German Politics and Society

Saskia Richter, the author of the first scholarly biography of the Green politician Petra Kelly, died in August 2015, age 37, after a four-year battle with cancer.

The September 2013 Bundestag election, which reelected Angela Merkel

as chancellor, was a clear defeat for the Green Party. Alliance 90/The

Greens (henceforth the Greens) fared far better than the Free Democratic

Party (FDP), which failed even to score the five percent of the vote required

for representation in parliament, but still fell from 10.7 percent to 8.4 percent,

losing five of their sixty-eight seats in parliament. Since in March of

that same year, surveys had shown their support at 17 percent, this disappointing

result forced Jürgen Trittin, the leader of the parliamentary delegation

to step down.1 In many ways, this perceived electoral debacle marked

the end of an era. The former Federal Minister of the Envi ron ment, who

had originally joined the party in 1980, told reporters that “a new generation” would have to step forward and lead the party into the 2017

campaign. This statement suggested not only that the Greens’ rebellious

founding impulse was spent, but also that they had become part of the

establishment in the Federal Republic of Germany (FRG), now requiring a

reinvigoration of their own. Since the Greens were once expected to be little

more than a short-lived byproduct of the social conflicts of the 1970s, a

closer look at the party’s founding moment at the beginning of the 1980s

might shed new light on its current predicament.

This article narrates the development of the antinuclear movement from the bottom up, showing how local protests initiated changes in Germans' ideas about democracy and public participation, precipitating the Green Party's emergence. The narrative begins with the pre-history of the 1975 occupation of the Wyhl reactor site in Southern Baden. It shows that vintners' concerns about the future of their livelihoods underpinned protests at Wyhl, but argues that the anti-reactor coalition grew in breadth after government officials' perceived misconduct caused local people to connect their agricultural concerns with democracy matters. It then explains how local protests like the Wyhl occupation influenced the formation of the German Green Party in the late 1970s, showing how the sorts of convergences that occurred amidst “single issue” protests like the anti-Wyhl struggle enabled a wide variety of activists to come together in the new party. Thus, the article argues that particular, local concerns initiated a rethinking of participation in electoral politics. Far from fracturing society, these local concerns promoted diverse new coalitions and shaped an inclusive approach to electoral politics.

Today's German Green Party looks much like its parliamentary counterparts. However, the long-term political experience of activists who founded the party informed flexible and open political thinking and structure, and raised questions about the nature of deep social change that are worth returning to. The Green Party in its current form is not the only possible relevant and practical manifestation of this thinking. This piece briefly traces an evolution of political thought before the emergence of the Green Party through the case of one former activist.

The West German Green Party's 1983 entrance into the Bundestag marked a major break, both in the history of this young political force and the parliamentary system of the Bonn Republic. The Greens had been founded in opposition to the guiding principles of the West German postwar consensus and conceived of themselves as an “anti-parliamentary party.” Although they had gained parliamentary experience in some regional chambers, their entrance onto the national parliamentary stage juxtaposed old ideals and new challenges—for the Greens themselves as well as for German political culture. Taking this singular historic moment as a starting point, this article summarizes the formation of the Greens in the context of the changing political and ideological landscape of the 1970s. It also contrasts the party's formation with the transformations in terms of program and personnel that it undertook during the 1980s. The focus lies less on the specific activities of the green parliamentary group than on the broader developments in green politics and thinking.

This article uses the biography of the activist and Green Party co-founder Petra Kelly in order to rethink the Greens' founding process and to articulate a new conception of charismatic political leadership. It shows how Kelly used her activism in the new social movements as the basis for her leadership role in the Greens, and how her ongoing work in the peace movement provided her a means of maintaining power within the nascent party during the early 1980s. By examining Kelly's contributions to the Greens' approach to politics, the article shows that she was more than just a figurehead for the new party. Most importantly, the article shows that throughout her career as an activist and politician, Kelly used her biography to establish credibility and to support her unique style of charismatic leadership. The German public's response to Kelly reveals the influence of this charismatic leadership and shows how her movement-driven and biographically informed approach, which brought personal experiences and emotions into politics, was part of a larger transformation of the political in West Germany during the 1970s and 1980s.

This article analyzes the reaction of the West German press to the powerful peace movement that gripped the Federal Republic of Germany between 1979 and 1984. Following NATO's double track decision and Russia's invasion of Afghanistan, thousands of pacifist and peace activists participated in rallies, meetings, and sit-ins to protest above all the politics of NATO. Unnerved by the amassing of nuclear, protesters expressed their fears and anxieties highly visible on placards and in pamphlets. This public display of “fear of atom” led to an intensive media debate about the validity and possible dangers of the protesters' emotionality. The press's coverage of the peace movement and the question of how protesters expressed their fears turned into a discussion over legitimate political participation.

The Greens' impact on German politics and public life has been enormous and massively disproportional to the size of their electoral support and political presence in the country's legislative and executive bodies on the federal, state, and local levels. After substantiating the Greens' proliferating presence on all levels of German politics with numbers; the article focuses on demonstrating how the Greens' key values of ecology, peace and pacifism, feminism and women's rights, and grass roots democracy—the signifiers of their very identity—have come to shape the existence of all other German parties bar none. If imitation is one of the most defining characteristics of success, the Greens can be immensely proud of their tally over the past thirty plus years.