[Truncated abstract] In October 2006, a fictional Ulrike Meinhof was confronted on stage in the premier of Elfriede Jelinek s Ulrike Maria Stuart with her elderly self (see cover image).1 The reminiscings of the old lady with a walking stick served to prompt a reflection on the historicity of West German terrorism and the immortality of the long-dead, founding generation of the Red Army Faction (RAF). This idea of immortality points to the current popular and scholarly fascination with the RAF and Ulrike Meinhof. Meinhof's fall from journalistic prominence, high-profile disappearance into the underground and role in the formation of the terrorist group were at once a tragic footnote to the waning student movement of the late 1960s and a preamble to the bloodiest decade in the postwar history of the Federal Republic. This thesis does not aim to retell her story, but to apply an understanding of terrorism as performative to her public persona, spanning any disjuncture between journalist and terrorist. Such an approach sits within a long tradition of research into terrorism in general that is only now being brought to bear on the West German example of the 1970s. Its application to Meinhof's journalism and terrorism in this thesis shifts the analysis from her biography, which has typically held sway, to her texts and her engagement with public discourse. In contrast to the all-too-prevalent desire to find the 'real' woman behind the terrorist, the simple assumption made here is that the real and historically important Ulrike Meinhof is not the pugnacious schoolgirl, orphaned teen, long-suffering wife, or single mother, but the public figure: the high-profile journalist, condemned terrorist and self-styled revolutionary ...