Protest by the "New Class"

By Frederick Painton

As the election nears, the Greens could hold the balance of power

Hundreds of tiny black, red and yellow West German flags fluttered amid the crowded banks of seats in the concrete-and-glass stadium in the Baltic port of Kiel. The odors of steaming sausage and green pea soup wafted from giant kettles in the corridors. Through the cheerful melee strode West German Chancellor Helmut Kohl, 52, shaking hands and exchanging greetings with some of the 6,000 supporters in attendance. From the podium, Kohl catalogued a variety of traditional conservative remedies for the social and economic ills of West Germany that arose, he said, during the rule of his Social Democratic predecessors, Willy Brandt and Helmut Schmidt. The Chancellor's voice rose to a shout as he reaffirmed a decision to deploy U.S.-built Pershing II and cruise missiles in the country if Geneva arms-limitation talks between the U.S. and the Soviet Union fail to achieve progress by December 1983.

At a packed press conference in Bonn, Hans-Jochen Vogel, 57, Kohl's Social Democrat opponent, vowed that "there will be no automatic deployment" of the controversial missiles if he wins the March 6 election. He said that if the U.S. and the Soviet Union did not make greater efforts to produce an agreement in Geneva, it would have a significant impact on his attitude toward deployment.

In the venerable city of Nuremberg, a rather different political rally was about to take place. Organizers for West Germany's radical minority party, the Greens (named after its environmentalist beginnings), scurried to ready the city's Meistersingerhalle for a bizarre three-day "war-crimes tribunal." Among those who would testify before an audience of Greens supporters and sympathizers were survivors of Nazi concentration camps and Hiroshima, antiwar activists and military experts from West Germany, the U.S. and other countries.

The purpose of the Nuremberg exercise, according to Petra Kelly,* 35, a founder of the Greens and a candidate for the West German Bundestag, was to indict "the world's five nuclear-weapons states, but mainly the U.S. and Russia." Said she: "What we are trying to do is to show that the very possession of nuclear weapons is a crime of immense proportions."

As West Germany entered the final, decisive weeks before its March 6 national elections, each of those disparate rallies had its own significance. At stake was control of the 519-seat Bundestag, a struggle dominated by the rivalry between Kohl's Christian Democrats and Vogel's Social Democrats. But for the first time, a powerful environmental and antinuclear movement, headed by the Greens, is threatening to take over the balance of electoral power in West Germany. That far from remote possibility would challenge the concept of nuclear deterrence within the NATO alliance, and would undermine a strategy that has given Western Europe three unprecedented decades of peace and prosperity. It is stirring concern that the much admired West German social consensus may be breaking down, inaugurating a period of paralyzing instability. Says Dominique Moisi, an analyst at the French Institute of International Relations: "The fear is that profound change is going on in West German society."

According to the latest polls, Kohl's conservative Christian Democrats should win 48% of the vote and the Social Democrats 43%. The Free Democratic Party, which precipitated the change in government last October by shifting its allegiance from Schmidt's Social Democrats to Kohl's Christian Democrats, is given 4%. Unless sentiments change, however, the Greens may win 5%, thereby breaking the barrier necessary for representation in the Bundestag. If that happens, the protest movement will be the first left-wing fringe party in the postwar period to have a say in West German government.

What both major parties fear specifically is that the Greens might oust the Free Democratic Party as the pivotal third force in the Bundestag. That will not matter if either Kohl's Christian Democratic/Christian Social Union alliance or Vogel's Social Democrats win a majority. But it becomes a critical issue if neither party has enough strength to form a government on its own. The conservatives are not likely, under any circumstances, to make common cause with the Greens. The Greens have signaled that they could support a Social Democratic minority government on some issues, but in return for such backing they insist on concessions Vogel will not grant. Among them: the complete denuclearization, both military and commercial, of West Germany and perhaps even the disastrous step of withdrawal from NATO, which would almost certainly lead to the collapse of the alliance as it is now constituted.

The Greens, according to Activist Kelly, "are the antiparty, the party for those who are disillusioned, no, disgusted, with the way the government has been running this country." A decade ago, Kelly's denunciation of West German democracy might have been dismissed as mere ideological ranting. But the Greens seem to be only the most politically visible and potent part of a vast counterculture movement in West Germany that has reached extraordinary proportions.

West Germans refer to the broader phenomenon as the "alternative movement." Its numbers are estimated at between 4 million and 5 million, much larger than the 1.5 million to 2 million adherents of the Green Party itself. Thriving all over the country, the alternatives include squatters and punkers, doctors and lawyers, engineers and social workers, who have organized hundreds of communes in which they are attempting to define, as one of them puts it, "a culture alongside the traditional, confining German society." Joseph Huber, 34, a lecturer at Berlin's Free University and a philosopher of the alternative scene, sees this counterculture wave as a "new class" in West German society.

The movement's members are mostly under 35, although an older fringe of over-50s is also active. Most of them vigorously reject the traditional German work ethic, sense of order, loyalty to family and security in favor of nebulous concepts of self-determination and grass-roots activism. They oppose nuclear weapons and nuclear energy. The alternatives are passionate about a clean and safe environment, about women's rights as well as those of oppressed minorities like immigrant workers and homosexuals. Says Carl Amery, 60, Bavarian writer, environmentalist and Green Party member: "The alternative movement is trying to recapture the German warmth that was killed in the war years."

There are those for whom the counterculture movement is more frightening than laughable. They see in it a renaissance of an ancient streak of German romanticism, a form of escapism that too often has preceded political follies. For most West German conservatives, the Greens reflect old but recurring fears of the relentless advance of industrialism and urbanism that threaten the individual with a society of scientific management and assembly lines. With romantic and dangerously simplistic longing, the alternatives look to the lost past, to what they believe was a simpler, less corrupt world of noble motives and a pristine environment.

There is a strong nationalistic edge to the alternative movement. The counterculture's music is purely German, both rock tunes and the protest songs of peace groups. Decrying the U.S. is a constant theme.

Arthur Burns, the U.S. Ambassador to Bonn, is fond of complaining to West Germans that by neglecting to teach the history of the past 40 years--West German schoolbooks have tended to skip lightly over the Hitler and immediate postwar periods--the country has produced a generation with little or no historical perspective. In the eyes of West German youth who cannot remember the cold war or the Berlin airlift or the Korean War, there is really not much to distinguish between the U.S. and the Soviet Union. As a result, the vital Atlantic Alliance is sometimes questioned or even naively perceived as a fading and largely unnecessary relic.

West German intellectuals of the Marxist-oriented left are fascinated, puzzled but not attracted by the Greens. Says Werner Holzer, editor of the left-leaning Frankfurter Rundschau: "The intellectual left has remained aloof for the most part because of the Greens' unruly way of thinking." In their inarticulate way, the Greens, indeed, appear to be rejecting all the political ideologies of the past, including Marxism. Nonetheless, says Professor Richard Lowenthal of the Free University of Berlin, the Greens' thinking has been influenced by the Marxist teachers who are now established in West German universities. This influence has presumably helped turn the Greens against capitalism. Adds Lowenthal: "The leftists have not taught them how I parliamentary democracy works or the importance of the legal system. They have not transmitted any of the Utopian Marxist hope. The Old Left is responsible for the gaps in the Greens' education."

The rise of the Greens, beginning in 1979, came just as disillusionment with West Germany's three other established political parties was spreading. In the 1980 national elections, the Greens polled only 1.5% of the vote. Later the same year, in the state election in Baden-Wuerttemberg, they won 5.3% and entered the state parliament. In quick succession came similar electoral break throughs in West Berlin, Lower Saxony, Hamburg and Hesse. In several of the state elections, the Greens ousted the Free Democrats as the third parliamentary party.

However inchoate and unrealistic their ultimate aims, the Greens have al ready left marks on the country. That Interior Minister Friedrich Zimmermann talks about saving dying German forests, that Social Democratic Leader Vogel now hedges on the missile issue, that the Free Democratic Party now champions the rights of foreign workers -- all can be at tributed to the political stimulus of the Greens. More than its Catholic counter part, the Protestant Church has been moved to respond to the concerns of West German youths. The large-circulation press has been unable to ignore the pressures of the counterculture movement. A regular diet of environmental coverage is now a feature of such major magazines as Stern and Der Spiegel. Both publications have come out strongly against the deployment of new NATO missiles, a position closer to that of the Greens than of the Social Democrats.

By last autumn, according to opinion polls, the Greens enjoyed support from as much as 9% of the electorate. In recent months, though, they have fallen back. One reason is that the Social Democrats, under Vogel, have moved just far enough to the left on the NATO missile and economic issues to pick up some Greens supporters. Another reason is that, ironically enough, the Greens' moral credibility comes at the cost of their political credibility. Says a Munich tenants' rights organizer: "The Greens have trouble enough trying to find out what their supporters want, let alone having to deal with questions like how they will vote on unemployment programs." If the Greens fail to win 5% of the vote, their future as a political force will depend on whether Vogel's Social Democrats maintain their leftward drift. In short, the Greens will disturb the West German political scene as long as there is room on the left for a new generation of skeptical citizens with a dim sense of the past and a hazy vision of the future. --By Frederick Painton. Reported by Roland Flamini and Gary Lee/Bonn

* Born in Germany of German parents, she got her name from her American stepfather, whom her mother married while he was stationed in Germany.

With reporting by Roland Flamini, Gary Lee/Bonn This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so viewer discretion is required.