Fritz Kuhn
Encyclopedia
Alliance '90/The Greens
Alliance '90/The Greens is a green political party in Germany, formed from the merger of the German Green Party and Alliance 90 in 1993. Its leaders are Claudia Roth and Cem Özdemir...
, the German Green party, from June 2000 to December 2002.
Early years
Fritz Kuhn was born in Bad MergentheimBad Mergentheim
Bad Mergentheim is a town in the Main-Tauber district in the German state of Baden-Württemberg.-History:Mergentheim is mentioned in chronicles as early as 1058, as the residence of the family of the counts of Hohenlohe, who early in the 13th century assigned the greater part of their estates in...
(Baden-Württemberg
Baden-Württemberg
Baden-Württemberg is one of the 16 states of Germany. Baden-Württemberg is in the southwestern part of the country to the east of the Upper Rhine, and is the third largest in both area and population of Germany's sixteen states, with an area of and 10.7 million inhabitants...
) and grew up in Memmingen
Memmingen
Memmingen is a town in the Bavarian administrative region of Swabia in Germany. It is the central economic, educational and administrative centre in the Danube-Iller region. To the west the town is flanked by the Iller, the river that marks the Baden-Württemberg border...
(Bayern
Bavaria
Bavaria, formally the Free State of Bavaria is a state of Germany, located in the southeast of Germany. With an area of , it is the largest state by area, forming almost 20% of the total land area of Germany...
), where he attended Bernhard Strigel grammar school. After his A-levels he studied German and philosophy at the Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich and the University of Tübingen, with a master's thesis in the field of linguistics
Linguistics
Linguistics is the scientific study of human language. Linguistics can be broadly broken into three categories or subfields of study: language form, language meaning, and language in context....
.
He was one of the founding members of the Green Party in the Federal Republic of Germany in 1980.
From 1981 to 1984 he worked as a research assistant at Augsburg university and as a consultant to the parliamentary party of the Greens in the state parliament (Landtag) of Baden-Württemberg (South-West Germany).
Member of parliament in Baden-Württemberg
He became an MP and the leader of the parliamentary party of the Greens (Alliance '90/The Greens from 1993) in the Baden-Württemberg legislature in 1984, a position he held until 1988, and then later again from 1992 to 2000, having worked as a Professor of Linguistic Communication in the years in between.Fritz Kuhn was one of the two federal chairpersons of Alliance '90/The Greens from 2000 to 2002, first together with Renate Künast
Renate Künast
Renate Künast is a German politician who is chairwoman of the Alliance '90/The Greens Bundestag parliamentary group. She was the Minister of Consumer Protection, Food and Agriculture from 2001 to 2005...
, then with Claudia Roth
Claudia Roth
Claudia Benedikta Roth is a German Green Party politician and one of the two current party chairs, together with Cem Özdemir.- Biography :...
. He resigned from that office in October 2002 after having been elected as a member of the Bundestag
Bundestag
The Bundestag is a federal legislative body in Germany. In practice Germany is governed by a bicameral legislature, of which the Bundestag serves as the lower house and the Bundesrat the upper house. The Bundestag is established by the German Basic Law of 1949, as the successor to the earlier...
, the parliament of the Federal Republic of Germany. There was a rule in the Green Party in those days that you could not be an MP and hold a party office at the same time.
Member of the parliament of Germany
Fritz Kuhn has served as a member of the Bundestag since 2002, between 2005 and 2009 also as one of the two leaders of the Green parliamentary party there (together with Renate Künast), since 2009 as deputy leader. In the Bundestag, he specialized in the fields of the economy (fighting for “a green market economy” ) and employment, and foreign policy in recent years.In the election campaign of 2005 Kuhn was the campaign manager of Alliance ‘90/The Greens.
He is a member of the board of the Heinrich Böll Foundation
Heinrich Böll Foundation
The Heinrich Böll Foundation is a German, legally independent political foundation. Affiliated with the German Green Party, it was originally founded in 1987 and rebuilt in 1997...
, a political foundation close to the Green Party.
Private life
Kuhn is married and has two sons.His hobbies are reading (favourite author: Salman Rushdie), running, and cooking (especially Italian dishes). He is also a football fan (FC Bayern Munich
FC Bayern Munich
FC Bayern Munich , is a German sports club based in Munich, Bavaria. It is best known for its professional football team, which is the most successful football club in Germany, having won 22 national titles and 15 cups....
).