Reluctance to elaborate on the personal and political was key to the chancellor’s political longevity. It is a trait she struggles to escape in her book Freedom
Angela Merkel grew up in a socialist, atheist state, where being a pastor’s daughter was a minefield of personal caution and real-life discrimination. Photograph: Liesa Johannssen/AFP via Getty ImagesThey told the 21-year-old trainee physicist it would be helpful for her career if she could tell them “certain things” about students and staff at her Leipzig university institute.“I’m a communicative person,” she told the two men, “and I always have to tell other people what’s on my mind.
When the Berlin Wall was built in August 1961 Merkel, then seven, remembers “everyone was in a state of pure shock, people were crying, my mother was in despair. She didn’t know when she would see her mother and sister in Hamburg again”. She remembers the vanished Germany as “petty, narrow-minded, tasteless, and… as humourless as it could possibly be”.
By a series of coincidences she became deputy press spokesperson for a small opposition party. Backing full unity rather than a reformed East, she ran for the Bundestag and found herself in 1990 sitting at Helmut Kohl’s cabinet table. When she came to office Germany relied on Russia for 41 per cent of its natural gas. That rose to 63 per cent when she left office, in part to bridge the gap from closing down nuclear plants. In her memoir Merkel never addresses whether it was wise to have nearly two-thirds of Germany’s energy eggs in one basket controlled by a man with “dictatorial traits”.
She blames France and the European Central Bank for blocking private investor “haircuts” because they “feared lasting damage to investor confidence in the euro zone”.
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