Status: 08/31/2022 11:23 am
The Green politician Hans-Christian Ströbele is dead. He died on Monday at the age of 83 after a long illness, as his lawyer announced.
Hans-Christian Ströbele, a member of the Bundestag for many years, died at the age of 83 after a long illness. This was announced by his lawyer Johannes Eisenberg.
In a statement, Eisenberg wrote: “He decided for himself that he no longer wanted to continue the long ordeal that his illness had imposed on him and reduced life-support measures. He was fully conscious to the end. Not the spirit became the body torment him and left him on August 29, 2022.”
Advocate for RAF members
In the 1970s, Ströbele, who was born in Halle an der Saale, worked as a lawyer for RAF members and defended the leading RAF figures Andreas Baader, Gudrun Ensslin and Ulrike Meinhof, among others. He joined the SPD, but was expelled after four years because he received a suspended sentence for his legal work for supporting a criminal organization. In 1978, he and others founded the left-leaning daily newspaper “taz”.
Green politician Hans-Christian Ströbele died at the age of 83 – an obituary
Kerstin Breinig, RBB, tagesschau24 11:00 a.m., August 31, 2022
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.
rebel in his own party
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.