Jutta Ditfurth

Jutta Ditfurth in 2011
Jutta Ditfurth during an interview, 1987

Jutta Ditfurth (born Jutta Gerta Armgard von Ditfurth, September 29, 1951 in Würzburg) is a German sociologist, writer, and radical ecologist politician. Being born into the noble house of Ditfurth, members of which had been noble ministeriales invested with hereditary administrative titles and offices in various regions of today's Saxony-Anhalt and Lower Saxony and elsewhere in the Holy Roman Empire, a daughter of the German physician and science journalist Hoimar von Ditfurth and a sister of the historian Christian von Ditfurth, in 1978 she attempted to have her name legally changed to remove the nobiliary particle "von" and to become the plainer Jutta Ditfurth, but was refused the change by the authorities. She is nonetheless known throughout Germany by her adopted non-noble name, which she prefers.

Ditfurth studied art history, sociolology, political science, economic history, and philosophy in Germany, Scotland, and the USA, at the universities of Heidelberg, Hamburg, Freiburg, Glasgow, Detroit, and Bielefeld, graduating as a sociologist in 1977. After her final graduation, she worked as a sociologist, journalist, and writer, and also as a shift worker.

Ditfurth has been politically active within the New Left since the early 1970s, joining internationalist and feminist groups, as well as participating in the nascent Green and anti-nuclear movement. Around 1980, she co-founded the German Green Party. In the 1980s, she was approached by the CIA to work for it, but she refused. Towards the late 1980s, she became highly critical of the subsequent trajectory of the German Green Party, which she described as counterrevolutionary, hierarchical, and nepotistic; she left the Greens in 1991.[1][2][3]

As a candidate on an international list of the Greek Left-wing party New Left Current during the 1999 European elections, she ran a campaign critical of the military German and NATO involvement in the Kosovo War, but did not win enough votes to win a seat in the European Parliament. In 2000, she co-founded the minor German party Ecological Left, of which she remains a member and on whose ticket she won a seat in the city parliament of Frankfurt in 2001 and 2011. In 2007, she published a biography of the Red Army Faction member Ulrike Meinhof.

She is currently based in Frankfurt. Her works remain largely untranslated into English.

Going beyond the Greens, radical ecology has to fill the enormous vacuum that once constituted the left--our movement must be against capitalism, it must be independent, and people in it must be accountable. With the Greens we were too naive--it was too easy for people like Joschka Fischer to take over the Green project for his own purposes. Now we have to keep this from happening again. And we must be prepared to work patiently to build this movement.
— Jutta Ditfurth, [4]

Publications

References

  1. ↑ "European Reports: Radical Ecology after the German Greens". Institute for Social Ecology: Left Green Perspectives #25. 1992-01-01. Retrieved 2013-01-20.
  2. ↑ Jutta Ditfurth. "Zahltag, Junker Joschka! (Payday, Junker Joschka!) [German pdf]" (PDF). Retrieved 2013-01-20.
  3. ↑ "Jutta Ditfurth and extraparliamentary movements of the seventies". Communimedia+. Retrieved 2013-01-20.
  4. ↑ "Jutta Ditfurth and extraparliamentary movements of the seventies". Communimedia+. Retrieved 2013-01-20.


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