When Angela Merkel stepped down as chancellor in 2021, she announced that she was going to devote herself to reading, sleeping and writing her memoirs. Not everyone believed her. It seemed impossible that the woman who had led the European Union’s largest economy for 16 years, the de facto leader of Europe, would think of dedicating herself to rediscovering the classics and taking naps. Many imagined her heading some international organization, giving lectures around the world or even in private business. But on her 70th birthday, which she celebrates this Wednesday in private, the former chancellor’s life is more or less as she predicted when she left active politics.
“Angela Merkel can look back on an impressive political career,” congratulates Chancellor Olaf Scholz, who was her finance minister and number two in the last grand coalition government between the CDU and SPD. “She started off furiously with the conquest of democracy in East Germany and German unity, which still moves me enormously today. She has worked tirelessly for the country. Happy birthday,” he wishes her on his X account, along with a photo of both of them smiling on the day she passed the baton to him.
Angela Merkel can auf eine beeindruckende politische Laufbahn zurückblicken. If furios began with the Gewinn der Demokratie in Ostdeutschland und der deutschen Einheit, was mich bis heute sehr bewegt. Unermüdlich hat sie sich für das Land eingesetzt. Alles Gute zum Geburtstag! pic.twitter.com/vOADQKqj70
— Bundeskanzler Olaf Scholz (@Bundeskanzler) July 17, 2024
As Merkel rarely appears at social events, and if she does she limits herself to smiling and allowing herself to be taken in selfies, the publication of her memoir in November is creating great expectations. She wrote it together with one of her closest confidants, Beate Baumann, who was her chief of staff for almost three decades, since 1992. Baumann announced in 2021 that the book, written without professional help, would not be a conventional autobiography, but that the chancellor wanted to tell in her own words how and why she had made her main political decisions.
The volume Freedom: Memories 1954-2021 The book will also address, as the title suggests, her childhood as the daughter of a Protestant pastor, Horst Kasner, who moved to the German Democratic Republic (GDR) shortly after she was born to spread the divine word in an atheist state. The former chancellor grew up in a small town of just over 15,000 inhabitants, Templin, in Brandenburg, and later went to the University of Leipzig to study Physics. It was during this time that her first brief marriage dates back to the surname she would keep forever, even after marrying her current partner, Joachim Sauer.
Merkel’s memoirs, whose image in Germany and abroad has been tarnished by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine for its policy of rapprochement with Russia despite warnings from its partners, trace a life that can be clearly divided into two halves and two German states: 35 years in the GDR and 35 years in reunified Germany, says the German publisher, Kiepenheuer & Witsch. The volume, of almost 700 pages, will be published simultaneously in several countries and promises to present the “most personal version of the leader than ever.” Merkel recounts her conversations with the great world leaders, details how decisions were made and, ultimately, sheds light on the inner workings of power.
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Merkel went from being a scientist in the grey GDR to entering politics after the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, well into her thirties. Once she decided to join the Christian Democratic Union (CDU) – she had previously tried other parties – her career was meteoric. She herself has said that in the party she was underestimated as “the Kohl girl”. [en referencia al canciller conservador Helmut Kohl, su padrino político] and that helped her rise. She was a woman, young and from the East, but in 2005 she became Chancellor after defeating the Social Democrat Gerhard Schröder and left whenever she wanted, because she did not lose any of the four elections she ran for.
The story of her 16 years at the helm of Germany will jump from crisis to crisis: the financial crisis, the euro crisis, the refugee crisis and, almost at the end, the coronavirus crisis. Many wonder what the next one would have been like, the invasion of Ukraine, with her in charge. There are even those who claim that with Merkel in the Chancellery, Vladimir Putin would not have started a war. For the moment, she is keeping her opinion to herself. She has not given interviews in these almost three years, except for the one she gave at the Berliner Ensemble theatre in the German capital in 2022, with a packed audience and with an atypical moderator, the novelist and columnist Alexander Osang. She was so relaxed and cheerful that some analyst joked the next day that she had spoken more in that theatre than in all the interviews she gave as chancellor.
She has been seen very little since then, except at official commemorations such as the 75th anniversary of the German Constitution last May. She attends, but does not give speeches. She has not published opinion columns nor has she interfered in any way in the work of her successor, the Social Democrat Olaf Scholz. She announced that she would do so, and she has kept her promise. Scholz has said that from time to time they talk and comment on current affairs, but it remains between them. She has hardly spoken a word in public. She did so at the farewell to the retirement of the Green politician Jürgen Trittin, her political adversary, and to pay tribute to Ulrich Matthes, a friend of his, at the Konrad Adenauer Foundation.
Merkel is also completely disconnected from her party. The CDU specifically invited her to participate in its last annual congress, last May, but the former chancellor declined the offer. She said through her office that she did not want to participate in “current events.” She also did not campaign for the European elections in June, nor does she attend events of the Konrad Adenauer Foundation, a CDU affiliate.
Meanwhile, the Germans have been able to see her, in her fictional guise, in the police series Miss Merkelinspired by the books by David Safier. On screen, the former chancellor tries to live a peaceful life in the countryside after her retirement, but ends up embroiled in the investigation of mysterious murders. The plot constantly makes humorous allusions to the real Merkel. The fourth episode will premiere in Germany in November (it is currently being broadcast in Italy). The former chancellor goes to therapy because she is depressed after finishing a book (coincidence?). And the corpse, of course, will be that of the therapist.
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