During the first part of the 21st century, Röhl has used her journalistic experience to concentrate more intensively on a relatively small number of themes: sometimes she has stirred controversy, drawing attention to uncomfortable aspects of recent history.
Joschka Fischer In January 2001, Röhl triggered discussion about the suitability for office of the
Foreign Minister and
Vice-Chancellor Joschka Fischer, when she published some photographs which recalled
Fischer's younger years. The pictures appeared to show Fischer with
Hans-Joachim Klein and other political activists savagely assaulting Rainer Marx, a policeman, during a street fight on 7 April 1973. Röhl published them on her website and in
Stern. The pictures came from a series produced by a photographer called Lutz Kleinhans in 1973 for the
Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, but no one had identified Fischer and Klein in them till 2000 when Röhl undertook the necessary research and spotted the men. Shortly afterwards, Röhl unearthed a film sequence of the same assault in television archives of the
Tagesschau, showing Fischer and the point at which the policeman was knocked to the ground. After Fischer had given public confirmation that during the 1970s he had indeed engaged in "violent actions" against policemen, Röhl addressed an open letter to
President Rau giving notice of a criminal action against Fischer for attempted murder. This was based on witness statements, including three that she had on tape, which she had obtained while researching an incident in 1976 involving a life-threatening attack with a
Molotov cocktail on a Frankfurt policeman called Jürgen Weber. Röhl wrote: "It's about the person Josef Martin Fischer. It's about his past. And its about the current… Fischer network. It's about the media cartel that suppresses truth. It's about a national emergency". Röhl's approach provoked a backlash. The photographer from whom she had received the pictures obtained (belatedly) a court injunction against her because she had published his pictures without his agreement. Her use of film footage borrowed from the
television company and the high prices she had herself demanded for the recordings attracted media criticism. During 2001 and 2002, she twice made substantial contributions to the political television magazine programme
Panorama which covered Fischer's violent past and her research work on it. Criticism of Röhl's approach increasingly became the story in both the domestic and international press. Her biography and the biographies of her well known parents were revisited in a search for her own motivation. Joschka Fischer is a writer too. The publishers' stated reasoning was that Röhl's sustained campaign, using all possible means both serious and questionable, against their longstanding author Joschka Fischer, had prompted the termination of their publishing contract with Röhl. Röhl became convinced that she had been made the target of a media hate campaign designed to launder Joschka Fischer's reputation by undermining her own credibility.
Mother:daughter The death of Ulrike Meinhof in 1976 in a prison cell raised questions in Germany which never entirely went away, and in late 2002, Röhl disclosed that her mother's brain had never been buried, but had instead been extracted during autopsy, examined, and stored in a jar of
formaldehyde preservative by doctors keen, it was explained, to explore a theory that Meinhof's mind had been damaged as a side-effect of an operation to remove a benign brain tumour in 1962. After
reunification, Professor Jürgen Pfeiffer, the man at the centre of the work, had relocated to
Magdeburg, and the brain had been transferred from the Tübingen Institute, where it had hitherto been stored, to Magdeburg in 1997. It had more recently been re-examined at a clinic in Magdeburg: Röhl had found out about the matter in October 2002. Almost immediately an ethics commission now prohibited the professors from undertaking further research on Meinhof's brain or from publishing any findings from research already undertaken. The prosecutors' office in
Stuttgart then demanded that the professors return the brain, had it cremated and handed over the residuum to relatives of the deceased. On 22 December 2002, the remains of Ulrike Meinhof's brain were buried with her other mortal remains at the Dreifaltigkeitskirchhof III (cemetery) (Feld 3A-12-19) at
Berlin-Mariendorf. Later, Röhl wrote a piece about the hairdresser
Udo Walz which appeared in the
Rheinische Post,
Die Welt and
Berliner Morgenpost. Walz was the man who had dyed Ulrike Meinhof's hair blonde in 1970 when Meinhoff was "living underground". The article was accompanied by hitherto unpublished photo-portrait of Meinhoff as a blonde. Photographs of Meinhoff still sold newspapers. However, the
Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung took the opportunity to criticise the continuing reporting of the "68 Generation" as a revenue raising device for (rival) newspapers. The
FAZ's criticism included a description of Röhl as a "terrorist's daughter". Röhl launched and won a case in the Munich District Court against this characterisation. However, the judgement was overturned by the
Federal High Court in
Karlsruhe which applied a semantically careful judgement to the effect that the defamation alleged was casual rather than central to the article in which it was published by the
FAZ. Röhl herself had written extensively about Ulrike Meinhof and let it be known that she was Meinhof's daughter, so that for anyone interested the information published by the Frankfurt newspaper would not be new information. Costs of the appeal were to be borne by Röhl.
RAF exhibition and "Ulrike Maria Stuart" During the two-year run-up to an exhibition on the
RAF held in 2005 in Berlin under the title "Zur Vorstellung des Terrors: Die RAF-Ausstellung", Röhl participated actively in the media discussions, notably with eye catching articles in
Die Welt,
Der Tagesspiegel, the
Rheinische Post and
Die Zeit. She also contributed to various television discussions and interviews on the display which was organised by
Klaus Biesenbach, Ellen Blumenstein and Felix Ensslin. The exhibition was intended to explore ways in which the visual arts had dealt with the RAF.
Feminism In April 2005, Röhl contributed a critical three-part feature to
Cicero under the eye-catching titles "Die Sex-Mythen des Feminismus", "Die Gender Mainstreaming-Strategie", and "Der Sündenfall der Alice Schwarzer?". She revealed herself to be a resolute critic of what she called "gender mainstreaming" and of 1970s-style
radical feminism of the kind advocated by
Alice Schwarzer in her book "Der kleine Unterschied und seine großen Folgen" (
"The small difference and its big consequences"). In a headline-grabbing assertion, she states: "This idea of the penis as a weapon of domination is a core part of Schwarzer's doctrine. This kind of feminism can be boiled down as follows: women are people, men must still be made into people". On the occasion of the awarding of the
Theodor W. Adorno Award to the philosopher, literary scholar and
queer theoretician Judith Butler, Röhl warmed to her work in her "Bettina Röhl direkt" column in
Wirtschaftswoche. However, she has remained critical of the subject of "
gender ideology", writing that in Norway the government provides subsidies of nearly €60 million annually for gender research and each project, one by one, has been written off as charlatanry. In a subsequent contribution, she described feminist currents as
"a crime against humanity" and "gender mainstreaming" as "spiritual arson" ("geistige Brandstiftung").
New Years Eve sexual assaults Following the widely publicised
sexual assaults attributed to immigrants in the area between
Cologne Cathedral and the city's
main railway station (and elsewhere) during New Year's Eve 2015/2016, Röhl accused the television journalist
Anja Reschke of downplaying the various assaults. ==Notes==