Petra Karin Lehmann was born to German parents in Günzburg between Ulm and Augsburg on November 29, 1947.

Her father left the family when she was seven years old. Her mother worked as a translator on an American base, where she met the professional soldier John Kelly, whose name Petra later took. Petra was raised by her grandmother.

When she was later asked as an adult about the root of her special abilities, she replied that as a child she was taken seriously and that she was a grandmother's child. She describes her strong bond with her "Grandma Birle" as that of a friend, a sister, and yet at the same time as that of a grandmother and granddaughter. She calls her her first and most important guide for her political and personal commitment.

Her grandmother supported her in her political work as a confidante, friend and unpaid secretary. Her unconditional, selfless work for Petra strongly influenced her understanding of love. She developed a tendency to expect total sacrifice and acceptance from her loved ones.

After her half-sister Grace was born in 1958, the family moved to her stepfather's home country, the USA, in 1959. They moved to the southern states, to Columbus in West Georgia. Petra studied English intensively and after just one year she was perfect. At the age of 18, Petra went to Washington to study political science. Her career goal: to become a diplomat. It was here that the first feminists took to the streets in 1966: Women's lib (women's liberation) and this movement reached the whole Western world in the 1970s.

Petra Kelly was influenced by Women's lib, adopting its symbols and attitudes, attacking the patriarchy "without ever really incorporating feminist content and analysis into her thinking, speeches or even life". (according to Alice Schwarzer). But in any case, she was politically socialized in the American civil rights movement and sharpened her sense of symbolic action and learned the concept of "civil disobedience".

Although she embodies the demands of the women and later the Greens with words, she "submits" to the powerful men with gestures and her very needy appearance and does not really attack them. This is how Alice Schwarzer sees Kelly's commitment. Kelly believes that the world can be changed by the gestures of individuals, is not intimidated by anything or anyone and at the same time relies on the big players in this world.

In May 1969, she completed her studies and returned to Europe. In Amsterdam, she worked successfully at the European Institute on the subject of "European Integration". She moved to Brussels when she was awarded the European Community Fellowship. Here, too, she worked hard, but was lonely and isolated in this cold, male-dominated place. She became an EC administrator and in 1975 she began a relationship with John Carroll, an Irish trade union leader and an idol of the European protest movement. In the years that followed, she accompanied him to all the world's trouble spots.

At the height of the peace movement, she met the 24-year-old "peace general" Gert Bastian, who had left the German army. She was the first to sign his "Krefeld Appeal" against rearmament and nuclear weapons. More than two million signatures were added to this appeal.

As an EC administrator on leave, she now commuted with him between actions in Wyhl, Erdinger Moos, Bonn and Brussels. On November 1, 1980, Bastian and she were panel guests on the topics of "Women and Peace" and "Women and the Bundeswehr". At the time, Bastian was known as a figurehead of the peace movement and was better known than she was. In 1981, she joined him in the demonstration of 400,000 against nuclear armament in Bonn's Hofgarten.

A romantic, sometimes overflowing love soon bound them together, as much as unconditional political passion. They became the symbolic figures and influential trailblazers of the new Green Party and the German peace movement.

The influence of disappointed social democrats who left the SPD in protest against Helmut Schmidt's defense and nuclear policy and formed new alliances should not be underestimated at the end of the 1970s. Petra Kelly also left the SPD in 1979 and joined the Federal Association of Citizens' Initiatives for Environmental Protection (BBU). She stood as a top candidate for the 1979 European elections for the SPV (Other Political Association). In contrast to Bundestag elections, no formal party foundation was necessary for the European elections.

However, the trend towards participation in state, federal and European elections continued from 1978 onwards, characterized by disputes between the various groups, voter associations and electoral alliances.

Petra Kelly was at home in all these movements, she established networks and brought people together.

In West Germany and West Berlin, the Green Party emerged from the environmental movement and the new social movements of the 1970s and was founded as a party in January 1980. At the federal assembly in March of the same year, Petra Kelly was elected as one of the three party spokespersons. The adopted basic program contained demands for the decommissioning of all nuclear facilities, unilateral disarmament, the dissolution of the NATO and Warsaw Pact military blocs, a 35-hour week and the abolition of § 218 of the German Criminal Code ("abortion paragraph").

The self-image was that of an "anti-party party" (Petra Kelly). This dispute between the "fundis" (the Greens as a movement) and the "realos" (the Greens as a party with parliamentary mandates) was to determine the internal party debate over the next few years. The development and establishment phase of the new party was thus strongly characterized by internal party differences between the radical so-called "fundis" and "eco-socialists" on the one hand and the pragmatic "realos" on the other.

In addition to environmental protection, issues such as the rotation principle, the separation of office and mandate and the women's quota defined the image of this new party.

Petra Kelly was an early advocate of an alliance with peace and human rights groups in East Germany. The civil rights movement that emerged in East Germany, Bündnis 90/DIE GRÜNEN, merged with the West German GRÜNEN in December 1990 to form an all-German party.

From 1980 to 1990, Petra Kelly was a member of the Federal Executive Committee of the Greens in Bonn and, together with Otto Schily and Marie-Luise Beck-Oberdorf, a member of the parliamentary group's spokesperson's council.

In 1982, she was the leading candidate in the Bavarian state elections. This election campaign made her famous throughout Germany. She rejected her forced resignation from the Green Party's executive committee due to the rotation principle, because in her opinion, this principle made continuous substantive work in parliament impossible. She also refused to bow to the rule that every member of the Bundestag should pay high contributions to the so-called eco-fund. She gave her contribution to the parents' groups of children's cancer wards. She had long been regarded as a difficult person in a grassroots party that acted as if everyone was equal. As a result, she was always on a confrontational course with her party.

She was critical of the infighting within the Greens and could hardly stand it. And yet she saw her contribution to bringing a green party into parliament as a great ecological and political achievement. She increasingly distanced herself from her party's increasingly realpolitik course and called for the Greens to return to their origins as an "anti-party party". She saw the Green turn towards "realpolitik", reformist changes and parliamentary compromise as follows: "If politics is determined solely by the functional and the pragmatic, politics will degenerate into mere opportunism".

In December 1990, following the merger with the East German civil rights movement Bündnis 90/DIE GRÜNEN, the Greens were initially no longer elected to the Bundestag. Petra Kelly would have been left out in any case: her party had not even put her up for election. She was sidelined by the party and ignored by the media and suffered greatly from no longer being able to propagate her political concerns effectively enough.

As the symbolic figure of the Greens, she was the star of the movement on the outside until 1990, but on the inside she was worn down and exhausted. In 1982/83, at the height of her political career, Petra Kelly could no longer be alone, could no longer travel alone. She suffered from panic attacks, claustrophobia and fear of persecution. As a result, Gert Bastian increasingly took on the role of protector, companion and manager of her professional and domestic life.

She began to give many lectures abroad and worked on a book about Guernica. She remained an avowed pacifist who counted Mahatma Gandhi, Martin Luther King and Rosa Luxemburg among her role models. Petra Kelly was on the police's list of endangered personalities and was threatened by activists from the right-wing political sect EAP (European Workers' Party). However, she refused personal protection. She found it difficult to keep her distance in her private relationships, with the Greens and from the suffering and misery of the world.

Deeply shaken by the early death of her sister Grace from cancer, she founded a citizens' initiative with the aim of improving psychosocial care for children with cancer. In addition, she was involved in many voluntary activities in the European women's, peace and anti-nuclear movements as well as with the Federal Association of Citizens' Initiatives for Environmental Protection.

Rockets, nuclear power plants, hunger, children's cancer and dying forests are her topics. She wrote, gave lectures and took part in countless non-violent actions and demonstrations, acting against the military, nuclear power and patriarchy. She was known worldwide and received the "Alternative Nobel Prize" in 1982 and the US peace organization "Women strike for peace" awarded her the title "Woman of the Year".

She worked 12 to 16 hours a day until the early hours of the morning, she knew no boundaries.

Petra Kelly and Gert Bastian work next door to each other in the government district in the Kleines Haus Am Tulpenfeld, even when he left the Green parliamentary group in protest. He was now available around the clock. He helped her manage her daily workload, in which she set the pace. They lived together in a terraced house in Bonn Tannenbusch at Swinemünder Straße 6.

But gradually her fears and phobias got the better of her. She was ill and needed therapy. When Bastian wanted to go to his family in Munich, she would get tachycardia, sweats and circulatory problems.

A few weeks before her death, Petra Kelly wrote her last published text on "Women's lives, women's politics".

At the end were three wishes, the third being:
"... a long, fruitful, creative life and work together with my companion in life and soul, Gert Bastian."

This companion took her life on October 1, 1992 with a shot to the head from his pistol, after which he shot himself. She was only found dead in her bed in the house in Bonn Tannenbusch 18 days after the fatal shot. Gert Bastian was lying in the hallway. The exact circumstances of her death have still not been conclusively clarified and both deaths have given rise to speculation and legends.

48 hours after the bodies were found, the public prosecutor's office in Bonn and the police spoke of a "double suicide". This view also corresponded to the opinion of political Bonn and the media public at the time. Only a few were of a different opinion and expressed it. Joan Baez was invited to the state ceremony for their deaths in the Beethovenhalle. She refused to sing "for a murderer and his victim" and canceled her participation at short notice.

For Alice Schwarzer, the life of a woman was taken here "without this (...) being perceived as an injustice in society." There was no indication that Petra Kelly wanted to die. She had a full schedule until 1993 and wanted to enter the European Parliament in 1994.

Petra Kelly was buried in the Waldfriedhof cemetery in Würzburg. In 2006, a section of Franz-Josef-Strauß-Allee in the former government district (now the federal district) was renamed Petra-Kelly-Allee.

In her last publication, she expressed her first wish:

The rights to the above text are held by  Haus der FrauenGeschichte Bonn e.V. (opens in a new tab)

• Presber, Gabriele: Women's lives, women's politics. Konkursbuch Publ. C. Gehrke, Tübingen 1992
• DER SPIEGEL 44/1992
• Latka-Jöhring, Sigrid: Women in Bonn. Twenty portraits from the federal capital. Publ. Lattka, Bonn 1988
• Schwarzer, Alice: A deadly love. Petra Kelly, Gert Bastian. Kiepenheuer & Witsch publishing house, 3rd ed. 2005
• Lorenzo di, Giovanni: On the rise and other defeats. Conversations. Kiepenheuer & Witsch, 4th ed. 2017
• Claudia Roth, Vice President of the German Bundestag, Speech on Petra Kelly's seventieth birthday on November 29, 2017 in Freising. In: DIE GRÜNEN
• EMMA: April 1, 2010 by Mithu M. Sanyal (Joan Baez)