For most of Angela Merkel’s 16 years as German chancellor it was my job as a journalist to observe and analyse her. And although I often disagreed with her policies, I can’t deny that her style of governing impressed me, especially once she became an antithesis and foil to wrecking-ball leaders such as Russia’s Vladimir Putin or America’s Donald Trump.
Unlike those strongmen, she was “the opposite of bombast”: low on vanity and intellectually honest. More generally, she was “post-heroic”: bent on neither conquering (Putin) nor dominating, polarising and self-aggrandising (Trump), but on “holding things together”, whether the thing was Germany, the European Union, the West or even the world. If ever a politician of a large country belied Lord Acton’s dictum that power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely, it was Merkel.
Now, though, just as Trump prepares to take his second oath of office and Putin keeps waging his genocidal war of aggression, it’s time for the addendum. Helpfully, Merkel herself is providing the occasion: She’s just published her memoirs, Freedom, a doorstop of more than 700 pages which she co-wrote with her long-time confidante and aide, Beate Baumann. (True to form and notwithstanding their intellectual intimacy and mutual trust, the two still address one another with the formal German Sie.)
As Merkel keeps explaining in the media blitz accompanying the launch, her tome is really two books in one, analogous to her life, which she sees in two halves. The first is set in the communist dictatorship of East Germany. The second takes place in the reunited Germany and documents her rise to power as well as the wielding of it in the chancellery.
The first part, when she lived without the freedom touted in her title, recollects life under the dictatorship. Merkel (her name was Kasner then) found comfort in the sanctuary of privacy created by her mother and father, a Lutheran pastor. There were moments that could pass for fun: Aged 19, she emptied a bottle of “kirsch whiskey” with a boy in a boat on a lake; he stood up, she fell in.
Merkel’s goal is pedagogic: She wants Wessis (as Germans from the former West Germany are still known) to understand what life was like for Ossis (former Easterners). Once, when she was trying to get a doctoral position, the secret police (Stasi) tried to recruit her as an informant. She wriggled out of it by pretending to be a naive blabbermouth: “I’m a communicative person, and I always have to tell other people what’s on my mind,” she said. She didn’t get the position.
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If she had ended the story with the fall of the Berlin Wall, or in the 1990s when she became a government minister and navigated a stuffy political culture dominated by macho Wessis, the book would have worked.
Her recollections up til then, while not lively, sprinkle charm and light (if not answers) on two mysteries. One is how she kept running rings around the men. The other is how she as an Ossi could break into the Bonn system that was transplanted to Berlin.
That experience stings most: She still smarts from an old Wessi commentary that described her not as a born but a naturalised European (implying that she had to learn the values of the EU like an apprentice). She deserves kudos for overcoming such moats of condescension.
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Unfortunately, Merkel and Baumann then revert to the style for which the chancellor was known, parsing details like bookkeepers until the audience either falls asleep or begs for mercy. In explaining her decisions as chancellor, Merkel lays out the evidence — who said what at which meeting — as meticulously as she once presented results in her quantum chemistry labs. The pattern is unchanging: She eliminated all inadequate policy options until only one remained that was, to her, “alternativeless”. (The adjective sounds almost as clunky in German as in English.)
Which brings me slowly to her great and tragic failure. One of her strengths in office was her intellectual honesty and humility — when the facts changed, as during the pandemic, she changed her policies, and admitted what she couldn’t yet know. This was a contrast to the intellectual hubris of Trump or Putin; the latter, for instance, decided to invade Ukraine based on assumptions that were wrong on all counts.
Now out of office, she could have applied that same honesty and humility to the past and her record, which includes successes (preventing the euro area from breaking up a decade ago, for instance) but also lots of failures, mostly of omission rather than commission. She is a woman of great erudition and wit, and could have become a female, Ossi and modern version of Sun Tzu or Machiavelli in ruminating on tactics and power. But she lacked the courage.
Always taking refuge in thickets of details, she fesses up to no major missteps or miscalculations. Pressed by one interviewer whether there’s anything at all that she regrets, she sticks to her answer: No.
Just no? What about her jerky U-turn on energy after the disaster at Fukushima? That’s when she decided to exit from nuclear power generation altogether, leaving her country dependent on dirty coal (even though she says she cares about climate change) as well as dangerous Russian gas (more about that in a minute). What about all the economic reforms that Germany so badly needs but which she never even broached? Without them, the country now stagnates in a creeping deindustrialisation.
Then there was her style, marked by relentless centrism and deliberately bloodless oratory, meant to soothe and “asymmetrically demobilise” all opposition. In that way, she won the battles but lost the war: By portraying politics as science and presenting policies as alternativeless, she fanned populist rage on society’s fringes. That resentment found expression in a new party on the far right, not coincidentally called the Alternative for Germany, which will keep changing German politics for the worse.
But the biggest stain on her legacy, which only she can’t or won’t see, concerns Russia and Putin. She was an East German who learned fluent Russian, even studying in Donetsk once, a part of Ukraine now occupied by Russia. Putin, for his part, was a KGB agent in Dresden in the 1980s. She peered deeper into his mind than any other Western leader, and he, I’ve been told, learned to respect her for a time.
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Merkel could have, if she had wanted, seen and warned about the coming danger all along. She sat in the front row at the Munich Security Conference in 2007, when Putin rhetorically declared his grievances, if not yet his war, against the West. Once he annexed Crimea in 2014, it was in large part up to her to coordinate Europe’s response, and then to talk him out of even worse escalation in the aftermath.
And yet she clung to the same Pollyannaish groupthink of the German elite and refused to label Putin as the threat that he was. Stubbornly, she kept drawing cheap Russian gas from one pipeline under the Baltic while chaperoning the construction of a second, against the fears and objections of Poles and Balts in the east and Americans in the west. Nord Stream 2, as the pipeline was called, was not a geopolitical but a purely commercial project, she intoned cynically; “no gas ever flowed through it”, she tells interviewers now, as though that were exoneration. (Both pipelines were blown up in 2022, and it’s still not clear by whom.)
In retrospect, she, more than any other Western leader, looks like her generation’s Neville Chamberlain, the British appeaser who lied to himself about the intentions of Adolf Hitler. Of course she’s right that the alternative at the time (between 2014 and Putin’s full-bore invasion in 2022) wasn’t for Germany or NATO to go to war. But if she saw the gathering storm, why didn’t she warn the Germans and their allies? Why didn’t she stop the pipeline? Why didn’t she invest in the country’s puny army? And if she didn’t see it, how on earth could she of all people be so blind?
These fascinating questions will never be answered, at least not by her. Taking long walks on the Baltic in her retirement, Merkel is instead sticking to her script, even as she watches the Alternative for Germany turn pro-Putin and extremist in Germany, and as her nemesis Trump returns to the Oval Office, keen to haggle with his fellow strongman Putin over the spoils in Ukraine and elsewhere.
The orderly, multilateral, lawful and moral world that Merkel desired is unravelling into anarchy. The things she tried to hold together are falling apart. And still, no regrets. “I can tell that you’re not following my reasoning,” she told her exasperated interlocutor on a stage in front of a friendly audience last week. “I have to live with that.” So do we all.
In the end, Lord Acton’s law of power applied even to Merkel. She was good for a time; and now it’s good that she’s gone.
