The Graying of the German Greens

...for another, their roles in the partnership seemed suitably jumbled, with Kelly the jet-setting luminary, and Bastian increasingly playing the part of homemaker and secretary...

...For centuries, Germany has been a densely populated country that has valued careful stewardship of property and resources...

...The "antiparty" that emerged in the late 1970s and early 1980s as a synonym for youthful vigor has become just another political party—nearly as boring and encrusted as the old-line parties...

...Now the Greens are facing the same challenge faced by all other German political parties—that of defining the German role as a military force in a dangerous and confusing post-cold war world...

...In the shadow thrown by the Berlin Wall and NATO's security shield, self-righteous pacifism was an article of faith in West German Green political discourse...

...But, unlike the old-line parties, the Greens failed to get enough votes in the federal election of 1990 to earn representation in the Bundestag...

...However, such traditional sources of proenvironmental sentiment have recently been reshaped by more modern elements...

...The 5 percent rule for parliamentary representation generally prevented smaller political formations from fully participating in the larceny...

...Perhaps some good has come of all this...

...Of course, only political "parties" can join in this fun...

...Some glass is easily recognizable as green, or brown, or clear...

...The other side is the realization that there is no easy way back to the Garden of Eden...

...It is one thing to rail against "industrial society" from the sidelines, but it is another to seek positions in which one has no choice but to adopt and enforce policies with immediate repercussions on sensitive economic and social interests...

...Compounding the blow to Green supporters are speculations that Bastian may have feared revelations of a compromising relationship to the East German secret police (Stasi...

...In the course of that year, the main political blocs stand to be weakened to the benefit of the smaller parties, including perhaps the FDP, maybe the odd "unparty," conceivably one or more right-wing parties, and — possibly — the Greens...

...The spoils of these raids are divvied up among the parties according to a formula roughly reflecting their electoral strength...

...They engaged in fitful revolts against various "cults of personality" and required Green officials to "donate" a considerable portion of their salaries to approved charities...

...Thus, the Greens have a relatively stronger contingent of East Germans than the old-line parties, in which East Germans mostly play decorative or honorific roles...

...Not only is some of the carefully sorted garbage shunted off to be unceremoniously dumped in less prosperous countries...

...A product of post-World War II Germany's "baby-boomers," the Greens never got the knack of capturing the support of the "babybust" cohorts born after 1967...

...The influential weekly Der Spiegel has raised the question of whether the "Dual System" has not already proved to be a seven-billion-mark (4.2 billion dollar) misinvestment...

...Thus, at a time when the general public is increasingly cynical about the self-serving machinations of the political class, the Greens often appear as merely one more variation on a distasteful theme...

...Books critical of organized environmentalism, like those by Dixy Lee Ray or Ronald Bailey, attract little attention and have no parallel here...

...on direct state subsidies...

...Thus Germany seems likely to continue to play the role that it has already assumed, that of an environmental avant-gardiste...

...But, beyond this "crisis of consensus," the German Greens face other troubles...

...This is why many a contemporary environmental pronouncement may appear at first glance to have a resemblance to certain "Blut and Boden" effusions of the Nazi era...

...No other western democracy has been subjected to such stiff tuition...

...Green politicians were expected to exhibit a moralizing and ideological rigor which stood in stark contrast to the flaccid pragmatism of mainstream German politics...

...Like the other political parties in West Germany, they were caught napping by the collapse of communism and abruptness of reunification...

...In fact, the Greens had always vehemently denied obvious historical parallels of their antimodernism to classic German romanticism and even some Nazi ideology...

...What happens to the more-or-less pedantically sorted garbage...

...Since even McDonald's has developed a variety of slick environmentalism as a marketing tool, the Greens may have to stay on their toes to avoid being perceived as "McParty...

...Perhaps the greatest challenge facing the Greens today is that of finding a niche in a political climate that fully accepts the major tenets of contemporary environmentalism...

...The ads in any glossy German magazine should suffice to convince skeptics that German companies are no longer involved in manufacturing widgets...

...In any event, German politics has clearly entered a period of unpredictable change...

...The Greens have proved to be the most adept of all German parties in securing government revenues for themselves...

...What about glass...

...Throughout the 1980s the West German Greens flourished in the public disenchantment with established political culture...

...Notably, several of the right-wing groups also energetically wave the environmental banner...

...In some cases, in fact, there appears to be evidence of net environmental damage...

...Garbage sorting, it turns out, is a rarefied art, requiring thousands of spontaneous decisions by people who are at best highly motivated, but 232 • DISSENT Orson Politics often poorly informed: do packages that are hard to identify as plastic or paper belong with the plastic or the paper...

...The eastern contingent of the new Green Party—Alliance 90, a motley gaggle of East German civil rights activists and environmentalists—has Bundestag representation thanks to special rules adopted for the election of 1990...

...The shocking deaths of Kelly and Bastian in October 1992—and the ensuing public controversy—will continue to haunt the Greens in upcoming political struggles...

...But despite all of their "anti-party" noises, the temptations of the system proved too enticing...

...If the Greens manage to avoid co-optation of their raison d'etre by big business, they will have to maneuver very carefully to avoid foundering on a new sort of German "Perotism" —the politics of free-floating protest for its own sake...

...On the contrary: the German translation of Al Gore's ponderous Earth in the Balance has been on the best-seller lists for weeks...

...it is also far from clear that the entire exercise actually benefits the environment...

...But in his current role as chief public financial officer of Germany's banking center, this ascetic former rebel has done approximately what one would expect of a conventional banker: he ruthlessly cut the bloated budget...

...Germany is full of this sad—and perhaps politically endangered— species...

...Nevertheless, this and other ambitious schemes of trash management have turned the Germans into a nation of garbage sorters...

...Thus the financial chief of Frankfurt am Main, the most preposterously indebted of all large German cities, is Tom Koenigs, the once-prodigal son of a prominent banker...

...A few prominent (former) West German Greens, such as Daniel Cohn-Bendit, have called for a reassessment of dogmatic pacifism...

...But the vagaries of garbage sorting are only the tip of a trashy iceberg...

...But from the beginning, the party was also subject to tensions between such populist urges and, well, occupying its own comfortable position at the public trough...

...But whereas the other parties could reactivate dormant nationalistic or patriotic elements of their traditions as the drama of re-unification unfolded, the Greens were stuck with their own carefully cultivated rootlessness and antinationalism...

...Recent elections in Hamburg saw the emergence of a new formation calling itself the "Instead of Party" (Stattpartei...

...So much about them seemed so right from the Green point of view...

...Properly attired Green men generally turned out in sweaters, peasant blouses, or some other suitably "non-bourgeois" getup...

...Remember: Chernobyl was for West Germans not merely a distant confirmation of the emotional comforts of environmental highmindedness...

...One of the most fateful of the latter is that the political class has largely managed to emancipate itself from popular control by shameless raiding of the public purse...

...According to the newsweekly Focus, it becomes the object of "absurd scandals...

...None of the old-line parties, so bitterly criticized by the Greens for alleged financial profligacy, even remotely approaches this degree of dependence (over 70 percent of revenues...

...The proximity of West Germany to the former Soviet bloc—not to mention the firsthand experience of the East Germans—has sparked a unique sensibility to the unbelievable environmental depredations of Soviet Communism...

...Indeed, no environmental scenario seems too dire, no prediction of impending doom too extreme to elicit public skepticism...

...And how "clean" does the garbage have to be...

...Partly, the Greens have been the victims of their own success...

...Like the old-line political parties, the Greens are struggling with the difficulties of integrating personalities from the former East Germany into their party and program...

...West German democracy has many strengths—and some notorious weaknesses...

...There are many reasons for this peculiar state of public opinion, some deeply rooted in German history...

...At present, the most significant point of friction between ecological intention and economic and social reality is a program known as the "Dual System, Green Point...

...But the fairy tale came to an abrupt end with the discovery of their lifeless bodies in their Bonn house, in an apparent murder-suicide...

...To underline their own distinctiveness, the Greens adopted SPRING • 1994 • 231 Green Politics regulations requiring rotation of party members in offices...

...The guises that the parties use to extort money from the public treasury are legion...

...They were not linked by anything so conventional as marriage, for one thing...

...Many German voters, weary of broken promises from political parties, seem to have embraced "un-parties" featuring no coherent program at all...

...The Greens rightly point out that this cumbersome, expensive program is not really their baby...

...Moreover, the Greens have a cadre of functionaries who are products of this system, many of whom have never had another—realjob to which they could return...

...Lord Acton was only partially correct: power not only corrupts, it also deflates...

...More likely, the "Super Election Year of 1994" (with nineteen important elections at various levels of government) will reshape the political landscape...

...The prissy orderliness of German towns and villages (at least those spared Soviet-style SPRING • 1994 • 233 Green Politics communism) reflects centuries of careful husbandry...

...In addition, re-unification has provided West Germans with unbuffered exposure to the environmental debacle orchestrated by communism, and the costs of dealing with such a legacy...

...In present-day Germany there is no equivalent of Rush Limbaugh railing daily to a mass audience against "environmental wackos...

...From the outset it had strong elements of the type of apocalyptic antimodernism that has been an ongoing contrapuntal subtheme to Germany's turbulent process of modernization...

...In the widespread public discussion about the future of German industry, a high standard of environmental protection is generally presented as a potential advantage rather than an impediment to international competitiveness...

...In addition, a mystical veneration of German soil, of the foreboding forests, of the flowing streams has been a durable feature of German romanticism...

...Certainly the Greens no longer preside over a monopoly on environmental concerns...

...After all: promises not made cannot be broken...

...Green politicians were expected not only to talk like Greens, but to look and act like Greens as well...

...Instead, without exception, they are now dedicated to promoting blue skies and green pastures...

...The idea of "cleaning" garbage may require a revolution in human behavior that will make the aspirations of Marxism-Leninism look downright homey in retrospect...

...In 1992, state transfers to the Green party amounted to DM 47.1 million, compared to DM 13 million in membership contributions and DM 6.8 million from other grants and contributions...

...instead, it was an existential threat, leading to the establishment of a national ministry for the environment and reactor safety...

...They include reimbursement of election "costs," public political "education," political polling and research, political "foundations," and so on...

...This is the keystone of Germany's incredibly ambitious official goal of recycling—well, nearly everything...

...Kelly and Bastian were clearly the First Couple of the Green movement...

...Te Green movement in Germany was always more than just an ecological protest movement...

...The question is whether the Greens will once again claim the high ground of public opinion on these issues...

...234 • DISSENT...

...As public expectations and increasingly stringent regulations have required German industry to "clean up its act," environmental technology has come to represent not only a burden, but also a potential source of jobs and profits...

...When everybody is more or less "green," maintaining the distinctiveness of the Green party is no easy trick...

...The fact that Koenigs has engaged an adviser from Germany's largest financial institution, the Deutsche Bank, may increase his credibility in certain quarters...

...Many voters were convinced that a caste of political professionals had positioned itself in an allparty alliance at the public trough...

...After a spirited public debate, a special Green party conference in October 1993 voted to confirm the party's traditional rhetorical pacifism, but it is unlikely that the last word has been spoken in this matter...

...Thus, in the early days of Green ascendancy in the German Bundestag, it was considered a provocation on the part of Otto Schily, who has since migrated to the SPD, always to wear a tie...

...If not, their only recourse may be to repackage thesmselves as the "Grays...

...But what about glass that is merely murky...

...In areas of Germany governed by a Red-Green (SPD-Green) coalition, scandals of patronage and featherbedding involving Green functionaries are increasingly common...

...The West German Greens were the first political formation in many years to break through the 5 percent barrier...

...But in others it highlights a nagging question: do we really need the Greens to get this result...

...The full withdrawal of remaining Soviet troops in Germany scheduled for 1994 threatens to confront the Germans with major challenges of trying to clean up former military sites...

...There is little chance that anything so stable can be cobbled together in reunited Germany —even if the German economy begins to recover from its recent doldrums...

...Nobody was better at this than Petra Kelly and her unlikely beau, renegade Bundeswehr General Gert Bastian...

...The temptations of power are only one side of the equation for Greens in—or seeking — office...

...The stability of the classical pattern of two large, nearly equal political blocs (SPD and CDU/ CSU), balanced off by a much smaller Free Democratic Party (FDP), had already begun to unravel during the 1980s...

...There are already cases in which garbage collectors have refused to empty bins of green glass because they contained suspicious traces of murky glass...

...A veteran Green, Koenigs's original claim to public notice was the fact that he once donated a sizable sum to the Vietcong...

...Other similar groups are organizing around the country...

...The "slash-and-burn" mentality underlying American expansion into a vast continent has never been a viable option here...