Hans-Christian Ströbele

Hans-Christian Ströbele (7 June 1939 – 29 August 2022) was a lawyer and politician in Germany and a long-serving member of Alliance 90/The Greens. He was born in Halle (Saale), passed the Abitur in Marl, and from 1969 practised as a lawyer in Berlin. He sat in the Bundestag from 31 March 1985, when he succeeded Dirk Schneider under the Greens' rotation rule, and again without a break from 1998 until he left parliament in 2017. In 2002 he became the first candidate of the Greens to win a constituency seat, in Berlin-Kreuzberg, a mandate Der Spiegel reported that he then held across four legislative periods.

Before he entered parliament he was a defence lawyer identified with the extra-parliamentary left. The Bundestag's account of his career says he studied law and political science in Heidelberg and at the Free University of Berlin after military service with the Luftwaffe in Aurich, and that on 1 May 1969 he co-founded Berlin's Socialist Lawyers' Collective with Horst Mahler, Klaus Eschen and Ulrich K. Preuß. He later defended members of the Red Army Faction, among them Andreas Baader, Gudrun Ensslin and Ulrike Meinhof. In the Stammheim proceedings the court excluded him as counsel, and he was afterwards given a suspended sentence on the accusation that he had supported the imprisoned defendants, a charge he rejected for the rest of his life. In 1978 he was among the founders of the Berlin daily Die Tageszeitung.

He joined the Social Democratic Party of Germany in Berlin-Wilmersdorf in 1970 and later said he had been expelled after five years. By the late 1970s he was active in Berlin's Alternative List, and he took part in the Greens' founding congress in January 1980. On the party's left, he was a persistent critic of Joschka Fischer. Der Spiegel recorded his opposition to German participation in the Kosovo war, to the Bundeswehr mission in Afghanistan and to the Hartz IV labour-market reforms, and noted that he repeatedly voted against the line of his own parliamentary group. Deutsche Welle reported that posters in his Kreuzberg campaign carried the line "Ströbele wählen, Fischer quälen" ("Vote Ströbele, torment Fischer").

From 1998 he was a member of the parliamentary body that oversees Germany's intelligence services, and from 2014 he sat on the Bundestag committee of inquiry into surveillance by the National Security Agency. On 31 October 2013 he met Edward Snowden in Moscow for nearly three hours, together with the journalists John Goetz and Georg Mascolo. Snowden gave him a letter, which Ströbele also signed, offering to help establish the authenticity of the documents Snowden had disclosed and declining to testify on Russian soil. Ströbele's public image was tied to the bicycle he rode to parliament, often with a red scarf and white hair. In December 2016 he told his district association that he would not stand in 2017. He died in Berlin on 29 August 2022, aged 83; his lawyer Johannes Eisenberg said Ströbele had decided to reduce life-sustaining treatment and had remained fully conscious.

Early life and education

Family and childhood

Hans-Christian Ströbele was born on 7 June 1939; the Marler Zeitung names Halle (Saale), while in 2016 he placed the birth in Schkopau, beside the Buna works, and said the family left before he could remember much. His father, the chemist Rudolf Ströbele (1911–1988), held a senior post at the Buna Werke, an IG Farben synthetic-rubber plant, and was not called into the Wehrmacht. Ströbele said that American troops, pulling back as Soviet forces arrived, took the plant’s academics and their families west.

In Marl, Rudolf headed organic chemistry at the Chemische Werke Hüls from 1955 and received Prokura in 1957. The family lived in a company flat on Kampstraße in Marl-Drewer, among foremen as well as managers. His mother, Gabriele, née Zimmermann (1913–1995), was a sister of the broadcaster Herbert Zimmermann. Ströbele said she had studied law and that, after the first examination, she was refused a traineeship because women were expected to bear children; she had four. Zimmermann, known for his radio commentary on the 1954 World Cup final, visited from Hamburg, and Ströbele said he had wanted to be like him.

He attended the boys’ Albert-Schweitzer-Gymnasium, kept separate from the girls’ Geschwister-Scholl-Gymnasium next door, where two sisters were pupils. He later said he was weak in languages, better in history and German, and that the Abitur had nearly failed. Covering a 2010 reunion, the Marler Zeitung put him in the language stream’s class of 1960. Asked in 2020 about his father’s membership of the Nazi Party, he said it was barely discussed at home, and that never questioning his father was one of the mistakes of his life.

Studies, military service and West Berlin

He said he was conscripted in 1959, in the second cohort of the new Bundeswehr, and spent a year as a Luftwaffe gunner in Aurich, remaining a Kanonier der Reserve. He said he was already an Abiturient, difficult to square with a 1960 leaving date, and that former Wehrmacht NCOs still used the old songs and tone. He looked for exemptions, including a knee complaint, refused officer training, and, when a captain announced a promotion to Gefreiter before the battalion, declined it under the regulations he kept in his locker. He advised comrades, wrote some of their letters, and was elected Vertrauensmann. He later linked that service to a wish for less armed force, said he was not a pacifist by doctrine, and dated political commitment to 1967.

Heidelberg University records law and political science in the winter semester of 1960/61 and the summer semester of 1961, then study in Berlin. Seen alone, a performance there of Max Frisch’s Andorra was what he said first turned him sharply against Nazi ideology. In 1961, weeks after the Berlin Wall began to go up, he moved to West Berlin and the Free University of Berlin. For about two years he watched the first actions of the extra-parliamentary opposition without joining them, took his law examination after the minimum number of semesters, and began the Referendariat. In 1967 he and his wife married at Notre-Dame de Paris; he told Der Spiegel that the church ceremony was an “aufmüpfiger Akt,” not an act of faith.

He set the break on 2 June 1967, at demonstrations against Mohammad Reza Pahlavi. He reached Schöneberg town hall and the Deutsche Oper as crowds were already fleeing the police. That night a report that a student had stabbed an officer gave way to the news that a policeman had shot Benno Ohnesorg in the head at close range. The next day’s BZ showed a bleeding woman as the victim of a stone thrown by “Chaoten”; she said a police baton had struck her. Ströbele went to the lawyer Horst Mahler and offered unpaid help. He later said he had no Marxist education; the reporting had decided him, and his work as a political lawyer began there.

Legal practice and political trials

The Socialist Lawyers' Collective

Ströbele later dated his turn to political defense to 2 June 1967, when a police officer shot the student Benno Ohnesorg at a demonstration against the Shah of Iran in West Berlin. He told Deutschlandfunk that he had not been a demonstrator, but that the killing, and official attempts to blame the students, sent him as a trainee into the office of Horst Mahler. Der Spiegel placed that start at age 28. From 1967 he represented protesters, and he was admitted to the bar in 1969.

On 1 May 1969 he founded, with Mahler, Klaus Eschen and Ulrich K. Preuß, what a Bundestag portrait called the first and only Socialist Lawyers' Collective in Germany. Der Spiegel, which did not name Preuß, called it the First Socialist Lawyers' Collective. The obituary said he defended the communard Dieter Kunzelmann successfully, and that he also represented Mahler after Mahler had joined the Red Army Faction, and later Andreas Baader, Gudrun Ensslin and Ulrike Meinhof. The sign "Sozialistisches Anwaltskollektiv" came down after the bar treated the name as unfair competition; police seized a copy of it in a 1975 search.

RAF defense and the Stammheim proceedings

By the mid-1970s he was counsel for imprisoned RAF members, Baader among them, in the proceedings at Stuttgart-Stammheim. The main trial of the first generation opened on 21 May 1975 in a windowless courtroom beside Stammheim Prison. Baader, Ensslin, Meinhof and Jan-Carl Raspe were charged with murder and attempted murder over the May 1972 bombings; Holger Meins had died on hunger strike in 1974 and was absent.

Laws passed in 1974 limited multiple defense and allowed counsel to be excluded. Prisoners and lawyers continued a written circulation, the "info" system, which the legal historian Uwe Wesel described as coordination of the defense. Courts, he wrote, treated political content in the papers as support for a criminal organization, leading to exclusion and to criminal and disciplinary cases.

Ströbele, Klaus Croissant and Kurt Groenewold were removed from the Stammheim defense. A late-June 1975 Spiegel report treated the exclusion as already in effect and said the allegations, dated to 1973, were chiefly misuse of defense mail to keep prisoners in contact, the carrying of cell circulars, or the passing on of Baader's instructions. Ströbele was arrested in Berlin that month. The warrant, citing a risk of flight and his description of himself as a "comrade" and a "political defender," had been signed the previous Friday and held back; prosecutors then sought a temporary ban on his practicing. He spent 19 days in custody. Spiegel later placed the arrest on the steps of the Moabit criminal court.

The Berlin Kammergericht lifted the warrant for lack of flight risk. Its reasons, excerpted by Spiegel, called him a "tool of the group's will" but found that he had drawn a line he would not cross, quoting his circular of 22 February 1973 against treating lawyers as the revolution's spearhead, and Baader's June 1974 circular "die Flöte."

Conviction and its aftermath

In December 1976 prosecutors filed a 485-page indictment for support of a terrorist organization. The Berlin Regional Court gave judgment on 19 January 1981, file (502) 2 P KLs 5/77. On 24 March 1982 the Federal Court of Justice, in 3 StR 28/82, upheld the finding that imprisoned RAF members had, by the end of April 1973, formed a new criminal organization in custody. Help in building and running an information system directed at the group's continuing criminal aims could be support of that organization even without a measurable benefit, and so could help with a hunger strike meant to hold the group together. Help with courtroom statements that served the defense and were not themselves criminal was permitted defense work, not support under section 129 of the Criminal Code.

A different chamber gave judgment on 19 July 1982, file (510) 2 P KLs 5/77. Focus, publishing excerpts in 2017 from what it dated as that chamber's unpublished judgment of 9 July 1982, reported a conviction for supporting a criminal organization in 1973–75 and a suspended sentence of ten months. As quoted, the court called the case particularly serious because the organization was aimed at murder and explosives offenses; said that without his breach of a defender's duties, and that of others, the group in prison could not have held together; and said a faster trial would have required a ban on his practicing.

He denied the accusation for the rest of his life. Writing on Abgeordnetenwatch, he said the ten-month sentence became final in 1983, was later remitted, and was deleted from the criminal register; that he had not been charged with smuggling notes to the underground; and that the information system, run from a co-counsel's office in Hamburg, had been a way to coordinate a joint defense then still lawful and to give isolated prisoners something to read. Honor courts, he wrote, twice refused in 1975 to bar him from practice, and he remained admitted without interruption from 1969. Focus quoted his website: he had considered the work right and necessary then and did not see it much differently later. In 2009 he told Focus that documents he said he had not known looked "problematic" in hindsight, and called the system a "difficult chapter"; the magazine reported that his claim to have been convicted over hunger strikes and press conferences did not match the files. To Spiegel in 1989 he said he had been punished for committing himself too strongly to his clients. The same profile recorded that he skipped a lawyers' hunger strike outside the Federal Court of Justice and went to eat, and that Baader had mocked him as a "liberal manager."

Die tageszeitung

Founding

die tageszeitung (taz) was one project among the undogmatic left's attempts, after the German Autumn, to start a daily of its own. Michael Sontheimer, a founder who later joined Der Spiegel, wrote that radicals at the 1977 Frankfurt Book Fair had asked whether such a paper could break what they called a news blackout in the established press. Earlier plans for a left daily in West Berlin, set against Axel Springer's position there, had not been carried out. In January 1978 the idea was presented at the Tunix congress in Berlin, among others by Hans-Christian Ströbele and Günter Wallraff.

Initiative groups formed in about thirty cities. The circle started in Frankfurt, at the Informationsdienst für die Verbreitung unterbliebener Nachrichten, and moved to Berlin for subsidies under the Berlinförderungsgesetz. A trial issue dated 22 September 1978 reached kiosks on 27 September; ten trial issues preceded the first daily, produced on 16 April 1979 on a factory floor in Wedding and sold the next day.

Ströbele's bare title, "die tageszeitung," beat names such as "Sumpfblüte" and "Radikale Allgemeine." He did not join the staff. Ströbele later said the earliest meetings were in his law office and were about how to pay for the paper: advance subscriptions were sold before any copy existed. In 2017 he told the Bundestag he had given the project perhaps two months; he told Sontheimer he had expected it to fold within half a year. The aim, he said, was an undogmatic, left and radical daily, not another publication of the communist cadre groups. The carrier was the association "Freunde der alternativen Tageszeitung." About 6,500 subscribers had been found against a plan of 20,000.

Cooperative and later relationship

In 1991 the association, about 200 members, faced losses again. Der Spiegel reported a second-quarter deficit of 560,000 marks and a circulation of about 60,000. Much of the newsroom wanted outside investors through a limited company; some editors spoke of an offer of 30 million marks. At the October plenum Ströbele set other motions aside, and a proposal leaving the rescue with the board passed by 80 votes to 56. Editor Götz Aly called him and manager Karl-Heinz Ruch a "mafia."

Spiegel tied the next step to Ströbele as well: a cooperative of staff and readers, with shares of 1,000 to 50,000 marks meant to raise at least a million, and ownership passing from the association to the investors. Only employee-members would elect the board, the magazine noted, and it treated the plan as a way to preserve a self-managed image the paper had outgrown. Co-founder Max Thomas Mehr called the legal dispute a code for whether to abandon "every stereotype of being left." The cooperative was entered in the Berlin register as of 1 June 1992. Deutschlandfunk later credited reader capital with easing the shortage of money. By 2009 Sontheimer counted nearly 60,000 copies and 8,453 members; in 2012 the paper put membership near 11,700 and paid-in capital near 14 million euros. Ströbele was one of the early prominent members. In 2018 he said many of its texts had become too mainstream, and that other viewpoints were too little seen. In 2017 he told the Bundestag that it still appeared as a cooperative, with a circulation he put above 50,000.

From the Alternative List to the Greens

Break with the SPD

In 1970 Ströbele joined the Social Democratic Party of Germany in Berlin-Wilmersdorf. He later said that, as a lawyer and adviser to the New Left, he had wanted a socialist transformation of society and had taken membership seriously in order to carry those demands into institutions, including a Social Democracy that still won absolute majorities. He stayed five years. In March 1975 the party expelled him, then a district delegate, "wegen schwerer Schädigung der Partei," because he had given legal assistance to the core of the Red Army Faction, among his clients Ulrike Meinhof and Andreas Baader. He kept the membership card.

The Alternative List in Berlin

On 5 October 1978 about 3,500 people met at the Neue Welt on the Hasenheide to constitute the Alternative Liste für Demokratie und Umweltschutz (AL) as an electoral list, not a conventional party. The crowd mixed movement activists, radical trade unionists, communists and socialists. Proposals to bar members of the Maoist "K-groups" by name failed: incompatibility resolutions were rejected, though parties could not themselves be carriers or members, and only a little over 300 people joined at once. Otto Schily told Der Abend that the evening had felt like a KPD congress and that he wanted nothing more to do with the list. A 2017 Bundestag portrait places Ströbele, with Schily, among the lawyers active in Berlin as the list was being formed.

The AL took 3.7 percent in the 1979 Abgeordnetenhaus election and missed the five-percent threshold, then 7.2 percent in the 1981 early election after a building-finance scandal, and 10.6 percent in 1985. On 29 January 1989, in the last election in West Berlin, it received 11.8 percent and 17 seats. Walter Momper's SPD, with 55 seats, had nearly ruled out an alliance, yet SPD and AL together had a majority against the CDU, also on 55 seats, and the Republicans, with 11. Der Spiegel described Ströbele, an AL executive not generally counted among the Realos, as the promoter of the talks; at the Greens' Duisburg assembly he called the opening a "Jahrhundertchance." The coalition that followed was West Berlin's first red-green government. It ended in November 1990 after SPD senators ordered the clearance of occupied houses on Mainzer Straße in Friedrichshain and the AL withdrew. Deutsche Welle's 2022 obituary later called him an architect of that alliance.

Federal roles and the 1990–91 controversy

On 12 and 13 January 1980, 1,004 delegates met in the Karlsruhe Stadthalle to turn the "Sonstige Politische Vereinigung Die Grünen" into the federal party Die Grünen. Herbert Gruhl, until shortly before a CDU member of the Bundestag, opened a gathering that already contained Bunte Listen, alternative groups, state associations, K-groups, Social Democrats and Christian Democrats. Rudolf Bahro appealed for tolerance among incompatible currents. A ban on dual membership could not be carried against the K-groups, and only on 13 January, as delegates rushed for the last trains, did a majority vote the party into existence. The Bundestag portrait records that Ströbele recalled those early congresses, including sitting through debates with knitting needles, not that he directed the founding.

At a congress in Dortmund in June 1990, delegates elected him one of three equal speakers, with Heide Rühle and Renate Damus, ahead of the incumbent Ralf Fücks of the "Grüner Aufbruch." Realos called the result revenge for Hagen, where an attempt to sideline the left had failed. Ströbele said the Greens were the only clear opposition and would do everything "um Kohl vom Thron zu holen." The congress also steered toward a link with the East German Greens and citizens' movements.

The term ended during the 1991 Gulf War. Before a board delegation left for Israel, Ströbele told Henryk M. Broder, in an interview for the Süddeutsche Zeitung also reported in the Jerusalem Post, that Iraqi missile attacks were "die logische, fast zwingende Konsequenz der israelischen Politik den Palästinensern und den arabischen Staaten gegenüber." He also criticized German payments for Patriot missiles, which he did not regard as purely defensive. In Jerusalem the Foreign Ministry and the Knesset cancelled meetings, Peace Now demanded a statement, and anonymous death threats followed. The delegation broke off the trip. Ströbele said the interview had not been authorized and that he had been misunderstood, and called the attacks "grausam, terroristisch und ein schweres Verbrechen." On 22 February 1991 he resigned as speaker: "Es ist mir nicht mehr möglich, die Interessen der Grünen in Israel und der Bundesrepublik glaubhaft zu vertreten." Der Spiegel reported that the Israeli journalist Jigal Avidan had a recording and that Broder said the sentence had been repeated. Joschka Fischer said many Greens forgot that in Israel they were seen first as Germans. Konrad Weiß of Alliance 90 said the party's antizionism was often concealed antisemitism.

Bundestag career and the Kreuzberg mandate

Rotation and the first term

When the Greens entered the Bundestag in 1983, the party had adopted a rotation rule under which deputies were to hold a seat for only two years and then pass it on. Two years into the tenth legislative period, a different group of Green members was sitting in Bonn. Hans-Christian Ströbele took his seat on 31 March 1985 as successor to Dirk Schneider and remained a member until 1987. He joined the investigative committee on incidents at the Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution after a senior intelligence officer had defected to East Germany.

Four direct mandates

Ströbele returned in 1998 and then sat continuously for five legislative periods. The Berlin Greens had placed Andrea Fischer first on the state list, Ströbele second and Franziska Eichstädt-Bohlig third. In the constituency Berlin-Kreuzberg – Schöneberg he took 41,214 first votes, 29.6 percent of 139,331 valid ballots, behind the Social Democratic Party candidate Eckhardt Barthel on 53,660 (38.5 percent), and so entered through the list rather than a constituency seat. The Greens’ Berlin second-vote share was 11.3 percent, against 6.7 percent nationally.

In January 2002 he lost the Berlin list ballot to Werner Schulz and was left without a list place, so a constituency win was his only route back. The new constituency 84, Berlin-Friedrichshain – Kreuzberg – Prenzlauer Berg-Ost, joined Friedrichshain, Kreuzberg and the east of Prenzlauer Berg. His posters carried the line “Ströbele wählen heißt Fischer quälen” (“Voting for Ströbele means tormenting Fischer”), aimed at Foreign Minister Joschka Fischer; Ströbele said the slogan should not be over-read and that he was campaigning alongside the Greens, not against them. On 22 September 2002 he won 49,204 first votes, 31.6 percent of 155,867 valid votes, ahead of Andreas Matthae (SPD) on 45,400 (29.1 percent), Bärbel Grygier of the Party of Democratic Socialism on 33,324 (21.4 percent) and Kurt Wansner of the Christian Democratic Union on 20,321 (13.0 percent). Turnout was 75.5 percent. It was the first constituency seat a Green candidate had won in a federal election.

In 2005 the Greens took 69,988 first votes there, 43.3 percent of 161,804 valid votes, with the SPD second on 20.7 percent; the Bundestag’s biography for that term lists him as the directly elected member for constituency 84. In September 2008 he told his Kreuzberg local party that he would run again. In 2009 the Green first-vote total rose to 73,897, 46.7 percent of 158,289, the highest share in his four wins, with Die Linke second on 17.6 percent and the SPD on 16.7 percent. In 2013 the seat was renumbered 83, Berlin-Friedrichshain-Kreuzberg – Prenzlauer Berg Ost. Ströbele was returned with 66,056 first votes, 39.9 percent of 165,731, 6.8 points below 2009; the SPD followed on 18.0 percent and Die Linke on 17.2 percent. The federal returning officer’s alphabetical list of those elected records him for constituency 83 at 39.9 percent and does not show a state-list place. As of June 2017, before that year’s election, the Bundestag described him as the only deputy of Alliance 90/The Greens who had won a direct mandate. He did not stand again in 2017.

Roles in the parliamentary group

After the 2002 election the Green Bundestag group chose four deputy chairs, who were at the same time coordinators of its four policy working groups. Ströbele was elected with 28 of 52 votes. His portfolio was interior policy, law, education, women and youth; the Bundestag biography titles the post deputy chair and coordinator of Working Group III, “Democracy, Law and Social Policy,” and dates it from October 2002 to October 2005. In September 2004 the four deputies were re-elected. Ströbele, described in the report as the only distinctly left-wing figure in the group leadership, received the weakest result, 24 of 37 votes, after joining demonstrations against the Hartz IV legislation that his own party had helped pass. The two chairs nevertheless supported him. The published biography did not extend the deputy chairmanship past October 2005. In the following legislative period the same biography listed him as a full member of the Legal Affairs Committee, the Committee for the Scrutiny of Elections, the Parliamentary Control Panel and the first investigative committee.

Civil liberties and disputes inside the Greens

Security law and data protection

From 1998, under the Social Democratic Party of Germany and Alliance 90/The Greens, Ströbele reviewed security bills from Interior Minister Otto Schily. He later said colleagues called them, somewhat disrespectfully, "Otto catalogues," and that he had found the Aviation Security Act, aimed at attacks with hijacked aircraft, very difficult. The Bundestag passed it on 18 June 2004 by show of hands, the coalition for and the CDU/CSU, the FDP and non-attached members against; it was not a roll-call vote. Die Welt reported that the act let the defence minister, as a last resort, order a hijacked aircraft shot down, and that the Union had wanted a constitutional amendment first.

On 15 February 2006 the Federal Constitutional Court voided §14(3). The First Senate held that Article 35 of the Basic Law did not allow the armed forces to use specifically military weapons in a disaster, and that killing uninvolved people on board to save others treated them as objects, contrary to the right to life and to human dignity. Two days later Ströbele said the Green parliamentary group had voted for the law in 2004 and that he had helped draft the paragraph. He welcomed the judgment: the group had "wanted the right thing" but written the wrong formula, because Schily's side had wanted a shoot-down power even for passenger aircraft. He said he had not read "direct armed force" as covering uninvolved passengers.

A 2017 Bundestag interview has him say that, facing the same decision again, he would no longer agree. That sentence follows both the aviation act and a different statute, the counter-terrorism powers of the Federal Criminal Police Office. The rulings are separate. In 2006 the court nullified the shoot-down clause. On 20 April 2016 it held that secret BKA surveillance against international terrorism was in principle compatible with fundamental rights, but that many rules added in 2008, in force from 1 January 2009, failed proportionality and had to be repaired by 30 June 2018. The Bundestag had passed that reform by 375 votes to 168, with six abstentions; the Greens voted against. Nine Green members around Ströbele had challenged it. He called the judgment a heavy defeat for the grand coalition, though the preventive role itself was left standing.

He was blunter about surveillance he had not helped to pass. After 2004 figures showed acoustic bugging of homes ("großer Lauschangriff") in only ten proceedings, half without result and more than 60 percent unrelated to organized crime—the reason given for the 1998 constitutional change—he called it a discontinued model that should be wound up. On data retention he told the Bundestag on 6 July 2007 of a paradigm shift "that we will not go along with": the communications traces of 80 million people were not to be stored without suspicion. At the Berlin rally "Freiheit statt Angst" on 6 November 2007 he adapted an old census slogan—"We will not let ourselves be stored"—and said the bill treated the population as potential offenders.

Dissent on domestic policy

Der Spiegel, reporting his death, called him a figure of the Greens' left wing who clashed with party colleagues, including Joschka Fischer. It listed his opposition to the Kosovo war, the Afghanistan deployment and the Hartz IV reforms, and said he repeatedly voted against his group's line. The deployments belong with his foreign-policy record. The domestic breach set out at the time was Hartz IV.

On 17 October 2003, after concessions to critics inside Chancellor Gerhard Schröder's coalition, the Bundestag passed the merger of unemployment assistance and social assistance into Arbeitslosengeld II by 306 votes to 291, with one abstention. The Green who had said he would abstain was Werner Schulz. The mediation committee then dropped the link between acceptable pay and the local customary wage. On 19 December twelve Social Democratic and Green members voted no. Die Welt named six Greens—Ströbele, Winfried Hermann, Jutta Dümpe-Krüger, Werner Schulz, Peter Hettlich and Markus Kurth. Fischer had urged sceptics the night before not to turn the Bundesrat bargain into a public defeat. The six, the paper wrote, refused a law they saw as wage dumping; they had backed the third reading only because of the earlier concession on what work the long-term unemployed could be required to accept.

Foreign and security policy

Deployments and the Kosovo and Afghanistan debates

In the first federal government of the Social Democratic Party of Germany and Alliance 90/The Greens, Ströbele repeatedly voted against his parliamentary group, and against Foreign Minister Joschka Fischer, on deployments of the Bundeswehr. On 25 February 1999 the Bundestag approved, by 553 to 41 with 10 abstentions, German participation in implementing a Rambouillet agreement for Kosovo. Ströbele voted no, saying the resolution authorized combat units for Yugoslavia without another parliamentary decision or a legal basis, because the Serbian government had not consented. The day after NATO bombing began, on 25 March 1999, he interrupted unrelated business and said: "Ich schäme mich für mein Land, das jetzt wieder im Kosovo Krieg führt und das wieder Bomben auf Belgrad wirft." The next day Gernot Erler of the SPD said Ströbele was not speaking for the Green majority.

At a special congress in Bielefeld on 13 May 1999, a motion associated with Ströbele for an immediate, unconditional end to the bombing received 318 votes. The executive's call for a time-limited pause, tied to Fischer's peace plan, passed with 444. Fischer had said he would not carry out a decision simply to stop the attacks. On 11 June the Bundestag approved a German contribution to the Kosovo security presence, later KFOR, by 505 to 24, with 11 abstentions. Ströbele abstained. He did not reject peacekeeping, credited the foreign minister and the new United Nations mandate, and refused any retrospective justification of bombing he said had killed thousands and lacked a legal basis.

On 16 November 2001 he was one of four Greens, with Annelie Buntenbach, Winfried Hermann and Christian Simmert, to vote no when Chancellor Gerhard Schröder tied Operation Enduring Freedom to a confidence vote. It passed by 336 to 326. On 22 December he voted for the first ISAF mandate, adopted by 538 to 35, with eight abstentions. He said he was voting not to join the war, which he still rejected, but for a mission the UN had negotiated and would supervise. He did not repeat that yes. When ISAF was extended on 28 January 2011 by 420 to 116, with 43 abstentions, he voted no; the Green group split, 9 in favor, 22 against and 33 abstaining. Deutsche Welle later described him as opposed to almost every Bundeswehr mission abroad, with Afghanistan the exception.

After Germany abstained on UN authorization of the 2011 intervention in Libya and refused a combat role, answers to his questions said that 103 German soldiers in NATO headquarters had helped run the operation, including target selection. He called that a contradiction of the public line and a deployment that required Bundestag consent. On 4 December 2015 the House approved forces against the Islamic State in Syria and northern Iraq by 445 to 145, with seven abstentions. Ströbele voted no, writing that the mission was politically and militarily wrong and counterproductive because civilian deaths would feed hatred. In his last interview with Der Spiegel, in 2022, he said he no longer recognized his party and opposed heavy weapons for Ukraine. Deutsche Welle reported his strong skepticism of the deliveries Green ministers were urging in the war against Russia.

Earlier international positions

He was not a pacifist as such. In 1980 he joined an appeal for weapons for left-wing guerrillas in El Salvador. On 3 November 1980 Die Tageszeitung, signed "the majority in the taz," printed the front-page call "Waffen für El Salvador," asking readers to finance the Farabundo Martí National Liberation Front against the military government. Ströbele, a board member of the publishers' association, administered the account. By the 1992 peace about 4.7 million Deutsche marks had been raised. Pacifists in the peace movement, then campaigning against Pershing II and cruise missiles, objected to collecting money for arms. In 2013, 2,222.62 euros remained; he and the taz supervisory board gave them to Pro Búsqueda, which searches for children who disappeared in the war.

Intelligence oversight and the Snowden meeting

The Parliamentary Control Panel

The Bundestag's Parliamentary Control Panel (Parlamentarisches Kontrollgremium) oversees the federal government's direction of the Federal Intelligence Service, the Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution and the Military Counterintelligence Service. Its members are elected by a majority of the whole house and are bound to secrecy. Article 45d of the Basic Law, added in July 2009, requires the Bundestag to appoint the panel.

On 30 June 1999 the Bundestag elected Hans-Christian Ströbele on a second ballot, by 349 votes to 227, after a ballot the week before failed when some Social Democrats withheld support. A Bundestag profile in June 2017 still listed him as a member since the parliament elected in 1998.

He reported his Moscow meeting to a special sitting on 6 November 2013, held amid reports that the National Security Agency had monitored Chancellor Angela Merkel's mobile phone. Ströbele said Edward Snowden would not testify in Moscow, where Russian conditions could limit what he disclosed, and would speak to an inquiry or to German judicial authorities only if given asylum or a right to stay. Interior Minister Hans-Peter Friedrich of the Christian Social Union rejected asylum, arguing that Snowden was not a victim of political persecution, and the panel's chair, Thomas Oppermann, said a hearing in Germany was "not up for discussion."

The NSA committee

On 20 March 2014 the Bundestag unanimously established the 1st Committee of Inquiry of the 18th electoral term (Drucksache 18/843) to investigate foreign surveillance in Germany and any German involvement. Of eight members — four from the Christian Democratic Union/CSU, two from the SPD, and one each from Die Linke and Alliance 90/The Greens — the Greens' full seat and spokesperson's role went to Konstantin von Notz. Ströbele sat as von Notz's substitute from 2014. In the debate he pressed for Snowden to be heard, and for Merkel as "the most important victim."

On 8 May 2014 the committee voted unanimously to question Snowden, but the coalition separated that vote from the opposition demand that the hearing be held in Germany and preferred a video link. On 26 June the majority blocked a German hearing and set a video examination for 11 September in Russia, a format Snowden had already refused. Coalition speakers cited the extradition treaty and a U.S. arrest request; von Notz called the decision sabotage.

The Greens and the Left asked the Federal Court of Justice to force a vote on requesting governmental help with entry, residence and protection from extradition. An investigating judge granted the application on 11 November 2016; on 23 February 2017 the 3rd Criminal Senate dismissed it as inadmissible, holding that only a minority representing at least a quarter of the Bundestag — not merely a quarter of the committee — could compel evidence against the majority. Snowden never testified, in person or by video. Ströbele later told the Süddeutsche Zeitung that the committee had unanimously wanted him as a witness and that only the government and the coalition had stopped a summons to Berlin.

When the report (Drucksache 18/12850) was debated on 28 June 2017, Ströbele said, "It is all true. Edward Snowden is right," and asserted that the NSA had collected data in bulk from people in Germany, including German citizens, without a legal basis, while the BND had believed its own conduct must not be reported to parliament. SPD spokesperson Christian Flisek replied that claims of fundamental-rights violations committed millions of times against German citizens had not been confirmed.

The Moscow meeting

On Thursday, 31 October 2013, Ströbele met Edward Snowden for almost three hours at an undisclosed address in Moscow, with John Goetz of ARD and Georg Mascolo, a former editor-in-chief of Der Spiegel. ARD broadcast footage that night.

Snowden, then under temporary asylum in Russia, handed Ströbele a letter dated that day, which Ströbele also signed. It began "To whom it may concern," described his work for the NSA, the Central Intelligence Agency and the Defense Intelligence Agency, and called the U.S. response a "severe and sustained campaign of persecution." Once that "humanitarian situation" was resolved, he wrote, he would help establish the truth and authenticity of the published documents, and he looked forward to speaking "in your country" — not, as he made clear in the meeting, on Russian soil.

At a press conference in Berlin on 1 November, Ströbele said Snowden would come to Germany if assured of a safe stay afterwards in Germany or a comparable country. Friedrich said that if Snowden was ready to talk to German authorities, a way would be found, reversing the government's earlier refusal to question him. Snowden's lawyer Anatoly Kucherena told Interfax that travel would forfeit the temporary asylum and that Snowden could not disclose classified information while in Russia. The Justice Ministry confirmed that the United States had already lodged a precautionary extradition request.

Public image, final years and legacy

Persona and constituency style

Ströbele's public figure barely changed: white hair, a red scarf, and a bicycle. The Bundestag archive recorded that he rode to parliament every day for 19 years. Deutsche Welle described him crossing Berlin that way, and Die Welt treated the scarf, the bright white hair and the bicycle as his trademarks.

The look belonged to a constituency, not a single campaign. He was the only candidate of Alliance 90/The Greens to win a Bundestag seat by direct mandate, holding Friedrichshain-Kreuzberg four times in a row. He was called the "König von Kreuzberg," though the Tagesspiegel noted that he lived in Moabit, nearer parliament, not Kreuzberg. Thomas Schmid described wooden clogs year-round and an old bicycle ridden because Ströbele thought it right, not as a demonstration. Passed over in 2002 for a promising list place, he ran in the constituency under the slogan "Ströbele wählen heißt Fischer quälen," aimed at Joschka Fischer. The Neue Zürcher Zeitung later quoted him as saying the direct mandate let him be "the Green conscience."

Withdrawal, illness and death

On 13 December 2016 he told the Friedrichshain-Kreuzberg district association that he would not stand in 2017, because another five stressful years were too much. A Bundestag text of 6 June 2017 quoted him saying he was slowing down and losing concentration, while insisting he would stay active until the end of the term and would not become unpolitical overnight. The Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung read the decision as a concession to cancer, not as a wish for retirement. He left parliament in 2017, at 78, and Die Welt reported that he at first kept his Berlin law practice.

He died on 29 August 2022, aged 83. Die tageszeitung, which he had helped to found, reported the death first; Der Spiegel confirmed it from party circles. His lawyer, Johannes Eisenberg, said Ströbele had chosen not to continue the suffering his illnesses imposed, had reduced life-sustaining measures, and remained fully conscious: "Nicht der Geist, der Körper wurde ihm zur Qual und hat ihn am 29. August 2022 verlassen." Schmid placed the death in his Berlin apartment; the Neue Zürcher Zeitung called it the end of a struggle with cancer and noted a final tweet, days earlier, warning of nuclear war with Russia. In May 2022 he had told the Neue Osnabrücker Zeitung that further arms deliveries to Ukraine would harden the fighting and kill more people, and that the Greens should ask whether they still stood with the peace movement.

Assessment

Green colleagues praised a stubbornness that had also irritated them. Bundestag vice president Katrin Göring-Eckardt called him a "Querkopf und Freigeist," and Deutsche Welle reported that Vice Chancellor Robert Habeck had been impressed by his straightness. Co-chair Omid Nouripour wrote that the party was losing "eine Ikone des Kampfs für Demokratie und Frieden." Otto Schily, later federal interior minister, called him a legend while noting their disagreement over Schily's policy in that office.

Other assessments were sharper. Reviewing Stefan Reinecke's 2016 Ströbele. Die Biografie, Michael Sontheimer wrote in Der Spiegel that Reinecke faulted Ströbele for not distancing himself more sharply from his Red Army Faction clients, for standing aside from reunification, and for still voting against Bundeswehr deployments. Ströbele, unhappy with some of those judgments, called the book an incentive to write an autobiography; Sontheimer's own view was that the same obstinacy made him singular. Schmid granted the consistency and rejected the politics: refusing reunification had not been wise, and dissolving the Bundeswehr and the domestic intelligence service would not have left Germany safer, yet Ströbele's late answer to what he would change was that he would do it the same way again. Deutsche Welle added that he was not a simple pacifist: in 1980 he joined an appeal for weapons for left-wing guerrillas in El Salvador, even as he opposed nearly every later Bundeswehr mission and, in 2022, arms shipments to Ukraine.