Can Green Grow?

...With that, the Greens made it plain—if any doubt still existed—that they represent something new: a new program, new constituencies, and new ways of getting things done...

...One thing the American Left could learn from the Greens is the use of deft humor in politics...

...Such a left-wing coalition, or "coalition on the other side of the Right," as the Greens prefer to say, would have confronted both groups with excruciating and possibly fatal choices...

...It may be virtually impossible, therefore, for third parties to establish themselves in a system like ours, which does not provide for proportional representation...

...If he is disappointed, he knows he will have the Greens to reckon with...

...Who says that...

...In a way, the Greens are lucky that the conservatives won a decisive mandate in the election, foreclosing the possibility of an alliance between the Greens and the Social Democrats...

...As if to confirm such fears, the party's oldest delegate to Parliament had to resign just after the election when it was revealed that he had been a member of the paramilitary Stahlhelm, an SS officer, and an official in Hitler's interior ministry...

...The Greens themselves were not immune to serious blunders...

...Unlike many public-interest lobbyists, the Greens do not base their opposition to economic growth on the notion that it carries unacceptable social costs, such as pollution...

...Trampert, who used to be a member of a small independent communist party, is the national chairman of the Greens...

...The alternative for the socialists would have been to tolerate a'minority Christian Democratic government, but that would have compelled them to accept some responsibility for unpopular conservative measures...

...During the war, the city was leveled by American and British bombs, and after the war the Allied powers decided on Nuremberg as the place to conduct the trials of major Nazi war criminals—proceedings that many Germans regard to this day as one-sided and hypocritical...

...All third-party delegates have been chosen on the second vote from the party lists...

...Today, critics charge that the Greens, too, are immature youth playing fanciful games before coming to terms with adult realities...

...We don't understand democracy the same way as Strauss, who hangs around with Italian neofascists and goes to Indonesia to present a pistol to the president...

...Even those who voted for the Greens usually can cite only a few: Gert Bastian, perhaps, the apostate general who acts as security and arms-control expert for the party...

...If the Greens have an answer, they have not yet articulated it effectively...

...At the same time, the statement indicated that more should be done to develop alternative energy, low-cost housing, waste recycling systems, and chemical-free food...

...They prefer to think of defending national security by means of such tactics as civil disobedience, Gandhian passive resistance, or—in the most extreme case—some sort of grassroots guerrilla warfare...

...Manfred Rommel, the Christian Democratic mayor of Stuttgart (and son of the famous World War II general who committed suicide on Nazi orders) accused young people of learning "the wrong lessons" from World War II...

...But to a distressing extent, Petra Kelly dominates the party...

...This year, the Greens made it their first objective to create a "political spring"—a new beginning in Germany's wintry politics...

...A French admiral who condemned all nuclear policies except his own country's was roughed up a bit...

...Not surprisingly, Commoner said he thought the Left should unite behind a sustained effort to build a third party like the Citizens' Party...

...In due course, they are likely to use those powers in an attempt to pry loose classified information about nuclear weapons stationed in Germany and about nuclear war plans of the N A T O powers...

...How have the Greens come so far in so few years...

...They would prefer to see individuals and collectives work fewer hours, share the drudgery of life more equitably, devote more time to creative activities, and consume less of the Third World's resources...

...The Soviet participants were given a hard time about their government's treatment of dissidents, as well as about the Kremlin's military policies...

...No third party, including the Greens, has ever elected a candidate directly from a district...

...And the Greens' immediate economic objective—a shortening of the work week—has been endorsed by the German trade unions...

...Language of this sort reflects the growing influence in the party of such figures as Thomas Ebermann and Rainer Trampert, the Greens' left-wing leaders in Hamburg, who have been urging the party to make greater efforts to attract working-class support...

...But the Greens are bold...

...But it turned out to the Greens' advantage—as have other highrisk ventures they have undertaken...

...When the Greens promise to strive for a new harmony with natural cycles—by means of a systematic deindustrialization of society, if necessary—some cynics are reminded of Nazi rhetoric about the sanctity of forests and streams, and of how that rhetoric provided a smokescreen for the reconstruction of the German military-industrial complex...

...When the Greens talk about the environment as "Lebensraum," when they speak of themselves as a movement and not a party, when they claim they are outside the normal political spectrum and refuse to identify themselves as Right or Left, they really do provide an uncomfortable reminder of Nazi rhetoric...

...One rather offensive passage in their indictment of the nuclear weapons states accused the United States and Britain of inventing mass bombing of civilian targets, as though Guernica and Shantung had never occurred...

...And we don't understand democracy the way the people involved in the Flick Affair do"—a reference to a businessgovernment payoff scandal in which members of all the major parties are thought to be implicated...

...William Sweet writes regularly about arms control and the international peace movement...

...They look at their parents' mistake in accepting Hitler's authority," Rommel wrote in The New York Times, "and they conclude that they should not accept any authority at all...

...Sure," he replied...

...If the party had an inexhaustible supply of able and experienced leaders, that sort of rule might be manageable...

...Sonn, like other sympathetic critics, cautions that the Greens may render a disservice to their own interests if they act too aggressively as leaders of the German peace movement...

...During the campaign, for example, when socialist politicians claimed that the Greens were not mature enough to enter Parliament, Green speakers appeared behind a banner proclaiming QUIET PLEASE...

...Next to the poster-images of the Scholl siblings were texts explaining why they chose to resist even though they knew that sooner or later they were sure to be caught and executed...

...There's never been an event like this...

...In principle, it ought to be easier in the United States for alternative candidates to find support and for a coalition of such candidates to form a nationwide political entity...

...During a lull in the Nuremberg tribunal against nuclear weapons, I came upon Philip Berrigan out in the corridor and asked him whether a Green victory would be a source of inspiration to people working for peace and disarmament in the United States...

...Many other peace activists in West Germany and abroad argue that nuclear weapons do not really make us militarily stronger...

...Even Franz-Josef Strauss has denounced as unrealistic President Reagan's "zero option" proposal, which would require the Soviets to dismantle missiles they have had in place for twenty years...

...Barry Commoner, another participant in the Nuremberg tribunal, agreed that the Greens have something to tell us about political organizing...

...Like other anarchist and quasi-anarchist organizations that shun hierarchical structure, the Greens apparently have difficulty delegating authority and finding volunteers to do the drudge-work...

...This was plain talk for a German audience, and it received remarkably strong applause...

...Franz-Josef Strauss, the ultraconservative Bavarian party boss, said the Greens were really communists...

...This fight united antinuclear activists from all over Europe, local vintners who were concerned primarily about thermal pollution from the proposed plant's cooling towers, and sundry left-wing student groups...

...A panel of "jurists" from the United States, Europe, and the Soviet Union also sat through the speeches, and their role was to probe the speakers, correcting the wrong-headed and wrong-hearted...

...What is their role in the international peace movement...

...Whether they will burn out first or be rotated out is often a close call...

...They have put themselves out front on issues that matter most to them, and have devoted all of their energies to staying out front on those issues...

...The other parties are already trying to limit the extent to which Greens should be allowed access to such information...

...Unsympathetic observers, of whom there are many, are more acerbic in their criticism...

...Dietrich Linke, a spokesman for the Christian Democrats' parliamentary caucus, said in an interview, "We used to refer to socially advantaged youth who toy for a time with radical ideas as Jeunesse Rouge, but maybe we should talk now of Jeunesse Vert.'9 Linke, like socialist critics of the Greens, asks how they can reconcile reduced production with the maintenance of social welfare benefits...

...The next paragraph suggested that "the economic crisis corresponds to an ever more devastating environmental crisis...

...The Greens have learned a good deal from us about smallscale action, and maybe we can learn something from them about large-scale political action...

...Can Green Grow A new kind of politics takes root in German soil...

...Surprisingly, though, Commoner readily conceded that the success of the Greens and other third parties in Germany does not readily translate into success elsewhere...

...The Green leaders take their ideology literally and that has caused the party severe difficulties in establishing stable leadership...

...American peace activist Daniel Ellsberg set them straight on that, pointing to an essential difference between the World War II bombing of German cities, however reprehensible, and the extermination of the Jews in Nazi death camps: The Germans could have stopped the bombing any time by surrendering, Ellsberg noted, while the Jews could not have saved themselves by surrendering...

...They vote for the Greens largely because they want their voices to be more than ordinarily influential in the nation's affairs, but to achieve that end they need seasoned and effective leaders...

...Trampert and Ebermann, the Hamburg leaders, and Marion Maren-Griesebach, who represented the Greens in a pre-election television debate with leaders of the other parties...

...When the Greens decided last year to go national and seek representation in parliament, the move touched off a bitter controversy within the party and outside it...

...No, the Greens are simply against growth...

...That is a disappointment for voters who hoped the Greens would emerge from the election holding the balance of power, and the movement will have to work hard in the coming years to retain their support...

...This presents a serious dilemma for a movement that finds its support primarily among highly educated young people: students, teachers, and professionals...

...Younger socialists, who found the Greens attractive as a grass-roots movement, tended to agree with conservatives that the Greens were not mature and experienced enough to act responsibly and effectively in national affairs...

...The statement opposed the dismantling of social services "just when more and more people need them," but it suggested that health-care expenditures could be cut if "the unhealthy working and living conditions of a growth-oriented industrial society were corrected...

...Others—Protestants and Catholics, peace researchers, and independent activists—have been working in the cause for a long time, and they expect their own voices to be heard...

...In an economic policy statement adopted last November, the Greens said it is "illusory, misleading, and destructive to the quality of social relations to try to cure mass unemployment by stimulating economic growth...

...the average educated German can name no other Green leader...

...In a nuclear war, too, he continued, there would be no salvation in surrender...

...They could not have picked a more highly charged time and place to dramatize their position...

...But having established themselves, the Greens will also have to engage in serious soul-searching on some of the questions raised by their critics...

...Each voter casts two votes, one for a district delegate and one for a party...

...asked Lukas Beckmann, staff director for the Greens, when he was told of charges that the movement is a threat to democracy...

...It is typical of the Greens that barely three weeks before an election that would make or break them as a national political party, they conducted an "international tribunal against firststrike nuclear weapons and weapons of mass destruction...

...Even though the Social Democratic candidate for Chancellor, Hans-Jochen Vogel, said he would be willing to form a minority government with the tacit support of the Greens, it does not seem likely that the Social Democrats could have entered into a long-term working arrangement without thoroughly alienating a large number of their traditional supporters...

...This, too, may be a lesson: The Greens seem to have succeeded by promoting an uncompromising political line by every means available to them...

...What lessons—if any—can the American Left draw from their experiences...

...Germany after World War I , the psychologist Erik Erikson has described how the custom of taking a year off to commune with nature provided students with a last chance to rebel against stultifying social and economic arrangements before settling down to dreary middle-class life...

...Plans to build another nuclear plant at Brokdorf played a similar part in uniting Hamburg's Greens, while in Hesse the catalytic event was a controversy over a proposed extension of the Frankfurt airport...

...Josef Joffe, a top writer for Die Zeit, a prestigious weekly devoted to politics and culture, pursued the same line in a recent issue of The New Republic...

...Under the constitution of the Federal Republic, half the Parliament is made up of delegates representing districts, while the other half consists of delegates drawn from party lists by proportional representation...

...Their critics have accused them of being confused, emotional, and romantic...

...Germans tend to be sentimental about nature, and that trait can easily be exploited by manipulative politicians...

...Most analysts agree that he won because of general disenchantment with socialist economic policies, which were blamed for a tenfold increase in unemployment that took place during their thirteen-year reign, and not because voters endorsed his position on the missiles...

...On the other hand, the U . S . political system is much more flexible than Germany's, and the major parties have considerably less say in selecting individual candidates...

...The problem is compounded by the fact that the Greens' parliamentary group— with just over 5 per cent of the vote—will not be able to achieve any of its legislative goals in the foreseeable future...

...UH Sonn, a pastor who works with Germany's Fellowship of Reconciliation, explained that while members of his organization regard themselves as spiritual successors to the "Bekennende Kirche" (the anti-Nazi Protestant church), they like to strike a "meek and modest tone" about such things, since they have not been called upon to make the sacrifices that were required of Hitler's active opponents...

...WE ARE JUST NOW IN THE PROCESS OF MATURING SO THAT THE SOCIALISTS WILL LIKE US BETTER...

...But at the entrance to the conference halls one encountered not Siegfried or Brunhilde, the mythic heroes, but rather Hans and Sophie Scholl, the Munich students who were executed by the Nazis for printing and distributing anti-Nazi literature...

...Though she looked as though she had not slept for weeks, she kept a tight rein on the proceedings...

...For that reason, nuclear war is analogous to the Holocaust but not to the bombing of German cities...

...His friend Petra Kelly opened the proceedings at Nuremberg wearing knee boots, pleated slacks, and an embroidered top, all in lavender, the color of the European feminist movement (and the Protestant peace movement...

...The American Left must stop dissipating its energies in such onetime efforts as the civil rights movement, the antiwar movement, the women's movement, Commoner said, and should reject the Washington-based obsession with public-interest lobbying...

...By William Sweet As soon as the leaders of the West German Greens learned they had won twenty-seven seats in the March 6 parliamentary election, they announced that their delegates would engage in acts of civil disobedience, if necessary, to prevent the deployment of new U . S . missiles on German soil at the end of this year...

...The site they chose was Nuremberg, where, in 1936, the Nazis issued their first sweeping decrees against the Jews...

...They succeeded...

...Green members feared that their leaders, once subject to the temptations of power, would begin to compromise on the party's absolute and unalterable opposition to nuclear energy and nuclear weapons...

...Given the complex emotions Nuremberg arouses in most Germans, the Greens' tribunal might well have been—as many observers predicted—an exercise in selfdestruction...

...On the critical issue of deploying new U . S . missiles in Germany, Chancellor Helmut Kohl did not receive a decisive mandate from the electorate...

...Friendly observers of the Greens suggest that however noble their intentions, they may be overreaching when they lay claim to such martyrs...

...Most of the Greens' state organizations began as coalitions of local special-interest groups that united in a common cause...

...They speak, in fact, with an almost embarrassing clarity on the key issues that interest them, and they do not fudge their positions even when frankness may expose them to misunderstanding, scorn, or ridicule...

...In an essay on his own youth ir...

...One of their mottos is, "Green grows," and perhaps it will...

...The overall representation in parliament is determined by the proportions on the all-important second vote...

...During the electoral campaign, when there were jitters about the stability of West German democracy—and espedaily about the possibility that the Greens might come out holding the balance of power in a closely divided parliament— right-wing politicians made every effort to portray them as dangerous extremists...

...At its worst, the Greens' reckless talk can leave them open to the suspicion that they are deliberately courting old nationalist or even neofascist elements...

...The seventyfive- year-old delegate, Werner Vogel, would have been the senior member of Parliament, and he was to have delivered the opening speech in the first session...

...The party's current program states that "short-term profit motives" link the two crises, and denounces an order in which "the economically powerful determine the work process, the products of work, and living conditions for the majority...

...As a result, the leaders tend to push themselves to the edge of exhaustion and collapse...

...the Greens, however, do not even want to be militarily stronger...

...In just four years, the Greens have built a successful national party out of a loose amalgam of state and local organizations in which environmentalists and Marxists, feminists and hippies vie for influence...

...Now that the Greens are in parliament, equipped with staff and the powers and privileges that accompany public office, they are in a position to press for investigations into such matters as the Flick scandal...

...Because of the Greens' strong commitment to grass-roots democracy, all leaders, including delegates to parliament, are required to rotate out of their positions every two years or, at most, every four...

...As it turned out, the Christian Democratic-Free Democratic coalition will now bear the burden of trying to find a way out of Germany's economic difficulties, while the Social Democrats and the Greens can try to sort out their internal problems and build themselves into independent but effective opposition parties...

...Alone among all the political parties of the major industrialized nations, the Greens have attained national representation by opposing stronger military defenses and opposing higher rates of economic growth...

...It was, indeed, an extraordinary gathering, and it shed much light on the Greens, their aims, and the models on which their politics are based...

...The Greens opened their tribunal on February 18, fifty years and one month after Hitler came to power in Germany...

...The tribunal drew journalists from all parts of Europe...

...Others called them fascists or—in a more sophisticated formulation—the mirror image of fascists, and just as dangerous to German democracy...

...He understands that when Greens say they will take direct nonviolent action to disrupt missile installations, they mean it...

...Petra Karin Kelly, the party's dominant figure and best-known leader, presided throughout most of the sessions...

...Kelly's top position testifies to the drive, determination, and imagination with which she has built the Greens, but it may also reflect certain unhealthy trends...

...When I asked Ellsberg after his speech whether he had ever seen such an outpouring of reporters from top publications for an event like this, he said, "An event like this...

...Kohl has made it plain that he expects the Reagan Administration to come up with a more reasonable negotiating offer...

...In the 1920s, student backpacking groups proved to be remarkably receptive to nationalist demagoguery...

...Such arguments were put forth primarily for polemical reasons during the campaign, and the Greens tended to answer in kind...

...The prospects for launching such a movement in the United States look best in the kinds of places where the Greens have succeeded—major cities where there are many students, young radicals, and minorities, and areas where there is an unusually strong environmental consciousness...

...But Staff Director Beckmann, a handsome man with a Durer nose, grows his hair down to his shoulders, and dresses in soft corduroys, cottons, and velvets fashionable in the middle-class counterculture—not the simple suit or work clothes of the socialist politician...

...In the southwestern state of Baden- Wuerttemberg, for example, the party owed its origins largely to the battle waged in the mid-1970s over plans to build a nuclear power plant at Wyl, a scenic spot in the wine region of the lower Rhine...

...The tribunal took place in Nuremberg's cultural center, the "Meistersingerhalle," a name fraught with Wagnerian imagery...

...A hero in the classic mold, Hans Scholl went to the scaffold shouting, "Long live freedom...

...The opening paragraph of the Greens' statement blamed Germany's economic problems on a "deep structural crisis in the capitalist system...

...they will chant like American civil rights marchers and pour blood like militant antiwar activists, and when they get carried off to jail, they will beam at the cameras—as Daniel Berrigan did fifteen years ago—with a kind of charm and self-assurance that confounds their adversaries...

...And the answers they provide to those questions may determine whether the Greens survive as an effective force in German politics...

...And now thet are in German parliament, the Greens' representatives will do something parliamentary delegates have rarely done before: They will occupy nuclear power installations and sit in at nuclear missile bases...

...The Greens may be "Hitler's children," he suggested, and their "pacifist nationalism" may play the same role in cementing together their disparate elements that "aggressive nationalism" played in Nazi ideology...

...Rudolf Bahro, an exiled East German dissident who has had considerable influence in the Greens, once went so far as to suggest that when the number of unemployed reached five million, it would be an opportune time for West Germany to secede from the industrial system...