Joe Klein's European Listening Tour

Joe Klein is a staff writer for The New Yorker. He is traveling in Europe for the London Guardian, where a version of this article first appeared.

Today's itinerary: Hanover, Germany

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"I want to have power. I like being in power," said Claudia Roth, co-chair of the Green Party, as we sat in her bright, militantly informal Berlin office. "I got into a lot of trouble when I said that a few weeks ago. 'How dare she! Power is bad, power is dangerous!' But you need power to change the world."

Roth had begun our conversation with a tribute to the Prince of Wales, who had recently visited Germany. "He's so green. He spoke about nature and biodiversity, genetic agriculture and nuclear power, and he was so clear, so intelligent. I was so impressed I want to propose him for honorary membership in the German Green Party." She noticed that I was laughing. "No, really," she insisted.

If ever there was going to be an antidote to the stifling consensuality of Germany, it promised to be the Greens—and look at them now: Prince Charles is their idea of a radical. The Greens are the only significant party to have been formed since Germany became the federal republic, my baby-boomer generation's contribution to political discourse, and they did change things a bit. They popularized the notion of women's and human rights, and, of course, they brought the environment to center stage. They were fanatic peaceniks at first, but that only served to reinforce the prevailing German unease with all things military.

Over time the party's establishment drift has caused an endless, garrulous marital spat between two factions: the fundis and the realos (names that recall the '60s split between realies and feelies). The realos have won. They became part of the government in 1998, when Gerhard Schröder formed his Red-Green coalition. They supported military action in Kosovo and Afghanistan (the fact that German troops are currently operating in Afghanistan, the first time the country's soldiers have been deployed outside Europe since the war, doesn't seem to be much of an issue to anyone in Germany), and they are making noises—safe, consensual noises—in favor of the sort of economic reforms "everyone knows" are needed. But, the fundis would argue, the realos lost, too: They lost their ideological purity—and the party is losing altitude in the polls, down from 12 percent to about 7 percent.

In Hanover last week, the Greens celebrated the 20^th anniversary of their arrival in the Lower Saxony Landtag (legislature). It was a wildly nostalgic evening. Jürgen Trittin, Germany's minister of the environment and a member of the Greens' first legislative delegation in 1982, told the crowd gathered in a courtyard of the Landtag complex: "My first speech in the Landtag was to demand the expulsion of the leader of the parliament. It didn't pass."

The Hanover Greens had been at the epicenter of the fight to prevent the storage of nuclear waste at Gorleben. I was introduced to an unprepossessing man with short white hair and a moustache, whose name was Rolf Grösch. "I was in the streets with Joschka Fischer in Frankfurt in '68," Grösch said. Fischer's street-fighting past is now famous in Germany. Grösch was also a leader of the Gorleben protests and another member of the Greens' first Landtag delegation. "We all rotated out of the parliament after two years. That used to be party policy: one term and then out. I'm sorry we've abandoned it. My son, who is 20, thinks we're just another establishment party now."

Next, I was introduced to a realo-fundi mixed marriage: Dr. Thea Dückers (R) and Johannes Kempmann (F). Actually, Kempmann was formerly a fundi, a leader of the Gorleben anti-nuke protests. He is now a board member of an energy company. "I wanted to see," he said sheepishly, "if I could make a difference from the inside."

We sat on the back steps of the Lower Saxony parliament building, drinking beer, the setting sun in our eyes, talking about the strange lessons that experience teaches. "We were part of the local Red-Green parliamentary alliance," said Duckers, who is now a member of the Bundestag and a leading green economic expert. "But after we were turned out in 1994, my husband and I started a humanitarian agency and were working with the Kurds in northern Iraq. Every day, we saw the American jets fly over and we'd be so happy. Their presence allowed us to do our work. It was an important moment for us, a big change. We both began to understand the importance of military power. I voted for the military actions in Kosovo and Afghanistan in the Bundestag."

I asked Johannes about the young people going Yellow. "We call them the spass generation," he said. "The fun generation. They like having new cars and big houses and fun drinks and clothes. They don't like to talk about politics, they like to talk about fun. The FDU is all about fun. That's not the Green way. We can argue about politics all night."

"Are they rebelling against you?" I asked.

"What do you think? We had long hair and they have no hair. We were going to change the world and they—well, with the Internet and the global economy and all these other things, they think the world is too complicated to change. So why not have fun?"

I suggested that our generation had been a burden on our children, "and it's only going to get worse as we retire and they have to pay for us".

Kempmann laughed. "A terrible burden, yes," he said, and then grew quiet. "Yet another burden."

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