Messenger of Hope : She gave clear voice to ideals of nonviolence and environmental sanity : THE LIFE AND DEATH OF PETRA KELLY, <i> By Sara Parkin (Pandora/HarperCollins San Francisco: $22; 272 pp</i> .<i> )</i>

There are certain women whose combination of mediagenic good-looks, natural intelligence and passionate commitment to social change have made them both symbols and leaders of the radical movements of our times, women such as Angela Davis in the United States, Bernadette Devlin of Ireland and the Green Party’s Petra Kelly. But Kelly may have been unique in giving clear voice to the ideals of non-violence, feminism and environmental sanity in the midst of the 1980s, a decade more often marked by greed and nuclear brinkmanship.

“She was such a believable person, emotional and honest, so unlike all them others, I’m sorry she’s gone,” said a German farmer stunned, like millions of other citizens, by her violent murder in the fall of 1992.

The irony of course is that in her personal life Petra Kelly was often wracked with uncertainties and fears, tended to form overly dependent relationships with much older men and was killed by a gun she’d allowed into her home even as she continued to preach the non-violent creed of Martin Luther King (one of her two heroes, along with Rosa Luxemburg, a German revolutionary leader of the 1920s who criticized Lenin for his male chauvinism).

“The Life and Death of Petra Kelly” traces the personal and political development of this extraordinary woman from her birth amid the physical and moral rubble of postwar Germany, through her emergence as a tireless leader of the international Green movement to her murder at age 44 at the hands of her 69-year-old lover, ex-Wehrmacht General Gert Bastian.

Written by a former British colleague and friend Sara Parkin, Petra Kelly’s story could have made a fascinating tale of the living contradictions between a woman’s personal demons and political ideals, of the struggle of a dissident leader attempting to lead a popular movement into parliamentary politics without compromising its principals, even as a chilling true-crime tale of obsessive love and murder. Unfortunately much of what this volume provides is a dryly written history of the life and works of Petra Kelly, complete with separate chronologies, glossaries and listings of her books, chapters, articles and major speeches.

Parkin does a competent job of retracing Kelly’s early life, suggesting some of the basis for her later insecurities. Abandoned by her father at the age of 6, Petra Kelly was educated by Catholic nuns, raised largely by her grandmother while her mother worked to support the family. At age 11, Petra had to leave her grandmother when her mother married an American army officer who moved them to Fort Benning, Ga. Once settled in the U.S., Petra became a classic overachiever; cheerleader, member of the student senate, scholarship winner. Despite physical pain from lifelong kidney ailments and the emotional trauma associated with the death of her younger half-sister Grace, Petra was able to maintain an almost maniacal focus on achievement.

But it’s as her need to excel began to find expression in the turbulent politics of the 1960s that Parkin’s profile begins to falter, giving us more positive spin than political analysis. On the one hand Petra “was very attracted to a clear, uncomplicated opposition to all that was bad--racial discrimination, the Vietnam war, heartless bureaucracy,” on the other hand she became a supporter and personal confidant of Vice President Hubert Humphrey in his 1968 bid for the presidency, hardly the candidate of the ‘60s youth culture. We’re told of her bitter disappointment at Humphrey’s defeat but nothing of her reaction to the Chicago democratic convention riots that doomed his candidacy.

Petra’s return to Europe for postgraduate study and involvement in European Federalist politics is said to have opened her eyes to sex discrimination (of 1,625 top posts in the European Commission only 99 were held by women). At the same time she began an affair with the 65-year-old married EC president Sicco Mansholt, the first of a number of affairs with politically powerful older men.

Her one uncompromising love, however, was the adrenaline-charged give-and-take of the anti-nuclear and environmental movements that formed the basis of the German Green Party she would help found, inspire and lead into the Bundestag, the German Parliament, in 1983. Unfortunately, her growing political involvement with “Die Grunen” was paralleled by a growing dependence on Gert Bastian, a former NATO general who quit the military to protest deployment of Cruise missiles in Europe. As brilliant, romantic and mercurial as Petra was, Bastian was plodding, methodical and obsessive. He seemed strangely willing to surrender his identity in order to meet her needs and bind her closer to him--until finally something inside of him must have snapped.

On Oct. 1, 1992, using a two-shot .38 derringer, Bastian shot Petra in the head as she slept in their small apartment upstairs bedroom. Then he turned the gun on himself.

Parkin’s theory--that Bastian killed his lover because he feared exposure as an informant for the STASI, the former East German secret police, and feared Petra’s subsequent disgust at and rejection of him--is interesting, but lacking in any documentary evidence. Given the many conspiracy theories that surfaced after their deaths, she might also have provided more forensic detail on the blood-splatter and powder-burn evidence that confirmed that Bastian was in fact the murderer.

A greater failing is Parkin’s inability to define more accurately Petra Kelly’s political role in the rise and fall of the Greens or to make important historic junctures come to life, such as her address to a rally of 350,000 peace activists in Bonn, or her involvement with East German dissidents who helped topple the Berlin Wall. When asked to describe herself, Petra Kelly would laugh and reply: “intuitive, intense and subversive.” Parkin’s academically dispassionate book would feel more substantial if it contained more of that Petra Kelly.

Shortly before his death, Nobel laureate Heinrich Boll told the frenetic Petra through a mutual friend that se should not work so hard, because “in the future we will need her.” Today, amid widespread political cynicism and dissolution, Petra Kelly and her message of hope through constructive engagement are needed more than ever.