The life and death of Petra Kelly

the long version

Petra Kelly was born Petra Karin Lehmann in 1947 in Bavaria. She spent her teenage years in sixties America after her mother remarried a GI and the family moved to Virginia. After a displaced adolescence, during which she saw her sister, Grace, die of eye cancer, Kelly threw herself into politics and cut her political teeth working on the campaigns of Robert Kennedy and Hubert Humphrey. She returned to Europe in 1970. Her extraordinary political passion, combined with lobbying skills and international contacts, ensured that she immediately shot to prominence within the emerging green and peace movements. Petra met Gert Bastian in the early eighties. Bastian was a NATO general, a war veteran who rocked the German establishment by joining protests against US nuclear weapons in Germany, then joined the Greens and fell in love with Petra Kelly. In this meticulously researched biography, Sara Parkin goes behind the public charisma of Petra Kelly to reveal the contradictions of her complex character, a woman at once sure of her vision but desperately insecure, wielding massive power in the outside world but wholly dependent in her intimate life.