The Greens are fading now, but I was in Germany with them at the start

The Greens are failing in elections all over Europe. They were wiped out in Iceland’s elections and have only just avoided the same fate in Ireland. This followed failures in June’s EU elections, in particular in Germany, France and Belgium.

Greens, gone. I am pleased with that. I have always found them to be a political movement that was more evangelical than rational.

But the vanishing Greens leave me with some nostalgia. I was there when the Green movement started. I was in Germany with Petra Kelly and her Die Grünen in 1982, when she and her followers kicked off the whole Green thing. They were the first environmentalists who would rise to European prominence.

However, I was no Green. I was working with the American current affairs show CBS News 60 Minutes as an associate producer and researcher. We wanted to cover Kelly and her environmentalists, mostly to see if they were just flaky or if they were actually up to something that would have political impact. I arrived first in Bonn, without our producer, correspondent or crew, and saw Kelly leading an outfit that looked like hippies (yes, still hippies in the 1980s) campaigning against acid rain in forests and against nuclear war.

They were like students, woolly in their thinking and unfocused in their policies. It still seems extraordinary to me how effective their movement eventually was. They would dress up in costumes and pile onto buses to head to demonstrations or have meetings that seemed something between yoga sessions and humming ‘Ommmmm’ for hours.

As for Kelly herself, she had an Irish name because her mother married an American soldier and Petra took his name. When I met her, she was 36-years old and living with Gert Bastian, a 60-year old ex-general and former Panzer commander. He was the only one with a short back and sides in the whole operation. Kelly died in 1992 after Bastian put a bullet through her head and then killed himself.

I persuaded her to allow 60 Minutes to follow her and her Greens for ten days. Once that was agreed, my boss, a multiple-award winning veteran producer, and our crew with 2,000 kg of equipment arrived, and later our star correspondent flew in from New York (by Concorde, changing in London. As I said, he was a star). Kelly looked at them and said how pleased she was that CBS News was so advanced that a woman was producer of this crew. I panicked and started to say, “No, you don’t understand,” when my producer, pro that he was and knowing how to work a story, immediately said, “Yes, we at CBS support woman producers.” I muttered, “What?” but Kelly smiled. We clearly were her kind of fem-lib people. For the next ten days I acted slightly producer-ish when Kelly was around, always looking to the real boss if I had to make a genuine producer decision.

She kept telling us how hard she worked, but I never saw much of that, just a lot of “Ommmm.” We were in a restaurant in the middle of the shoot when Kelly went to the loo. And stayed there. Stayed some more. My producer and I were afraid she might be in there doing drugs, so I was sent in to retrieve the Green. What she was doing, I never figured.

At one point, Kelly wanted me to take her expert on the effects of acid rain on trees into a forest so he could show me. I looked at the German “expert,” thought he looked deeply weird, and arranged for someone to accompany us into the woods, more as a security bouncer than chaperone. And, yes, there were trees and they looked a bit peeked, but why we had to go into the depth of a forest to see it I never knew.

Kelly gave us a good show, looping us through Nuremburg, always a good spot to film on Germans. My only mistake there, and it was a mistake that showed the difference between an associate producer and a real producer, was that I led the crew to the wrong arena when we were trying to find the site of Hitler’s rallies. I remain embarrassed by that.

In the end, long after I lost touch with Kelly, she faded from prominence as the Greens became more political, acting against her insistence they never become like other political parties. She spent years being not much seen, then there was Bastian and the bullet in the head.