Review: Life & Death Petra Kelly
Genevieve Grafe Marcus Ph.D.
/* Written 8:53 AM Feb 1, 1995 by gn:socalgreens in igc:gpty.intl */
/* ---------- "Review: Life & Death Petra Kelly" ---------- */
Copyright 1995 The Washington Post
The Washington Post
January 20, 1995, Friday, Final Edition
SECTION: STYLE; PAGE D2
LENGTH: 919 words
HEADLINE: Book World; Idealism On a Grand Scale
BYLINE: Carolyn See
BODY:
THE LIFE AND DEATH OF PETRA KELLY
By Sara Parkin
Pandora. 230 pp. $ 22
There are times when you wish you were God instead of a book
reviewer, and this is one of them. If I were God, I would say: "Let
there be an opera made from this material. Not a soap opera but a grand
opera -- something between 'Manon Lescault' and 'Nixon in China.' Let
people be reminded that great personal tragedy is always with them, that
some humans are picked (by destiny, or accident, or Me) to act out the
sorrows of their entire generation: Some lives, in fact, are timeless,
ennobling and, yes, tragic. So let's set this story up in scenes, let's
show ill-starred lovers meeting, let's entwine their personal concerns
-- separately and together -- into the very largest preoccupations of
mankind. Let there be arias composed and the final scene set for hubris,
tragic flaws and a stage drenched in blood."
Petra Kelly was the shining star of "green politics." As a child
she'd lived in Germany, where her father abandoned her (and never
contacted her again, except for one letter years later to complain about
how she spoke of him in the press). Her mother then married an American
military man, and the new family trooped off to the New World, where
Petra, the classic abandoned child, excelled -- perfect grades, every
extracurricular activity in the world. And she was blond, very beautiful
and a cheerleader.
Her half sister died horribly of cancer. Her own health had been bad.
And suddenly it was the '60s. Kelly became an activist in an utterly
feminine way. If she wanted to get in touch with Hubert Humphrey or the
pope or the Dalai Lama, she wrote to him. They just seemed to write
back. And Kelly continued in college -- excelled, excelled, excelled.
She became convinced that this should be a world resting on nonviolence,
ecology, social responsibility and grass-roots democracy. She felt
strongly that the old world of left-right politics was dead. She
returned to Germany and in 1979 became a co-founder of Die Gruenen, the
Green Party. She was only 32. She was fearless, utterly able to turn her
thoughts into action. By 1983 she'd been elected to the Bundestag. She
was gorgeous and kind and altruistic and dedicated. In theory there was
nothing she couldn't do.
Back in 1980, Kelly had met Gert Bastian, an ex-NATO general who had
resigned from the army in a swirl of moral indignation about the
deployment of nuclear missiles on German soil. There's a medieval
proverb, " 'Tis merry when knaves meet"; but it's scary when saints
meet. The general was peace-loving, handsome, old enough to be her
father. They would be the perfect revolutionary couple.
Except. Except that he was already married, had a couple of kids
roughly Kelly's age and a record as a confirmed womanizer. Also, he had
a shady past from World War II, and chances were that when he'd made his
famous anti-missile speech he'd been working as an agent of the East
German government. Bastian's tragedy was that he thought he was picking
up another cute girlfriend to tide him over into old age, when he could
return to the comfortable tedium of domestic married life. Instead, he
fell hopelessly in love with this vibrant young woman, and things began
to get weird. The formerly fearless Kelly fell prey to terrifying
anxiety attacks; the general became consumed with jealousy and wanted
her with him always.
And the once-radiant Green Party went the way of so many hopeful
idealistic social movements over the millennia. "How can people be so
heartless?" as the song goes. "Especially people who care about ...
social injustice?" People are jealous and mean, and they're not too
crazy about kind and beautiful blondes who can make crowds fall in love
with them. Within just a few years colleagues from Die Gruenen weren't
speaking to Kelly. They snidely compared her to Princess Diana. They
advocated violence instead of nonviolence and schemed to make deals with
the Old Guard because -- guess what? -- they wanted power like every
other cheap politician. Let air pollution and women and children and
nuclear proliferation take care of themselves. Members of Die Gruenen
wanted to be invited to the fancy parties, where the champagne poured
into crystal goblets. They were tired of cheap white wine in cloudy
plastic glasses.
Within a few years, Kelly and Bastian were outcasts. They had trouble
publishing their work. Power went whirling away. Bastian had a bad
accident and turned into a "very sweet elderly man." Finally, he shot
Kelly to death and then turned the gun on himself.
You can say that Kelly's ideas live on. You can say that "green"
thinking has changed the way we perceive our lives and the planet. But
nothing will change the truth of the political mean-spiritedness that
brought this heroine down or the obsessive passion that broke the
military womanizer. Nothing can change their final hours that left him
so baffled by life that death for them both seemed the only solution.
The author has done a great job with this book, but the story bursts out
of the pages. It demands a stage, a full orchestra and voices that reach
past our minds to touch our souls.
Genevieve Grafe Marcus Ph.D.
/* Written 3:12 AM Feb 15, 1995 by gn:socalgreens in igc:gpty.intl */
Copyright 1995 South China Morning Post Ltd.
South China Morning Post
February 4, 1995
SECTION: REVIEW; Books; Pg. 8
LENGTH: 1387 words
HEADLINE: Behind the Green team
BYLINE: Jonathan Braude
BODY:
The Life and Death of Petra Kelly by Sara Parkin Pandora $ 272
ON October 19, 1992, Petra Kelly, co-founder of the German Green
Party, Tibetan rights campaigner, pioneering feminist and charismatic
politician, was found dead in her bed. She had been shot through the
head. Her lover, Gert Bastian was found dead in the hallway. They had
lain there undiscovered for almost three weeks.
That this was not a double suicide, as the German police immediately
concluded, was never in doubt to anyone with the remotest connection to
the life-affirming ways of Petra Kelly.
As British Green Party activist Sara Parkin argues in her biography
of her friend and political soul-mate, if Kelly had wanted to end her
life she would not have done so without first sending her friends and
the press a fax explaining her action.
"Petra did not just make political statements, she was one," she
says.
The forensic evidence showed not only that Bastian was the only one
who could have pulled the trigger, but also that Kelly had been asleep
when he did it.
Yet the police and the Public Prosecutor's Office continued to
perpetuate the myth of a double suicide until Kelly's family and friends
protested. By the time the authorities put the record straight, the
world had lost interest.
Parkin is active in the international Green movement and was a close
friend of Kelly's. From the start she makes no bones of her intention to
demonise the elderly Bastian. As far as she is concerned, the former
soldier-turned-anti -nuclear-campaigner and then Green politician is the
villain of the piece.
Kelly, by contrast is the innocent victim, whatever her faults.
Nearly everything that follows is seen through the distorting prism of
this judgement making Parkin not critical enough of her subject.
Kelly was, certainly, a big-hearted woman. Others might have put up
protective defences after the trauma of watching a younger sister die
painfully and miserably from cancer of the eye at the age of 10. Kelly
opened her love to the world.
Her emotional as well as intellectual and political devotion to the
causes she fought for was extraordinary. She was also a driven,
brilliantly organised campaigner, a charismatic perfomer and an
international networker beyond compare.
But she was vulnerable to personal criticism and suffered from what
Parkin diagnoses as clinical anxiety. Her anxiety contributed to her
dependence on Bastian, which may, in turn, have led him to destroy her.
In her personal - but hardly private - life, she was involved with a
series of married men, many of them old enough to be her father, doing
her political prospects no harm in the process, frequently running two
or even three such relationships simultaneously and apparently unmoved
by the plight of their wives and families.
Parkin does not hide this side of her character, but seems not to
consider it a flaw. Tellingly, she recounts how, at 26, Kelly was
"shocked" that 66-year -old European Commissioner Sicco Mansholt's wife
of 38 years should be upset at his plan to move in with his young
assistant.
During Kelly's final relationship with Bastian - when they died she
was 44, he was 69 - she had a passionate affair with a married Tibetan
doctor. The general's humiliation was public.
Much is made of Kelly's reliance on her beloved grandmother and how
little she looked to her parents for support. Only at the end of the
book is it mentioned, almost in passing, that her mother and stepfather
had been treated contemptuously by Bastian. They felt he had come
between them.
Meanwhile, after an initial honeymoon period in the German
parliament, Kelly fell out with the Greens.
While her unhappiness with all around her is dealt with in great
detail, the major cause of the dispute - her refusal to give up her seat
to someone else halfway through her term as she had originally promised
- is dealt with in just one page.
The party's disillusionment with her gets only a trifle more
coverage. The subsequent relationship is dealt with in more detail, but
the author is more interested in Kelly's personal relationships than her
political achievements.
But Parkin's worst sin is to present conjecture as fact. She
decides, on the basis that in his early years Bastian had been a member
of the Hitler Youth and had spent part of his war on the Russian Front,
that he knew more about Jews and atrocities than he admitted.
She goes on to imply he had connections with the feared East German
state security service, the Stasi.
Since it was impossible, she argues, that a West German general
would not be in the Stasi files or have been contacted by the East
Germans during his anti-nuclear campaign, Bastian must have some
shameful secret.
This is a non sequitur. Being mentioned in the files does not make
you a spy or informer. However, Parkin claims his fear that "the final,
intolerable shame of those hidden years would disgust Petra totally"
preyed on his mind. When the files were to be opened, Bastian knew he
had to kill her to prevent her finding out what he had done.
She may be right. But she may not. This is a useful, interestingly
written biography. But it is not a balanced account.
GRAPHIC: Activist Petra Kelly . . . her life was a political statement