Ulrike Meinhof: Stupid, Intellectual Snob

Ulrike Meinhof's final years in prison before her death changed her. She had devoted her life to fighting in the RAF, and having that chance to fight ripped away and replaced by a life imprisoned deeply affected her. In 1974 she spent eight months in solitary confinement, which she described with a growing sense of torturous insanity, but her final months in 1976 before her likely suicide (although this is disputed) were what I see as the completion of the total breaking of her spirit, when tensions between the imprisoned RAF members resulted in a bitter division between them.

Gudrun Ensslin wrote to Meinhof, 'You are the knife in the back of the RAF ... you're appallingly disoriented pigs ... You're the one destroying us - something the law could never do.' The utter rejection Meinhof withstood from the RAF, the last aspect of her identity she retained, was enough to drive her into a deeply unstable state, which is reflected in her malicious self-criticism; she dismissed herself as a 'hypocritical pig of the ruling class' saying 'I was an elitist swine - I pretended to know everything better ... a stupid, intellectual snob.

I used her self-criticism in this poster, an intentionally pessimistic, scathing approach to her legacy. the photograph is a famous image of her arrest. It shows her at a low point, the end to her militant crusades, with her expression and body language conveying distraught, vulnerability, and submission. The captions attack her at this weak point, highlighting that this is all her life culminated in, and positioned using black bars over her mouth and eyes, reflecting her eventual self-censorship and the restrictions she had to face in prison. It uses her hatred of herself and her cynical, disillusioned view of her past and dismisses her entire life through that lens.