Greens’ Odd Couple Lived in Own World Saving Globe : Germany: Party founder Petra Kelly was apparently shot by her fellow activist before he killed himself.

They wanted to save the world.

But after devoting their lives to peace, Petra Kelly and her lover, Gert Bastian, met violent deaths, which sent shock waves Tuesday through the international movement they had ignited.

Kelly, 44, was the American-raised peacenik who designed an “anti-party” political party, the Greens, in the West Germany of 1979 from a grab bag of feminist, leftist, pacifist and environmental activists. They went on to spawn Europe’s most powerful environmental movement, inspiring a worldwide proliferation of similar groups whose supporters today number in the millions.

The movement pushed even established political parties to pay attention to such issues as ozone depletion and global warming, the world’s rain forests, air and water pollution, nuclear safety and recycling.

In particular, Kelly, with her waiflike looks and searing sound bites, became the face and voice of Germany’s anti-nuclear campaign during the 1980s. The rebellious stepdaughter of a retired U.S. colonel and her ragtag band of followers gained fame and notoriety disrupting North Atlantic Treaty Organization exercises with sit-ins and songfests.

Yet a decade later, she was bitterly estranged from the party she co-founded, virtually forgotten by the mass media and worrying about how to scrape together enough money to support herself and a beloved grandmother.

She feared becoming dependent on her 69-year-old lover, Bastian, a retired general who helped her launch the Greens and continued to travel around the world with her, championing so many causes with such fervor that Petra would have to check herself into the hospital for exhaustion.

They lived in their own world, acquaintances said, but still, considering their former fame, it seemed sadly ironic that Kelly and Bastian, of all people, would lie dead in their own home for nearly three weeks before anyone bothered to look for them. Their bodies were found Monday night by a former neighbor.

Police said Tuesday that Bastian apparently shot Kelly in the head at point-blank range as she slept, then killed himself outside her bedroom door with the same .38-caliber pistol. Investigators have no idea why. Neither left behind any explanation for the world they wanted to save.

Friends and fellow Greens who had been in recent contact with the couple said they had not seemed distraught or depressed, and Kelly was already making plans to campaign for a seat in the European Parliament in 1994 elections.

“Both seemed a little bit tired,” said Eva Quistorp, who had known the pair since she helped to organize the Greens. Kelly had recruited Bastian for the Greens, and the blond hippie and graying general soon became the quixotic movement’s odd couple.

Both triumphantly sat in the Bundestag, or lower house of Parliament, in 1983, when the Greens won seats for the first time. With their ponytails and blue jeans, the leftists provided a brash counterpoint to the staid ranks of legislators.

A sickly child, Kelly was raised by her Bavarian grandmother before emigrating to the United States at the age of 12 with her German mother and Irish-American stepfather. She returned to Germany after graduating from American University in Washington with a degree in international relations. As a student activist, she worked for Democratic Sens. Hubert H. Humphrey and Robert F. Kennedy before returning to Europe.

When a half sister died of cancer in 1970 at the age of 10, Kelly became a passionate environmental activist, deeply interested in links between pollution and illness.

The anti-nuclear movement, which spread across the Continent and was capable of rallying half a million grass-roots demonstrators in Germany alone, made Kelly, with her fluent American English, a media darling.

Chancellor Helmut Kohl himself admitted earlier this month that the sheer numbers of anti-nuclear demonstrators at times had made him doubt his own commitment to NATO’s deployment of Pershing 2 and cruise missiles on German soil.

But Kelly’s celebrity quickly began to grate on fellow activists who resented her dominant role at the peaceful anti-nuclear protests.

Bastian’s own public protest of NATO’s strategy prompted his early retirement from the West German army. He founded a group called Retired Generals for Peace. And like other Greens, he was repeatedly arrested during peaceful blockades of U.S. military bases in the 1980s.

Fighting the recent rise of Germany’s extreme-right fringe had become a pet cause of both Kelly and Bastian. In a commentary he wrote shortly before his death, Bastian told of his horror over racist attacks against foreign refugees and asylum-seekers in Germany.

“Evil memories from my youth in the 1930s are awakened,” he wrote. “Like before, lust for violence, hate-filled fanaticism and merciless self-righteousness dominate. Only the targets of the beatings and murder have changed.”

Greens Chairman Ludger Volmer said he had spoken with Bastian frequently by telephone and detected nothing wrong.

“Petra Kelly and Gert Bastian always worked to the brink of physical and emotional exhaustion,” Volmer said, and the frail Kelly more than once ended up hospitalized.

The pair had distanced themselves from the party itself in recent years after Kelly, who twice chaired the Greens, refused to give up her seat halfway through her four-year term in Parliament, a “rotation” policy that the Greens had advocated in the interests of equality.

Detractors angrily muttered that Kelly had become egocentric, and infighting eventually splintered the party so badly that it could no longer muster enough votes to keep its voice in the Bundestag.

When the Greens lost their mandate in the 1990 elections, after opposing German unification, Kelly bitterly noted that even East Germany’s corrupt Communist Party had garnered more votes--enough, in fact, to replace the Greens.

Kelly tried unsuccessfully to reclaim the party chairmanship last year. But even without a party, Kelly and Bastian were never without a cause.

“They demonstrated in East Berlin’s Alexanderplatz against the Communist dictatorship and before the White House against medium-range missiles; they stood up against the Chinese government for religious freedom for the Tibetan people, and they fought with Indians and Australian aborigines against the destruction of their sacred ground,” recalled a statement Tuesday by Alliance ‘90, the eastern German cousin of the western Greens.

Police told a news conference Tuesday that there was no sign of a struggle inside the couple’s suburban Bonn apartment, and that autopsies indicated they died in either a murder-suicide or a suicide pact.

The single wound in Kelly’s temple suggested that she most likely died instantly in her sleep, police said.