Petra Kelly

Petra Kelly was born Petra Lehmann in Günzburg in Bavaria and took her American stepfather's surname. She moved to the United States in 1960, studied international politics in Washington, where she joined protests against the Vietnam War and racial discrimination, and then studied European integration in Amsterdam. From 1972 to 1982 she worked for the European Community in Brussels while active in the environmental citizens' movement. She left the SPD in 1979, co-founded the Greens and served as one of the party's first spokespersons. She sat in the Bundestag from 1983 to 1990. In 1992 she was shot dead by her partner Gert Bastian, who then killed himself.

Admirers see Kelly as the most internationally known face of the early Greens, who helped bring ecology, nonviolence and feminism into mainstream politics and linked the West German peace movement with dissidents in the East. Her 1982 Right Livelihood Award and her campaigning on Tibet and Indigenous rights gave her a global profile. Within her own party she became increasingly isolated, criticizing what she called self-destructive factional fights, and she failed to win renomination in 1990. Critics within the Greens objected to her refusal to follow the rotation principle. The circumstances of her death in 1992 remain unclear, including whether she consented to it.