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The man who married Ulrike Meinhof: Klaus Rainer Röhl
Photo:
Oliver Berg / picture-alliance / dpa
For many who deal with the beginnings of the »Red Army Fraction« and the later German Autumn, Klaus Rainer Röhl was a minor figure.
Significant not qua person, but rather because of his function as editor of the left-wing magazine »Beton« and the fact that he brought Ulrike Meinhof into the editorial team at the beginning of the sixties.
The two married in 1961, and in later memories of this time, Röhl became "Mr. Meinhof".
The poet Peter Rühmkorf, who was friends with him for a while, also considered him an "inevitable puke".
Rühmkorf and Röhl had known each other since they graduated from high school and went to Hamburg together.
There they tried their hand at political cabaret while studying in the early 1950s.
Politically, Röhl, who had been drafted into military service as a schoolboy two weeks before the end of the war, represented pacifist positions that brought him into contact with the protest movement »Fight against Atomic Death«.
Their mouthpiece was initially the magazine "Studentenkurier" published by Röhl.
While working on it, he came into contact with members of the West German KPD and the SED, which eventually took over the financing of the magazine.
The SED also "specifically" supported its successor until it broke up in 1964 because of an attempt to exert increasing influence.
Under Röhl's leadership, the »concrete« became the mouthpiece of the extra-parliamentary organization and reached its highest circulation in 1967 with 167,000 copies sold.
Sexual themes and revealing pictures that Röhl had printed in the course of sexual liberation are also said to have contributed to the success.
In 1968 Röhl and Ulrike Meinhof got divorced.
Meinhof moved to Berlin with the twins who had emerged from the marriage and joined the RAF.
Röhl did not participate in the radicalization and turned against the RAF as a journalist.
After disputes about the political orientation, he was dismissed in 1973 from "concrete".
Various attempts with other, similarly stored magazines failed.
From the mid-1970s onwards, Klaus Rainer Röhl slowly changed his political stance, moving from the left to the national liberal camp.
In 1995 he joined the FDP.
He took part in publications which, for example, questioned the assessment of the end of the Second World War as "liberation".
In 2010, his first daughter, Anja Röhl, accused him of sexually molesting her when she was a child.
In an open letter, Röhl rejected the allegations, as did those of his daughter Bettina, who also accused him of assaults.
Klaus Peter Röhl lived with his partner Danae Coulma in Cologne until the end, because of whom he left Ulrike Meinhof.
He died on November 30th, the day before his 93rd birthday.
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