In the 1970s he defended members of the RAF as a lawyer. He later became the only Green to win a direct mandate for the Bundestag four times in a row. Now Hans-Christian Ströbele has died in Berlin.
The Green politician Hans-Christian Ströbele has died at the age of 83. This is reported by the "taz". Accordingly, Ströbele died on Tuesday in his apartment in the Berlin district of Moabit. The political veteran was considered one of the most prominent representatives of the Greens nationwide and was a symbolic figure, especially for the left wing of the party.
"He decided himself that he no longer wanted to continue the long ordeal that his illness had imposed on him and that he reduced life-sustaining measures," said Ströbele's lawyer Johannes Eisenberg. "He was fully conscious to the last. Not the spirit, the body became his torment and left him on August 29, 2022."
Ströbele won the direct mandate for the Bundestag four times in a row in the Berlin constituency Friedrichshain-Kreuzberg-Prenzlauer Berg Ost. He's the only Green who's ever done something like that. After a total of 20 years in the Bundestag, Ströbele announced in December 2016 that he would not run again the following year.
Ströbele was last directly elected to parliament in September 2013. There had been doubts beforehand as to whether he would compete again. Cancer had weakened the co-founder of the Greens. The revelations of the whistleblower Edward Snowden offered Ströbele another big stage. In October 2013 he flew to Moscow to meet Snowden there.
His political career was almost over in 2002. After four years in the Bundestag, his party refused him a safe place on the list. But he managed to create a sensation: he won his constituency directly. He had also advertised his resolute opposition to the Greens' foreign minister at the time, Joschka Fischer. "Choosing Ströbele means torturing fishermen," was his slogan. Above all, he resented Fischer and the red-green government under SPD Chancellor Gerhard Schröder for their participation in the Kosovo war.
At the beginning of his career, Ströbele, who was born in Halle an der Saale in 1939, was, among other things, a defender for the terrorist "Red Army Faction" (RAF). At the time, the lawyer was a leading representative of the extra-parliamentary left-alternative movement and founder of the Berlin "taz". In 1985 he joined the Alternative List for Democracy and Environmental Protection (AL), which was later affiliated with the Greens as the Berlin state association.
Former SPD Interior Minister Otto Schily once called Ströbele an "age radical", a "fundamentalist with crazy political positions". Ströbele himself made no secret of his convictions: "Unfortunately, we didn't achieve the revolution I wanted. We wanted a Soviet republic, not a democracy in which citizens are only asked questions every four years."
