolds volitions and cognitions that are nothing if not
situated. Intensity is asocial, but not presocial –it includes social
elements, but mixes them with elements belonging to other levels of
functioning, and combines them according to different logic. (Massumi
1995: 90-91, emphases in the original)
Meinhof’s persistent concerns about the destabilization of
higher cognitive functions, such as thought (“the associations
you make are being hacked away”), expression (“you’re growing
mute”), management of language (“you can no longer identify
what words mean, you can only guess”, “sentence structure,
grammar, syntax –are out of control”), and memory (“half an
hour later you can only mechanically reconstruct whether the
visit took place today or last week”) need to be addressed in
this context. All these crucial elements, belonging to the
13
order of the social, have been abruptly7 forced to a novel
affective regime of isolation and sensory deprivation, namely
to a regime that excludes the social or marginalizes it to the
sphere of exception –half-hour visits by familiars and lawyers
once a fortnight- or side-effect -“the only minimal contact
with another human being was when food was delivered” (Smith,
Moncourt 2009: 239).
What seems to have been taking place, then, is the
accumulation of two factors, each one belonging to a different
level: on the one hand, the social proper level faces the
danger of disruption, and demands the reinforcement of
cognitive mechanisms that testify its persistence; on the
other hand, the affective proper level impinges a continuous
intensity upon the body at the same time that the discrete
external stimuli it provides are infinitesimal, and therefore
the counterbalancing process of internal sensation is elevated
to the highest level of awareness. The combination of the
processes that unfold on these two levels amounts to the
experience of a radical internalization and thus radical
destabilization of the external-internal homeostasis,
traversing the body all the way from perception to cognition,
and manifesting itself on the level of linguistic expression.
When Meinhof says that “you can no longer identify what words
mean, you can only guess”, she refers to the slippage of
meaning as suspension of the underlying intensity, which,
transferred to the linguistic plane in order to be captured,
7 It is important to acknowledge that her confinement in the dead wingfollowed immediately after her arrest.
14
suffers the deferral of signification and the paradox (as
argued previously).
After all the previous analytical elaborations, the
pathway to the final task of understanding the discrepancy
between the first and the second letter is now more open. The
structure of the second letter seems split in two parts: the
first part reaches until the phrase “reduces one’s speed from
240 to 190”, after which the second part begins. The reason
why this heuristic segmentation is attempted here, is that one
witnesses a shift from the fragmented, gestural and
contradictory discourse of the first letter, continued also in
the first part of the second letter, to a more semantically
coherent and determinate expression in the second part of the
second letter. This divergence accompanies also the writer’s
attitude towards the object of attention: in the first case,
Meinhof explores the intensity of the novel affective regime
and its impingements upon her, as if she’s groping her way
across the dark, the brand new, that which requires a surplus
of signification to compensate for a deficit of apprehending
capacity, since it’s slipping away; in the second case, she
expresses an assertive attitude towards this intensity, which
is no longer a new, non-experienced regime, she articulates
with certainty and condensing competence her final cognitive
abstraction of what actually “is going on in these places”: “a
process of inner disintegration occurs”, “the complete
destruction of personality is insidious”, “one expects the
prisoner to lose self-control”. The political and ideological
positioning has come to the foreground (“prisoner”, “judge”,
15
“execution”, “Tupamaros”), whereas in the first case this had
receded in the background, as implicit element, susceptible of
extrapolation from contextual knowledge; the affected body,
stripped to a high degree off its political accretion, was at
the centre.
This discrepancy is justified by the fact that the second
letter is the product of the second (and thus not-
unprecedented) time of Meinhof in the dead wing, for a much
shorter period of time, under seemingly more relaxed
conditions, and having had the time before that to re-
socialize within prison, but foremost to restore contact and
communication with the other imprisoned members of RAF8.
Afterword - ConclusionThe afterword of this overall analysis has to do with what in
affect theory is termed as “the patho-logy of a body
intersecting with the pedagogy of an affective world”
(Seigworth, Gregg 2010: 12). Pedagogy here has to be understood
as the social subjection of the body to changing and novel
affective regimes, effectuated by diverse mechanisms and
apparatuses pertinent to the sphere of biopolitics; patho-logy
becomes in this context the openness of the body, its
vulnerability as a medium for the passage of affects. In the
first case, Meinhof attempts to articulate this patho-logy of
8 This restoration was effected in a complete form after the period ofMeinhof’s first confinement, which sheds some further light to the issue ofdiscrepancy between the two letters: “In March 1973 Baader [i.e. the otherleading figure of RAF] demanded that the lawyers ‘build an info-system’,which from May became highly organized. /…/ This became known as ‘das info’,and it was received by a regular group of around thirty prisoners”(Passmore 2009: 39).
16
the body in a cruelly pedagogical, affective context; in the
second case, she transforms this patho-logy into sheer
pathology, subject to a final verdict, which can support
substantially the counter-discourse of RAF against ‘state
terrorism’. Of course, both letters expose a significant state
of affectedness, which, having been textually registered,
carries on with its own, autonomous affective force.
We can have a glimpse of this affective force in two
instances, historically connected with the situation examined
in the present essay. First, as Passmore registers:
“Groenewald [i.e. an RAF lawyer] reported back to her [i.e. to
Meinhof] on a speech he gave on 30 January 1974 in Stuttgart
to around 900 people and the success of the poem [i.e. the
letters] in relaying the reality of prison torture” (Passmore
2009: 50). A second instance -which was not a direct corollary
of the affective force of Meinhof’s letters, yet nonetheless
remains an event, for which to take place these letters played
a major role as exposing such tormenting prison experience- is
an open letter, which was handed over from the French
organization Mouvement d’Action Judiciaire to the German Embassy in
Paris on 8th April 1974, was addressed to the Minister of
Justice in the state of North Rhine-Westphalia (to whose
administrative region the Cologne-Ossendorf prison belongs),
and which demanded: direct application of normal imprisonment
conditions for Ulrike Meinhof, Gudrun Ensslin and all other
political prisoners, direct abolishment of the dead wing in
Cologne-Ossendorf prison, and abolishment of the torture of
isolation and sensory deprivation. This letter was signed,
17
among others, by prominent members of the French
intelligentsia, such as Michel Foucault, Jean-Paul Sartre,
Simone de Beauvoir, and Gilles Deleuze (see Komitees gegen
Folter an politischen Gefangenen in der BRD 1974: 190-193 -in
German, not translated in English).
What was attempted in overall in the present essay is not
by any means an objective to disregard the strong ideological,
political, and discursive aspects surrounding historically the
texts examined here; it was rather an attempt to illuminate
the equally strong, yet analytically overshadowed, affective,
and thus generative aspect of these texts, in reconciliation
with their multilayered context, and to emphasize the
necessity for a discrete reading of these two texts as not
entirely one and the same, and as not solely subordinate
excerpts of the wider discourse of RAF. The analysis performed
bears a suggestive and not exhaustive character, and is
susceptible of being re-informed under the light of new
evidence regarding the letters or their context.
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to: Ulrike Meinhof. Everybody Talks about the Weather…We Don’t: The
Writings of Ulrike Meinhof. (Edited by Karin Bauer. Preface by
Elfriede Jelinek. Translation by Luise von Flotow.) pp. 12-
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Brown, Steven D. and Ian M. Tucker. 2010. Eff the Ineffable:
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In: Melissa Gregg and Gregory J. Seigworth (eds.) The Affect
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Theory Reader. pp. 229-249. Durham: Duke University Press.
Retrieved in draft, pre-publication version, and following
its respective enumeration (pp. 1-23) from:
https://www.academia.edu/767230/Eff_the_ineffable_Affect_so
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Colvin, Sarah. 2009. Ulrike Meinhof and West German Terrorism: Language,
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Ditfurth, Jutta. 2007. Ulrike Meinhof: Die Biografie. Berlin: Ullstein
Verlag.
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http://www.socialhistoryportal.org/sites/default/files/raf/
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APPENDIX
Meinhof, Ulrike. brief einer gefangenen aus dem toten trakt. (two
letters, one from the period 16.06.1972 – 09.02.1973, one
from the period 12.12.1973 – 03.01.1974)
Original source:
Hamburger Institut für Sozialforschung (HIS), RAF Archive.
Classification: HIS, RAF, F Me, U / 009, 002.
Published in German (among other editions) in:
Brückner, Peter. 1976. Ulrike Marie Meinhof und die deutschen Verhältnisse.
Berlin: Wagenbach.
Selected Translations in English:
First letter’s translation by Louise von Flotow in: Bauer 2008
(see above), pp. 75-76.
Second letter’s translation by André Moncourt and J. Smith in:
Smith, Moncourt 2009 (see above), pp. 272-273.
1. From the period between June 16, 1972 and February 9,
1973
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