Film: Green Party co-founder Petra Kelly: Civil disobedience

The autumn of 1989 in the GDR was the fulfillment of her dreams: a non-violent revolution! “You are ahead of us!” she shouted, visibly moved, to her listeners at a New Forum event. Who, apart from Petra Kelly, wanted to see it that way in the West at that time – not to mention later? Three years later she was dead. Her companion in life and politics for more than ten years, the ex-Bundeswehr general Gert Bastian, first shot her in her sleep and then himself.

By then she had long been frustrated by Germany’s post-reunification policy, which was a slap in the face for all civil rights activists. And it had also become a foreign body among the Greens. She co-founded the Greens, as a party and a non-party at the same time, organized as a grassroots democratic movement and of course to the left of the SPD. The Greens initially wanted to give a voice in society to all those who otherwise did not have one: not only marginalized people, but also plants and animals threatened by environmental destruction. Gone, after reunification it was suddenly about other things, about tangible interests.

Pacifism remained the driving force behind their political actions. How quickly the Greens switched from pacifism to “Bellizism” (Otto Schily) after her death is striking. Petra Kelly was undoubtedly the early shining light of the Green Party, a visionary with an almost religious mission that she followed unconditionally.

But it didn’t take long before the party behaved like a party soldier towards its founder. No special role for strong personalities! The Green Party co-founder Joseph Beuys, who was close to her, also found out about this and soon found himself deported. As soon as they arrived in the Bundestag, the career project began for some of the Green MPs. We know which offices Joseph Fischer and Otto Schily ultimately achieved. But Petra Kelly never wanted a “green FDP,” and she said that loudly, perhaps too loudly for some. She remained the fierce idealist she started out as.

Remembering this path of institutionalizing the green idea in the Federal Republic of the late 70s and early 80s also seems overdue because Petra Kelly was pretty much the opposite of what the Greens under Baerbock and Habeck are today.

The filmmaker Doris Metz has reconstructed Petra Kelly’s life using numerous film documents in a way that is worth seeing – and fortunately her film does not just revolve around the dramatic end and her remaining mysterious relationship with ex-general Gert Bastian, but also focuses extensively on her early years . Because that is where the origins of this unheard-of power that she was able to develop can be found.

Nevertheless, at the same time she seemed driven, because the downside of the incredible power was a great fear from which she continually tried to free herself. Maybe that’s why she spoke so quickly, as if rushed. The title of one of her books said it all: “Thinking with the Heart.” She then found an ally in the GDR citizens’ movement who was similar to her: Bärbel Bohley. She was also able to annoy tactical colleagues through her forced immediacy, but she also remained anti-ideological and authentic.

For Petra Kelly, the beginnings also explain a lot of what followed. She was raised by “rubble women,” she said, and her father left the family early. He wasn’t missed. The mother and especially the grandmother established a kind of matriarchy that shaped Petra Kelly. Her grandmother also went into politics with her and was her closest colleague in her Bundestag office, answering her letters and advising her granddaughter with all her life experience. Why are there still men? And then Gert Bastian, 24 years her senior, stumbled into her life. He belonged to the “Generals for Peace” group but was also a notorious gun nut.

Doris Metz is also looking for clues in the USA, because her mother remarried, an American officer who was stationed in Germany for a while. Petra Kelly then studied political science in Washington and worked on the campaign team of Robert F. Kennedy, whose assassination shocked her. It had become American during this time, shaped by the anti-Vietnam War movement and Martin Luther King’s fight against discrimination against the black population. His political means were “civil disobedience” and “nonviolent resistance.” That was also the unifying, suggestive force with which the West German peace movement brought hundreds of thousands onto the streets against the NATO double decision.

The biographical search for clues also shows how deep her rejection of nuclear power was. Because her American stepsister got eye cancer when she was ten. The still very young Petra Kelly arranged for radiation therapy in Germany, which followed the operation. But the child died. For Petra Kelly, it wasn’t because of the cancer, but because of the radiation that she initiated herself. The guilt complex then became an almost hysterical motivation to fight everything that had to do with nuclear technology from then on. Of course, other reasons also came into play, because Petra Kelly acted worldwide. This was a novelty at a time when German politicians generally never left their respective provinces.

A close friend of hers, who also appears in the film, was Milo Yellow Hair from the Lakota tribe in South Dakota. He has been fighting all his life against uranium mining on tribal lands – the radon that comes out of it destroys his lungs. This and much else formed the global political horizon with which Petra Kelly then returned to Germany. In the Bundestag, the established politicians from the governing parties laughed at her when she took the podium for the Greens and ostentatiously ignored her. So they missed sentences like this: “The core of non-violence is that everyone can take part.” Well, today’s Greens don’t want to hear something like that.

The film also tries to connect with today’s climate activists – hence the subtitle: “Act now!” Luisa Neubauer has her say and says that at the beginning she didn’t even know who Petra Kelly was, but has now discovered many similarities with her have. Because of the hostility, she can no longer appear at events without bodyguards. Petra Kelly and personal security? She must be confusing something. And the claim that Petra Kelly would certainly be there today when activists stuck themselves on highways also seems daring. Petra Kelly was never interested in provoking people, but rather in winning over a majority of society for more direct democracy.

Actually, she was not a politician, but a seeker of meaning who felt closer to the Dalai Lama or Heinrich Böll than to professional politicians. And Gert Bastian? Maybe he was actually a kind of bodyguard for her, at least her sentence sounds like this: “Without Gert, nothing works anymore.” What had happened to the young woman who once proudly declared that her grandmother didn’t need men to live? And now this fragile dependence.

There is no doubt that two of them have physically and psychologically worn themselves out over a shared decade of anti-nuclear power movements and arguments for and with the Greens. The film, however, turns the still unclear situation of the fatal shooting into a Gert Bastian murder case. Some things remain obscure to this day. For example, why there was still a sheet in the electric typewriter on which Bastian wrote letters on the night of his death on which the last word “must” ended with “müs”.

How could it be that the bodies were only discovered in a terraced house in Bonn 19 days after the fatal shooting on October 1, 1992? The fact is that both had become complete outsiders to German politics at the beginning of the 1990s. And Antje Vollmer later said about Kelly and Bastian that no one in the Greens had noticed their absence for so long, that says it all.

But perhaps one day even the Greens, when their power-political “bellicism” has completely worn off, will return to the ideas of their charismatic co-founder Petra Kelly. Actually, Petra Kelly’s intellectual legacy belongs to all of us and not just (probably least of all at the moment) to the Greens as a party.

»Petra Kelly – Act Now!«,
Germany 2024. Director and screenplay: Doris Metz. 105 min. Start: September 12th.

Petra Kelly never wanted a “green FDP,” and she said that loudly, perhaps too loudly for some. She remained the fierce idealist she started out as.

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