Why realpolitik needs values
As a post-war child and member of the generation whose parents lived through the Nazi regime and the Second World War, Green politician Jürgen Trittin has been a witness and protagonist of Germany's political history since the early 1970s: As a student and squatter, he experienced the social-liberal years, during the Kohl government of the 1980s he helped build up the Greens, was a state minister and paved the way for his participation in government in 1998 and again in 2021. He has shown time and again how ecologically responsible substantive politics works like no other. Along the milestones of his political life, Jürgen Trittin describes in four autobiographical essays on democracy, equality, ecology and international politics, which are indispensable levers for a value-led realpolitik today and in the future. His book is not only a very personal and politically committed testimony after the end of his political career, but also a piece of contemporary history.
