Petra Kelly

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Often, the fields that are most badly scorched become the most fertile. The barren landscape of post-World War II Germany nourished radical new ideas that would take root not just there but across the Continent. One of the most significant of these was the notion that the political mainstream must concern itself with the environment.

Its passionate advocate was Petra Kelly, a native of Bavaria whose teenage and student years spent in the U.S. left her influenced by its civil-rights movement. She was always controversial, feminine and charismatic and a baby boomer at a time when the German political scene was largely dominated by politically unimaginative older men.

In 1979, then aged 31, she co-founded the Greens, a political organization that gathered movements opposed to pollution, discrimination and militarism into one unified party. Within four years, this fringe body won 27 seats in the 498-seat national parliament, and it went on to expand its influence, eventually entering the coalition that governed Germany from 1998 to 2005. Kelly herself remained an outspoken force in the Bundestag until 1990.

Despite her achievements, Kelly's life was as freighted with criticism and tragedy as it was with triumph. Her strident antinuke efforts, coming at the height of the cold war, were rarely appreciated by nato powers, and her tendency to blame vague bugbears like male aggression for the very existence of warfare made it easy for critics to ridicule her as a naive lightweight.

In 1992, already marginalized in the party, Kelly, then aged just 44, was shot by her partner, a former German army general and Green politician, who then killed himself. Her death robbed the European green movement of one of its driving forces. But the fruits of her efforts continue to flourish.