A Variegated Sunflower

She has an Irish name, a fighting Irish spirit, and not a drop of Irish blood. She developed her politics in the U.S. and now directs them most forcibly against America. As the attractive star of a radical "antiparty" party that disdains celebrity, she is the frequent subject of glossy articles and the constant target of photographers. Petra Kelly, 35, the feisty, fiery gamin who speaks as the uncrowned leader of the Greens, is hard to overlook.

Born to a German mother and a Polish father in Guenzburg, West Germany, Petra Lehmann moved to Georgia in 1960 after her divorced mother married a U.S. colonel, John Kelly. Six years later Petra went to Washington's American University, where she majored in political science and took a crash course in grass-roots activism. On campus, Kelly distinguished herself as an enterprising and indefatigable charmer: after being bombarded by her letters, Robert Kennedy advised her about scholarships, Hubert Humphrey had a lengthy correspondence with her, and Pope Paul VI reserved five seats for her at a Vatican audience. More important, she imbibed at college the heady spirit of '60s idealism, reading Thoreau, watching Martin Luther King Jr. and raEying for civil rights.

After stopping off at the University of Amsterdam to write a master's thesis attacking the Marshall Plan, Kelly moved in 1972 to Brussels and a job at European Community headquarters that taught her, she says, about women's rights and nuclear arms. That same year, lured by what she called the "utopian hope" of former West German Chancellor Willy Brandt, Kelly joined the Social Democratic Party, only to storm out in 1979 convinced that Brandt's successor, Helmut Schmidt, had betrayed the party's beliefs. Thereafter she joined the Greens, instantly becoming one of the party's brightest spokesmen and strategists.

Since then Kelly has devoted so many 20-hour days to the cause that last November she was hospitalized for exhaustion. At rallies she delivers passionate speeches answered by thunderous ovations; behind the scenes, she deploys a sharp Americanized intuition for catchy public relations. Thanks to Kelly, the Greens have designed such arresting effects as February's "war-crimes tribunal" in Nuremberg, where nuclear arms were convicted of being "a crime against humanity."

Kelly has imported many other tactics from the America of her youth, including an ecological concern and a belief that civil disobedience is an unassailable political weapon. The symbol she chose for the Greens, a sunflower, further suggests that the party's roots lie among the flower children. Yet because Kelly believes that the U.S. is more likely to launch a nuclear attack than the Soviet Union, she adamantly opposes U.S. foreign policies. Is she biting the hand that fed her? More likely, perhaps, Unking two hands together. For Kelly thrives on eclecticism. She alternates a Bavarian inflection with an American twang, warm private gestures with eloquent public harangues. When detractors brand the Greens as a youth party, Kelly points to her colleague and frequent traveling companion, her 77-year-old grandmother.

Some of Kelly's flourishes strike observers as too rhetorical and romantic. She has been quoted as declaring, for example, that "I think they should put the code [necessary to launch a nuclear attack] in the heart of a child, so Reagan would have to tear it out to use it." Says a leading Social Democrat: "She is energetic and engaging, but a lot of what comes out of her mouth is hot air." With a seat in the Bundestag, Kelly must now prove her pragmatism and her party must deal with her celebrity, which is at once a feather in its cap and a thorn in its side. The Greens have already stipulated that all their members of parliament must rotate their seats and surrender part of their salaries to the party. But Kelly invariably compels attention. Even as the radicals celebrated their election victory, photographers mobbed her while fellow Greens, ignored, cried out their disapproval. This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so viewer discretion is required.