The angel of the laborious (nd-aktuell.de)

Petra Kelly was a celebrity. She was the leading figure of eco-pacifism. 30 years ago, on October 1, 1992, she was allegedly shot dead in her sleep by her partner, former General Gert Bastian, in her own house. Then he killed himself.

Kelly was radically nonviolent, energetic, and workaholic. She knew crises and how to deal with them, her sister died at the age of eleven. She learned how politics works in the EU, when it was still called the EEC. She was an outsider between Realos and Fundis. She was closer to the latter, even if she didn’t come from a small left-wing group, but had gone to school in the USA in the 1960s and then studied politics in Washington, at the height of the civil rights movement. Kelly also wanted the third way between East and West. She was in Prague in 1968 when the tanks crushed the reforms. She was often arrested, in East Berlin, for example, when she was demonstrating on Alexanderplatz, in the West in front of the NATO missile depots, in the Bundestag’s restricted area, for blockades and so-called coercion and the ignition of a cardboard rocket.

Petra Kelly was a troublemaker. “She got Robert Kennedy to advise her on scholarships,” reported the Washington Post admiringly in 1969, “she managed to sit down with him the day Hubert Humphrey lost the presidential election to Nixon to discuss her citizenship , Pope Paul VI. got her to reserve five chairs for her next to the cardinals at an important speech, and got the Russian Embassy in Washington to serve caviar to her guests. She is Petra Karin Kelly, 21 year old student at American University, from Germany.«

Ten years later, she co-founded the Greens, the first splinter party to achieve what, until 1983, almost nobody had thought possible: to become the fourth party in a party structure that had previously only envisaged three parties. In this election, Helmut Kohl ran for the first time as acting Federal Chancellor, but the »star in US newspapers is Petra Kelly«, wrote the »Neue Presse« at the time. She was the “angel of the struggling and burdened, because she radiates the charisma of political credibility,” cheered the “Stern”. And for the Guardian she was the “second most powerful woman in Europe” after Margaret Thatcher. Why? Kelly was the “best-known member” of the Green Party (New York Times), “master of symbolic gestures” (Stuttgarter Zeitung), and even the “symbol of the largest popular movement in post-war Germany” (Le Monde).

And in 1992 she was dead. Life and life’s work were destroyed. It was a perfect disassembly. Like Che Guevara, Kelly’s likeness could adorn children’s room posters or T-shirts. But it doesn’t. And yet she is not as ticked off as other ex-celebrities of the party. When Kelly described herself as an “emancipated socialist, currently fighting against the discriminatory personnel policy of the EWG”, other later Green functionaries were still on the move, for example in the “cleaning group” of the Spontis, or as a vicar in Berlin-Wedding or as lawyers on the way to the Stammheim trials.

Even if it didn’t appear on the Green Party’s website at times, it couldn’t be completely erased. Plays, films, documentaries and biographies have been produced about Kelly. There are too many unexplained facts about the crime scene and the victims. A new documentary series on Sky Crime is now also drawing on this: »Petra Kelly – The mysterious death of a peace icon«, the three episodes of which will be broadcast from this Saturday. The people responsible (author, director and film editor) are closer to Fridays for Future and #MeToo than Gorleben and Wackersdorf, the scenes of the protests in the 1980s. The Greens were seen by the bourgeois media as chaotic, softies, emancipated and confused heads when they first came to the Bundestag in 1983. There they gave speeches about sexism and the NATO exit. But they were also elected by the bourgeois middle class, and according to historians, because of two people: because of General Gert Bastian, who was deported by the Bundeswehr as too critical, and because of Petra Kelly, who was trained in symbolic politics and rhetoric in the USA. An always surprising affair, the two who were now MPs.

When they were found dead in Bonn in 1992, they were no longer stars of the Greens. Their bodies were not discovered until October 19, almost three weeks after the crime, which was taken as proof of their insignificance. It is correct: your party was kicked out of the Bundestag in the first all-German elections (only the East Greens/Bündnis 90 made it in). The forensic gave the date of death when the last fax was pulled out of the machine: October 1, 1992. The time was never transmitted. The previous and following umpteen pages of cover letters and job offers from universities, television and security agencies were never mentioned. The apartment looked like that of student activists: mountains of papers everywhere you looked. Total chaos. The situation was “clear as day from the start,” as a police chief said years later.

“Double suicide with Gert Bastian?” was the headline in “Bild” the following morning: “They were last seen 7 days ago.” Murder with suicide or murder. All possibilities are open.« This openness is now documented by Sky Crime. This is different from the three German documentaries that have already existed. There, only the spokesman for the public prosecutor’s office came to the conclusion that “one thing can be ruled out with certainty: that third parties were responsible for the death of Ms. Kelly and, er,” here he has to look at his paper, “er, Mr. Bastian so that criminal prosecution measures are out of the question.” This is a recording of the “Tagesschau” less than 24 hours after the discovery of the dead. Results of smoke, ballistics or chem-tox tests were not available.

But the suicidal motives and background remain nebulous. The death of the symbolic figure, for whom everything private was political – as clear as day – was handled as a private matter. The woman just wanted too much: to save the whole world. She understood the exploitation of the environment and former colonies as a complex of militarism and sexism, exactly like Naomi Klein later, of whom nobody said that she was “overwhelmed” when writing her bestsellers. Kelly, on the other hand, was said to have been suicidal because of an “anxiety disorder”.

The three episodes on Sky, unfortunately only on pay TV, present puzzles and inconsistencies. Nothing is finished here after 30 years, all possible variations are still open. At that time, Lew Kopelev, Bärbel Bohley and Vladimir Tschernousenko doubted the couple’s suicide. Under the headline “Who killed Petra Kelly?”, “Vanity Fair” published many questions on twelve pages at the end of 1992 (five times as long as this text), but nothing happened in Germany: “Investigations stopped” (“Oldenburger Zeitung”).

Sat., October 1st, 8:15 p.m. Sky Crime: »Petra Kelly – The mysterious death of a peace icon« (three episodes).