Green Hell: German Environmental Activism in Democratizing Brazil, 1979–92

Drawing from a longer study on German economic and social engagement in Brazil across the 20^th Century, this paper highlights the “discovery” of Brazil by a new West German political movement, the Greens, over the course of the 1980s. Concern for circumstances in Brazil pervaded almost every issue that animated Germany’s Greens: industrial pollution, nuclear power plants, the debt crisis, threats to indigenous populations, and rain forest preservation. Individual party leaders embraced one or more of these issue areas, traversing the Atlantic individually or with parliamentary delegations to meet with Brazilian counterparts. Political initiatives often proved difficult to coordinate, however, given the starkly different political cultures. At times, a lack of deference to Brazilian sensibilities fueled charges of environmental imperialism. Using the papers of Gina Düllmann, a German-Jewish Brazilian who worked as a Green Party staffer in Bonn, along with extensive documentation from Germany’s foreign, economy, development aid, and chancellor’s offices, this presentation explores the complications that arose when Germans advocated for what they believed to be Brazilian causes. Fearing that the course of democratization was, in some ways, intensifying Brazil’s exploitation of nature, German civil society yielded to the temptations of state power. It was thus Helmut Kohl’s conservative government that leveraged German institutions in the early 1990s to pursue change in Brazil – wielding financial leverage to demand environmental assurances surrounding the Carajás mine project and a “pilot program” for halting Amazonian deforestation.