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The Greens' impact on German politics and public life has been enormous and massively disproportional to the size of their electoral support and political presence in the country's legislative and executive bodies on the federal, state, and local levels. After substantiating the Greens' proliferating presence on all levels of German politics with numbers; the article focuses on demonstrating how the Greens' key values of ecology, peace and pacifism, feminism and women's rights, and grass roots democracy-the signifiers of their very identity-have come to shape the existence of all other German parties bar none. If imitation is one of the most defining characteristics of success, the Greens can be immensely proud of their tally over the past thirty plus years. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Today's German Green Party looks much like its parliamentary counterparts. However, the long-term political experience of activists who founded the party informed flexible and open political thinking and structure, and raised questions about the nature of deep social change that are worth returning to. The Green Party in its current form is not the only possible relevant and practical manifestation of this thinking. This piece briefly traces an evolution of political thought before the emergence of the Green Party through the case of one former activist. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The West German Green Party's 1983 entrance into the Bundestag marked a major break, both in the history of this young political force and the parliamentary system of the Bonn Republic. The Greens had been founded in opposition to the guiding principles of the West German postwar consensus and conceived of themselves as an 'anti-parliamentary party.' Although they had gained parliamentary experience in some regional chambers, their entrance onto the national parliamentary stage juxtaposed old ideals and new challenges-for the Greens themselves as well as for German political culture. Taking this singular historic moment as a starting point, this article summarizes the formation of the Greens in the context of the changing political and ideological landscape of the 1970s. It also contrasts the party's formation with the transformations in terms of program and personnel that it undertook during the 1980s. The focus lies less on the specific activities of the green parliamentary group than on the broader developments in green politics and thinking. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article uses the biography of the activist and Green Party co-founder Petra Kelly in order to rethink the Greens' founding process and to articulate a new conception of charismatic political leadership. It shows how Kelly used her activism in the new social movements as the basis for her leadership role in the Greens, and how her ongoing work in the peace movement provided her a means of maintaining power within the nascent party during the early 1980s. By examining Kelly's contributions to the Greens' approach to politics, the article shows that she was more than just a figurehead for the new party. Most importantly, the article shows that throughout her career as an activist and politician, Kelly used her biography to establish credibility and to support her unique style of charismatic leadership. The German public's response to Kelly reveals the influence of this charismatic leadership and shows how her movement-driven and biographically informed approach, which brought personal experiences and emotions into politics, was part of a larger transformation of the political in West Germany during the 1970s and 1980s. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines the changes in social movements, in particular the peace movement since the late 1970s, their processes of differentiation as well as their connections to older aspects of the movements. Of particular interest is the breadth of the peace movement, which succeeded in mobilizing several hundred thousand persons at the beginning of the 1980s. How points of conflict developed between this movement and an antiwar movement led by a 'new youth movement' around 1980 is the focus of this article. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]