My Ulrike Complex

No one knows exactly how I died. They know I was in a prison. They know I was found with a prison towel tied around my neck. They know I’d been a writer and journalist and, having read Gramsci and Marcuse, when I looked at the world I could see injustice. It ought to have been eradicated long ago. But that’s the problem with injustice, it never seems to go away. It feeds on power, clinging to privilege, attaching itself to the people with money, and the people with the money are the same people they’ve always been. When I was alive, I looked at the wars being fought in Ireland, Vietnam, in Watts; they were the same old wars they’d always been. Think of all the hate there is in red China. Then take a look around to Selma, Alabama. That’s from a song, written when I was alive, about leaving earth for four days in space, but when you return it’s the same old place. It was performed on a television show in 1965, a variety show called Hullabaloo, and the lyrics were all about desolation and despair, about the world on the eve of destruction. But on television, because despair didn’t sell merchandise, backup dancers danced to the lyrics, writhing on a set meant to look like a junkyard, turning disaffection into another sexy commodity. Every day, to earn my daily bread I go to the market where lies are traded. That’s from a song by Bertolt Brecht, and maybe because I’d been an orphan, the lies I saw around me, couched in the same old stories, seemed so obvious. I didn’t want to buy them or sell them. I wanted to resist them or destroy them. And I tried. I left my husband, my children, the magazine I worked for, and as my resistance began to solidify, my beliefs became more radical. I felt more and more the necessity to uproot the story I was taught and start, not from scratch, but by shining light on what was corrupt and unacceptable in that story, maybe you can make it visible, and by making it visible, you can fight it. But it’s hard. Because what you’re fighting is your own story.

My chance to fight the story I’d been taught came in 1968 when Gudrun asked me to help her. A few years earlier, she and her boyfriend, to protest the Vietnam War, set fire to two Frankfurt department stores. People were hurt, the boyfriend was put in prison, and when she asked me to help she was offering me a chance to turn my good intentions into action, to tear off the so-called mask of consent, and I was willing to do it, to turn my back on everything I’d been told was delicious and desirable and change the person I’d spent my life becoming. Sometimes, instead of waiting for the world to change, you need to force it to change, and so I agreed to help Gudrun free her boyfriend, Andreas, from his prison. The plan was simple. Being a journalist, I could easily pose as a journalist writing a story. The prison authorities granted me permission to interview the prisoner, and on the appointed day Andreas was brought to me at the Institute for Social Questions, to the library, wearing handcuffs. The guards assigned to monitor our meeting had guns, so they assumed it was safe to remove his handcuffs. I had my notepad and some cigarettes, and while I was pretending to seriously conduct the interview, three co-conspirators entered the library, placed their briefcases on the polished library tables, and the plan was set in motion. They opened the cases, took out their guns, and as Chekhov says, if you bring a gun to act one, it needs to be shot by the end of the play, and before the end of the interview, or faux interview, shots had been fired, a librarian was hit, and Protest, I once said, is when I say that something doesn’t please me. Resistance is when I ensure that what doesn’t please me stops happening.

Suddenly, when Andreas turns and runs to the exit, I have a choice to make. As a journalist, I’ve been writing about resistance, wondering how I might react if a chance to resist presented itself, and now, although I hesitate—and I admit that my resolve momentarily wavered; I was a mother, with two children, and the choice presented to me meant losing my children—because of the gunfire and the sirens and the sense of panic, when Andreas pushes open the glass double doors and runs outside I join him. I cram myself in the getaway car, and once the car drives off the world I used to know was left behind. At a gas station I called a friend, asked her to pick my kids up at school, not knowing when I would see them again, not knowing our escape would be successful. And because it was, I was charged with attempted murder. A reward was put on my head, for the capture of my body, and the movie Bonnie and Clyde had come out a few years earlier, in 1967, and like Bonnie and Clyde, I was now part of a gang, rebels like them, but I had a cause, and because I’d broken the law, because we all did, the headlines turned us into outlaws, made us mythic, and the first thing we did was give our gang a name. The Red Army Faction. We used the German word fraktion to indicate our solidarity with other people struggling against oppression, and because we had no goods to sell or services to offer, along with targeting military installations, we also robbed banks. Gudrun was ruthless, and Andreas was a petty criminal, possibly a psychopath, so the terrorist life, a life without empathy, came easy to them. I’d always thought of myself as a pacifist, always been anxious, the kind of person who didn’t know what to do with her hands. Some people actually said I wasn’t very good at terrorism. Which is why I dedicated myself so fervently. It’s why I made sure the gang named itself after me. And it’s possible that Gudrun was jealous. I was a writer, so I became the de facto voice of the gang, the one who said, If one sets a car on fire, that is a criminal offense. If one sets hundreds of cars on fire, that is political action. Our logo was a cartoon submachine gun, with bold lettering, and when I issued statements, I made it clear that we meant business, that business meant violence, that violence was how we disrupted the daily routines of people; we made those daily routines dangerous. Chaos was an inexpensive way to fight the powers that abhor chaos, and How low would you not stoop, Brecht asks, to destroy the low? I was willing to stoop as low as I needed, willing to hurt what I hated, willing to fight criminality by becoming a criminal. I became what I’d never been before, and I didn’t want to think too hard about what it was because I didn’t want to lose my resolve. When I helped plant bombs that killed human beings, that was the cost of war. And the thrill of war is the thrill of having no constraints. And with nothing to constrain us, our gang got famous, and the fame was intoxicating, but like any drug, after a while the effects wore off. The anxiety I’d felt when I was younger, now it started getting worse. I started losing weight. The constant hiding from police, the constant disguising myself, the need to separate myself from the others; it was making me, not crazy, but yes, when the story I’d created got out of my control I panicked. Every action I made, I second-guessed myself, every thought I had I doubted. I doubted the role I’d taken for myself and when finally the police, acting on a tip, came to the apartment I was using as a safe house, when they rang the doorbell, I opened the door as if I wanted to be taken away, and I was.

The two main ways to hang yourself have names. The short drop and the long drop. The long drop happens when, with a knot secured at the side of your neck, as your body falls through space, the weight of the body, when it stops falling, causes the spinal cord to snap, which causes death. First a loss of consciousness, then death, and supposedly the experience isn’t painful. This was the method used to execute the people who, after the Civil War, conspired to kill, and did kill, Abraham Lincoln. After their guilt was determined, they were taken to a specially constructed gallows, hoods placed over their heads, nooses secured around their necks, and photographs taken at the event show the stages of the execution. Seen in order, the photos show the three men and one woman standing on the wooden platform, and then the hatch door beneath their feet opens up, and the photos that capture them mid-fall are blurry, but in the final photo their lifeless bodies hang in the so-called breeze. In the prison yard you can see the spectators, dressed for the event, the men in hats, the women in long dresses, some with parasols, and the crowd seems to turn away from what just happened, careless and unaware, like Brueghel’s famous horse, turning to one another and casually talking, smiling and amused like people at a carnival or a circus. It’s the same almost jovial unconcern you see on the faces of people photographed at American lynchings. And we can say that the participants there were depraved, but the whole culture was depraved. Newspapers announced the event, politicians officiated, and because it was a form of terrorism they didn’t bother with gallows. And the short drop is just what it sounds like. The distance a person drops, with a noose around the neck, is short. Whether standing on a chair or sitting on the back of a horse, when the chair is removed and the horse runs off, the weight of the falling body tightens the noose, blocking the trachea, constricting the jugular vein and the carotid artery, and a lot of anatomical technology is involved as the person struggles to get air, to get blood to flow where it ought to be flowing, and when that doesn’t happen, after an agonizing ten or twenty minutes, the person dies.

I left no suicide letter, but I did keep a notebook in prison. While my lawyers pleaded for leniency, I wrote about the feeling of being in solitary confinement. The feeling, one’s head explodes (the feeling, the top of the skull will simply split, burst open)—the feeling, one’s spinal column presses into one’s brain. Some of my entries are confusing because I was confused: it’s a human condition, and I was recording it, my mental and emotional disintegration. I was charged with four counts of murder, no possibility of parole, no contact with my friends, if they were my friends, and worst of all, the new and beautiful life I imagined I wanted, I’d failed to live it, and because I’d failed, and because I couldn’t return to my old life, or any life, life was impossible to live. What choice did I have? I was talking to myself, not wanting to answer myself but my answer was clear. I had no choice but to die. So I said. To myself. And no one was there to watch me in my cell, and no camera recorded what I did. So you have to believe what I’m saying. Some people believe I hanged myself. Some suspect that someone else was involved, a guard who hated me, or was paid, and I say hanged, as in the bitch was hanged, and there’s a painting of me, from a photograph, showing me from the side, dead, face up on the floor, my dark hair like a pillow, the bruise of the noose like a necklace adorning my neck. My eyes are closed, my lips parted, and when they later removed my brain and examined it, trying to learn the reason I did what I did, naturally nothing was found. Only a piece of metal, a remnant of an operation I’d had when I was younger, a girl, a metal clamp meant to cut off the blood supply to a tumor. Maybe that had affected me, distorting my common sense, short-circuiting what they now call my executive functioning. I once said, The act of liberation is the act of annihilation. I would have preferred a bullet to the brain, but I didn’t have a gun. And because I only had the window in my prison cell, I had to use the short-drop technique to hang myself. Instead of a rope I used prison towels. I’d been collecting them surreptitiously until, on a day in 1976, either cloudy or sunny, I had no idea, I tied the towels together. I didn’t need that many. I just had to loop the end of one around a bar of the metal grate that covered the small square window in my cell, the only source of light except for a bulb I couldn’t control, and it’s funny, because death is something I could control. My attempt to eradicate injustice had failed. My weakness hadn’t transformed into anything, except more weakness, which felt like pain, a physical pain that throbs so deep in my bones that I can’t even tell where it comes from, an ache that vibrates in my literal heart, and even more in my metaphorical heart, a heart that wants to burst, or implode, and yes, I still had my daughters, somewhere. I’d broken off contact. With them. And with everyone. That’s how I could concentrate so completely on getting the end of the threadbare towel attached to the window grate, securing my makeshift noose with a good solid knot. I had a little trouble standing on my one chair, tying the towel around my neck, getting the knot as tight as I wanted, cinching the worn cotton cloth against my skin, but then, with the noose secure, the moment before I kicked away the chair, when I looked out of my eyes to the room in front of me, my cell like my room in the house when I was a child, like a room in my mind, I was ready to leave.

This story will appear in Trying to Be by John Haskell, to be published on October 15 by FC2.