Conflict in the Ranks

It was a gesture that caught all the environmental fervor so characteristic of West Germany's Green Party. Minutes after Helmut Kohl had been elected Chancellor last March, Marieluise Beck-Oberdorf, 31, a new Green deputy, handed him a branch from a fir tree that had been exposed to acid rain. With that impulsive act, Beck-Oberdorf breached her idealistic party's agreement against any individual initiative. For her transgression, she was castigated so harshly by her parliamentary colleagues that she burst into tears.

Last week, however, a clearly outrageous gesture by a Green regional deputy from the state of Hesse had been approved in advance by local party members. At a reception for U.S. commanders in Wiesbaden, Frank Schwalba-Hoth threw a glass of his blood on the chest of Lieut. General Paul S. Williams Jr. to protest the projected deployment of U.S. intermediate-range missiles in West Germany.

The Greens arrived triumphantly in parliament five months ago with a vision of themselves as the antiparty party, a model of selflessness and dedication in a political system they considered debased by cynical powerbrokers and greed. Since then, they have been discovering that the purity they preach is painfully hard to put into practice.

In the belief that even a sliver of power corrupts, the Greens eschew any hierarchical party structure. The result occasionally is unhappy chaos. Arguing incessantly with one another, party members have created an oppressive atmosphere of dogmatic righteousness. Even Green Deputy Petra Kelly has become too well known for the taste of party purists and is keeping a low profile.

Factions have begun to emerge within the Green Party under the pressure of its new national role. On one side stand the "fundamentalists," dedicated to preserving the party's protest roots. On the other are the "pragmatists," who are more concerned with having an impact on national policy. The two groups are at odds over how to deal with potential violence in the peace movement. After 134 peace activists were arrested in Krefeld last June for attacking U.S. Vice President Bush's car with stones and paint bombs, Green Deputy Gert Bastian, a former general in the West German army, chastised the offenders as "provocateurs, not part of the peace movement at all." Other Greens insisted that the party must remain open to all kinds of dissidents.

Not surprisingly, money has become a problem for a movement that has been too lofty to learn how to manage it. Says Deputy Otto Schily: "Running a party is not as cheap as we thought it would be." Party funds have been spent on travel to Eastern Europe, Central America and the U.S. Even before the elections, Green deputies agreed to give $25,600 of their $34,600 annual salaries to their favorite cause, which for most is the party.

In the permanent state of controversy that seems to reign among the Greens, an argument has erupted over a basic principle adopted before they came to the Bundestag. In order to ensure that representation would always be more important than personalities, the party had decided to rotate its members every two years instead of waiting for elections every four years. It is now occurring to some of them that the rotation principle may be too costly and could deprive the Greens of some of their most effective voices, such as Kelly, Bastian and Schily.

Despite all their problems, the Greens have taken effective advantage of their parliamentary platform. Already 18 of the 27 deputies have given speeches on the floor, a far higher percentage than that of any other party, and most of the speeches were broadcast, at least in part, on national television. The West German press continues to give the Greens extensive coverage. For a movement that refuses the traditional compromises necessary to make parliamentary democracy work, that already may be enough. The question now is how long the Greens can live with the conflict between their principles and political reality. This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so viewer discretion is required.