The German Green Party: A Movement Between Fundamentalism & Modernism

West Germany’s Green party is so little understood that we suspect it can’t be elucidated by traditional political categories. The standard view is that the Greens are a single issue, middle-class, left-leaning youth movement— a temporary irritant for the more serious German parties. Such a view obscures the two most interesting aspects of the Greens: their ambiguity and the importance of the political questions they raise.

The Greens have never seen themselves as a singl...