The political legacy of Petra Kelly

Abstract

Petra Kelly was one of the most remarkable members of the postwar generation, someone who determined at age thirteen that she would become either a nun in a Third World country or a new kind of politician. When she died in October, at 44, international news agencies summarized her significance as “perhaps the world's best‐known environmentalist” and “the personification of the German environmental and peace movements.” She was not only the most widely known member of the German Green Party but the person through whom a transatlantic synergy was brought full circle: German Greens had been influenced in the 1960s and 1970s by observing the ecology, peace, feminist, and social justice movements in the United States; Kelly then brought to American media and lecture halls during the 1980s charismatic testimony about the combination of those concerns in the new phenomenon called “Green politics.” She was uniquely positioned to play such a role, having spent her childhood in Bavaria and her adolescence in the United States, for her parents had divorced and her mother had married a U.S. Army colonel. While earning a degree from American University's School of International Service, Kelly worked in Robert Kennedy's campaign and Hubert Humphrey's office and was influenced by the nonviolent civil disobedience of the civil rights and antiwar movements. Returning to Europe, she worked as a policy analyst for the European Economic Community and then cofounded the West German Green Party in 1979. She was elected to the West German parliament in 1983, along with twenty‐six other Greens, and remained in office until 1990.