Jutta Ditfurth

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.

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