The Green politician Hans-Christian Ströbele is dead. He died on Monday at the age of 83, as his lawyer Johannes Eisenberg announced on Wednesday. The former RAF lawyer Ströbele, whose trademarks were a red scarf, bright white hair and his bicycle, was the first Green to be elected to the Bundestag by direct mandate in the Friedrichshain-Kreuzberg constituency in Berlin in 2002 and thus went down in party history. Ströbele co-founded the Greens and sat in the Bundestag for 21 years.
He only left active politics in 2017, at the age of 78, but initially continued to run his law firm in Berlin. Before joining the Greens, he was active in what was then the Extra-Parliamentary Opposition (APO). Together with the later Federal Interior Minister Otto Schily and the later right-wing extremist Horst Mahler, he first defended activists of the student movement as a lawyer, then also terrorists of the Red Army Faction (RAF).
The son of a chemist from Halle an der Saale was a symbolic figure, especially for the left wing of the Greens, and never shied away from confrontations with his own party friends – for example with the former foreign minister and vice chancellor Joschka Fischer. Ströbele was against German participation in the Kosovo war, the deployment of the German armed forces in Afghanistan and the Hartz IV reforms. In Parliament, he repeatedly voted against the line of his group.
In recent years in the Bundestag, Ströbele has devoted himself intensively to the subject of secret services and made headlines with a visit to US whistleblower Edward Snowden in Moscow.
Attorney Eisenberg wrote in his statement: “He decided for 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. He was fully conscious to the end. Not the spirit became the body torment him and left him on August 29, 2022.”
