Gudrun Ensslin - Early Life

Early Life

Ensslin, the fourth of seven children, was born in the village of Bartholomä in Baden-Württemberg, Germany. Her father, Helmut, was a pastor of the Evangelical Church in Germany. Ensslin was a well-behaved child who did well at school and enjoyed working with the Evangelical Girl Scouts, and doing parish work such as organizing Bible studies. In her family, the social injustices of the world were often discussed, and Gudrun is said to have been sensitized to social problems in West Germany and the world as a whole.

At age eighteen, Ensslin spent a year in the United States of America, where she attended high school in Warren, Pennsylvania. She graduated in the Honor Group at Warren High School in 1959. After returning home, she finished the remaining requirements for her German secondary education.

Like her partner Bernward Vesper and other members of the Red Army Faction (such as Ulrike Meinhof and Horst Mahler) Ensslin had excellent exam scores and received a scholarship from the German National Academic Foundation. Studying at the University of Tübingen, she read education, English Studies, and German studies as well as meeting Bernward Vesper in February, 1962.

Vesper's father Will had been a best-selling author before the First World War and joined the National Socialist German Workers' Party (Nazis) in 1931. The senior Vesper kept a pro-Nazi stance until his death in 1962. The son's life was largely shaped by his father's experiences. Ensslin's politics harmonized with those of the Vespers, and the couple made a failed attempted to publish a collection of the senior Vesper's works.

In Tübingen, together with two other students, Ensslin and Vesper organized a student workshop for new literature which led to a shoestring publishing business called Studio neue Literatur. The first book produced was an anthology of poems against atomic weapons, with many well-known poets from all German-speaking countries. as well as a bilingual edition of poems by Gerardo Diego. In 1963–1964, Gudrun Ensslin earned her elementary school teacher's diploma. In the summer of 1964, the couple moved to West Berlin where Gudrun would began her thesis on Hans Henny Jahnn at the Free University.

In 1965, Gudrun's younger sister Johanna married Günther Maschke, then a revolutionary Marxist poet and member of the Situationist International group Subversiven Aktion, which included Rudi Dutschke as a member. Maschke is now a leading conservative antidemocratic intellectual and editor of Carl Schmitt. Later that year, Gudrun and Bernward were engaged to be married. Both were active on the democratic left-wing, they had well-paid jobs working for the Social Democratic Party of Germany. The couple demonstrated together against new security laws, the Vietnam War, an Allied Powers arms show, and for the right to demonstrate. Vesper neglected his studies, read voraciously, and in 1966 published, with a group of friends, a serious and important series of pamphlets and paperbacks, the Voltaire Flugschriften. In May 1967, Ensslin gave birth to their son Felix Robert Ensslin.

In July or August 1967 Gudrun met Andreas Baader and they soon began a love affair. Baader had come to Berlin in 1963, to escape ongoing troubles with the Munich justice system and also to avoid conscription. The young criminal who drifted in and out of youth detention centers and prison soon became the man of Ensslin's life. In February 1968, Ensslin broke up with Vesper by phone, informing him that the relationship was already finished before Felix was born. An artifact from this time is an experimental film Ensslin participated in entitled Das Abonnement (The Subscription).