Nicht rechts, nicht links, sondern vorn

Since the success of the Green Party in the elections to the Baden-Württemberg Landtag in spring 2011, the German public seems to have discovered the German Greens anew. The public perplexity springs not only from the fact that for the first time in the history of the Federal Republic the office of minister-president is held by a member of the Green Party, Winfried Kretschmann, but also from the apparent conservative outlook of Green politics in southern Germany. Were the Greens not part of the Left? What is it that unites, say, Joschka Fischer, the former Frankfurt Sponti, and Winfried Kretschmann, the Swabian Catholic? Silke Mende’s book, of course, does not address this question in particular, but she nevertheless offers a differentiated and sophisticated historical answer in presenting us with the amazing heterogeneity of groups, networks, ideological traditions and individuals that shaped the Green movement in the 1970s and the newly founded Green Party in the early 1980s. This Tübingen PhD thesis is indeed a remarkable pioneering work, based on a multitude of sources, and knowledgeably woven into a flourishing research landscape. She not only succeeds in identifying the main strands that finally led to the founding of the Green Party in January 1980, in presenting their ideological outlook and political profile, and in laying open their diverse ideological trajectories, she also offers a convincing explanation of how this diversity could finally be integrated and given a more or less distinct ideological outlook.

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