LAST TUESDAY night, after a hectic week of speeches, meetings and electioneering, Petra Kelly, 34, collapsed in nervous exhaustion. Desperately pale and breathless, she was taken to a Munich hospital. As she lay there recovering, reporters stalked the corridors, eager for word of her progress.
Germany's intense interest in Kelly - the "appealing waif" of politics as she is known - is understandable. As leader of the increasingly popular "Greens", the upstart party of ecologists and pacifists which has been remarkably popular in recent state elections, she could become a king-maker at the next election, holding the balance of power between Germany's two biggest political parties, the Christian Democrats and the Social Democrats.
There were, however, few get-well cards from the establishment. Her party was dismissed by one robust Bavarian conservative last week as a "bunch of Commies, nut cutlet freaks and poofs of no consequence". More mildly, Willy Brandt accuses her of a lack of maturity.
None of this greatly worried Kelly. By Friday she felt well enough to take a stroll, to test the radically altered political atmosphere, and to talk to journalists.
A pale and fragile figure, desperately overworked, leading a party as divided within itself as Germany is divided about it, she remains an irrepressible enthusiast for her maverick brand of politics, and uncompromising in her views.
She sprays her beliefs like an idealistic watering-can. There are, she says, five "life-and-death planks" which any coalition partner in a future line-up would have to accept:
"We stand for ecology" she says. "We must save the forests and purify the rivers. We are against nuclear devices of any kind, weapons or power plants, and we wish to see both Nato and the Warsaw Pact disbanded. We want decentralisation in politics and energy. We are in favour of minorities, women, Turkish workers, homosexuals, the handicapped. And we want a new approach to employment, so that people work to live and not live to work."
None of these ideas is music to the ears of Helmut Kohl, Germany's new chancellor, nor Helmut Schmidt, the man he has deposed. But they cannot be ignored. As we strolled down the street, an old poster for Franz Josef Strauss, conservative leader of the Bavarian wing of Kohl's Social Democrat Party, was being replaced. We watched as the new one went up. In place of Strauss's blood-and-guts image, a green tree in full blossom was pasted up. Miss Kelly snorted.
"You imagine Strauss is interested in trees?" she asked. "They are just trying to steal our Green image. We've arrived."
THE STEADY advance of the Greens since their foundation as a party in 1979 has been one of Germany's minor miracles. They already hold seats in six state parliaments and could add others in deeply conservative Bavaria during state elections later this month. They have held the balance between the Christian Democrats and the Social Democrats in Hamburg since June and their share of the polls has shown a steady increase elsewhere.
All this has been achieved as Germany's traditional minority party, the Liberals, who have held the balance of power for 13 years, have begun to decline to the point where they face the possibility of political extinction. In the Hesse election, the Greens' share of the vote rose to 8 per cent.
Seldom can a more bizarre party have achieved such impressive success. The sheer diversity of its support creates enormous problems - as Kelly frankly admits:
"We've got back-to-the-land romantics, and drop-outs, young anarchists, mature Christian pacifists, utopians, socialists, dogmatic conservatives who think animals are more important than people, old aunts who like gardening. We've got big regional differences to resolve. The Hamburg Greens are obsessed with abolishing the police force while in Bavaria the Greens rather like the police - macrobiotic food is their thing."
Then there is the worry that success will spoil them, that a party which thrives on being "anti-party," deliberately amateur, honest to a fault, will be corrupted by the power-broking of national politics.
Finally, there is the physical durability of Kelly herself. "I've been working myself to death" she says. "I write all my letters myself, and I post them. I get no money. I spend all my EEC salary (she is a European civil servant), and I am in debt. I've spent 20 nights in the last month on trains, going to meetings. I wind up in hospital.
On top of all that, the Greens insist that every elected member of the party should stand down every two years to make way for a new one. Under this rotation scheme, Kelly herself is supposed to step down as chairman next month.
"It doesn't make much sense rotating just when we're breaking through," she sighs. "But if I don't, it'll be seen as another compromise."
PETRA KELLY is not by nature a compromiser. She is German born, but after her journalist father left home when she was four her mother married an Irish American army officer; hence the surname.
Educated partly in the United States, partly in Germany, she dates her conversion to radical politics to the period when her ten-year-old sister was dying of cancer. She was convinced that the radiation treatment prescribed was at least partly responsible for her death, and began an intense study of nuclear energy and government policy on it.
She became a European civil servant in 1970 and helped to found the Greens in 1979. Her association with the movement and her involvement in a series of protests, notably that against the building of the new Frankfurt airport, have made her the target of frequent attacks from Germany's right-wing press. A much-publicised affair with her boss in Brussels, Sicco Mansholt, gave the papers a field day. Her present friendship with the Irish trade union leader John Carroll has also been seized on.
But she has done little to conceal her private life. In the course of campaigning in Bavaria, a stronghold of German morality, she admits openly to having had an abortion.
The attacks she resents are those which brand her a Moscow communist. At one time she was indeed feted by the Russians and was invited on a visit by them. "I said, 'Sure, as long as I can get up in Red Square and make some speeches.' I became a non-person over night. That gave the lie to the idea that the Greens were just Pravda fashion-plates."
She draws subtly on the electorate. Her feminism helps in a country where less than one per cent of the country's managers are women. Not many votes perhaps, but in coalition politics any vote counts.
Her language appeals to the strong romantic strain, to the lovers of cleansed forests and unpolluted rivers and Rhine maidens fresh-faced on macrobiotic bread. She talks of the Greens as a Bewegung, a great current of history, representing the Wille des Volks, the people's will. Few politicians have used these phrases since the Third Reich. It is shrewd, because the Greens collect votes from sentiment as much as from trendiness, and because, as Kelly says: "no one can mix us with Hitler".
They can, however, inject instability into Bonn if their position as the third party is maintained, a prospect real enough to have wiped several billion marks off the stock exchange last week. Kelly rules out any deal with the Christian Democrats, and although the Social Democrats are likely to woo Green voters this winter by softening their support for nuclear power stations and Nato policy, a formal alliance is still remote.
"The only post I would accept is Defence Minister, in order to abolish it," she said firmly. "You can't expect to run tidy minority governments for ever. If Schmidt wants to get back, he'll have to deal with us. We might be prepared to sacrifice a little of our idealism, but we will first have to see what he is prepared to sacrifice."
