An Unfitting End

THE DEATHS WERE AS PUZZLING AS THEY WERE A contradiction of what Petra Kelly had stood for. Ten years ago she was the personification of the German environmental and peace movements. One of the founders of the German Green Party, Kelly was a member of the West German Bundestag until 1990, when her party failed to win enough votes to remain in the parliament. Over the years, she had fallen out with many of her fractious party colleagues and became a marginal figure. Her compatriots were shocked into remembrance of Kelly, however, when she and her longtime lover and fellow Green Party founder, Gert Bastian, were found dead in their Bonn house. The state of the corpses indicated that they had been dead for some weeks and that Bastian had either shot Kelly while she slept or with her acquiescence, before shooting himself. No note was left.

Slight of build, Kelly, 44, had thrown herself with passion into campaigns against the stationing of intermediate-range nuclear weapons in Germany and for the creation of an ecologically sound public policy. The founding of the Greens made her perhaps the world's best-known environmentalist.

Bastian, a former Bundeswehr major general who was 69 when he died, had written an open letter in September decrying recent xenophobic attacks that had "spread like wildfire over the land." But there was no sign that the shootings were meant as political protest or, for that matter, anything else.