Some readers will find this enormous book not so much impossible as impassable. They should get a stronger torch, a nourishing snack on which to chew whenever they need to rest and reflect, and try again. Angela Merkel, after all, led Europe’s largest and richest state for 16 years, through the period when our post-Cold War decade of peace and hope was submerging under bankruptcy, pestilence and war. So her evidence matters.
But Freedom is no easy read. Much of it is like an album of letters home from boarding school: what I had for lunch; how we beat another school 4–1 at hockey; who else—name by name—was in our team. At international conferences or Christian Democrat conclaves, Merkel slowly describes not only the proceedings but the furniture, the decor, the refreshments menu and the titles of every official at the table. Even for readers who already know something about German political structures and procedures, these can be dreary detours. But, again, if you want to assemble an early history of Europe in the first, disastrous decades of this century, you have to study Merkel’s detailed record of decisions and how they were taken.
That’s not to say that it’s an infallible record. Merkel is often evasive and discreetly omits stuff that others would judge important. Annoyingly, she and her assistant Beate Baumann damage credibility by reconstructing the dialogue of informal conversations that Merkel cannot possibly have remembered. (Merkel’s greatest stroke of luck in government was, ironically, to trip and badly break her leg, forcing her to hire an assistant while she was on crutches. This was Baumann, who would blossom into her closest aide, indispensable as super-secretary, speechwriter, political counsellor and friend. Co-author of this book, in which she is frequently mentioned, Baumann’s own name is for some reason not in the index.)
Merkel was born in 1954 in Hamburg, in what was then West Germany. But when she was two, her father—a Lutheran pastor—moved the family to East Germany, the German Democratic Republic, and settled in a church community in the small town of Templin in the Uckermark district of Brandenburg. Her mother was a refugee from Danzig; her father had ended the war as a conscripted flak gunner. But Merkel blanks out the Third Reich. She reveals nothing about the family’s previous attitude to the Nazi regime, beyond noting that “my grandfather was convinced that Germany would lose [the war] and needed to lose it”.
In the GDR, the Merkel family lived a quietly Christian life and kept out of serious trouble. There’s a tradition in German Lutheranism that demands obedience to the state, even though the ruler may be Satanic, and another—much followed in Nazi and communist times—that recommends withdrawal from dangerous public life behind the stockade of a Christian family. Angela and her sisters endured nothing worse, in a happy childhood, than denial of school meals and delayed admission to the “Young Pioneers” on the grounds that their father was an active preacher. It was only much later, when she was a physics graduate applying for a job, that the Stasi appeared and made the post conditional on her becoming an “unofficial informer”. She refused, sacrificing the job (she soon found another), and she repelled further Stasi approaches with a classic dodge learned from her father: tell them you are hopelessly indiscreet and would leak their invitation to family and friends. (It works: I have used it twice.)
In 1978, she began work on quantum physics at the Academy of Sciences, in East Berlin. The research was exciting; the colleagues were free-minded and stimulating, but—aged 25—she asked herself why she was dedicating her future to strengthening a state she despised. She walked out of an early marriage to Ulrich Merkel (“I kept his name”) and—with a naughtiness uncharacteristic of her—dared to drill out a lock in order to squat in an empty Berlin apartment. In the 1980s, she visited Poland and Czechoslovakia, talking to Poles resisting martial law and to Czech scientists still loyal to the principles of the crushed “Prague Spring”. As eastern and central Europe began to heave with rebellion, Merkel took advantage of new GDR relaxations to travel to West Germany. By this time, she had fallen in love with fellow scientist Joachim Sauer, whom she would later marry.
Subversive political debate was all around her now. But it was not until late 1989, when the lava flow of rebellion finally began to reach East Germany, that Merkel contemplated political engagement for herself. All over Europe east of the Elbe, opposition movements were growing bolder—in two directions. The heroic “dissident” generation, who had suffered every kind of persecution over many years, stood for new visions of purified, open, pluralist socialism. But a younger generation was now looking westward, towards a consumer capitalism that seemed to offer not only liberty, but the abundance that their own weary populations longed for. In the GDR, the early protest leaders, and many Lutheran clergy, stood for a democratic transformation of their country on a broadly socialist basis. Merkel’s parents took that line, but their daughter went the other way: “[O]ne thing was beyond doubt for me: East Germany’s structure could not be reformed from within. It was like a cardigan: if you fasten the first button incorrectly, you need to start all over again to be able to do it up properly. And the GDR’s first button was fastened incorrectly.”
Was she looking forward to early “reunification”, to the disappearance of East Germany into the Federal Republic? She doesn’t make that clear, but possibly not at first. As a teenager, she was shocked, almost scandalised, when Russian and Polish students remarked casually that the two parts of Germany would obviously come together again one day. But her emotional loyalty was already to the western state. She recalls her “anger” in 1974 when East Germany beat West Germany in the World Cup. “My satisfaction was then all the greater when West Germany went on to become world champions.” With that, as she grew older, went impatience with the GDR’s inefficient state-owned economy and envy of the market forces and competition in West Germany. She was already an ideological conservative when she joined the new Democratic Awakening (DA) party, a month after the Berlin Wall was opened.
Merkel’s behaviour on that Wall-fall day of 9th November 1989 was typically cool rather than ecstatic. When she heard the news, she went to the sauna as usual before venturing through the open barrier with the crowds. She accepted a beer from a West Berliner in the first street beyond the border, then hurried back east to finish writing a lecture.
Once an Ossi (an East German), always an Ossi? Merkel constantly complains in this memoir about how both rivals and colleagues in her career persisted in condescending to this “little chairwoman from the East” who wasn’t up to the job. Absurd prejudice—and yet there is truth in it. She has that Easterner’s irony about Western self-indulgence and arrogance, and an acidic, view-from-below sense of humour that is rare in the West. The behaviour of private banks—their blind selfishness and claims to entitlement in times of national crisis—infuriates her. So did West Germans she saw resting their boots on Intercity train seats (“outrageous… I had never seen behaviour like that in the GDR”).
Above all, she understands and somehow still shares that gnawing, enduring East German sense of being humiliated and exploited in the united country. On that November night in Berlin, foreseeing a united Germany, she asked herself: “What value would our experiences, our education, our achievements, abilities, private decisions have in the future?” Even now, there is no pleasant answer to that. Merkel’s long account of the unification years—the annexation (by consent) of the GDR by the Federal Republic and the demolition of its economy and institutions—makes for painful reading. It’s not an analogy she would use, but my own experience there suggested that East Germany had lost a “cold civil war”, and that the precedent for what was going on was the Reconstruction period in the American South after 1865. Here again was the inrush of carpetbaggers looting a collapsed economy, the trauma of sudden mass unemployment and poverty, the sullen resentment of a people stripped of their self-respect and their sense of a collective identity.
In 1990, Democratic Awakening joined the first and last democratically elected government of the GDR. Merkel became its deputy spokesperson. Swift reunification was now the goal: “We… worked with great passion for 174 days and nights to make ourselves redundant.” The GDR government abolished itself on 3rd October 1990, the day when, amid huge celebrations, Germany became a single state again.
The story of Merkel’s childhood and early life in East Germany is the most readable and accessible part of this book. From 1990 she begins her ascent to German leadership, through the intricacies and rivalries of politics in Bonn and then, as the government returned to its new-built home, in Berlin. Her original DA party had long since dissolved into the Christian Democrat Union’s mainstream, and she became the CDU Bundestag member for Stralsund, Rügen and Grimmen—a Baltic constituency in what had been East Germany, and which was about to be devastated by both the government’s unsparing privatisation drive and the trading rules of the European Union. Merkel supported these “transformations”, although she fell out with the ruthless Treuhand privatisation agency whose head, Detlev Rohwedder, was “unable to see things from the point of view of an East German citizen”. (He was assassinated soon afterwards.)
She became minister for women in 1991, then minister for the environment and nuclear safety in 1994. By 1998, she was general secretary of the governing Christian Democrats. But there’s no obvious explanation for this almost vertical ascent. She wasn’t pushy or glamorous or a crowd-puller: just a small, dogged person perceived as likeable but faintly alien by her colleagues on account of her “Ossiness” and her profession as a scientist (rare even in German politics). Perhaps she rose because she didn’t appear to threaten anyone—a safe replacement. She seems never to have got on well with Helmut Kohl while he was chancellor, but she did have one consistent and powerful backer in Wolfgang Schäuble, party director and for many years minister of the interior.
In 1998, the CDU-led coalition lost an election, replaced by an alliance headed by Gerhard Schröder’s Social Democrats. Helmut Kohl then plunged the CDU into crisis by confessing to accepting massive illegal donations. In the ensuing pandemonium, Merkel revealed unsuspected infighting skill and even personal ambition. In a newspaper article, she fiercely attacked Kohl by name and called for a renewal of the party: “It must venture away from home like a young person reaching puberty.” In April 2000, delegates to the CDU annual conference leapt to their feet as she spoke, electing her as chair of the whole federal party—which implied that she was now the CDU candidate for the chancellorship. Five years later, Merkel (“I was wearing a black pantsuit with a black velvet collar and buttons and a matt amber pendant on a gold chain”) stood in the Reichstag to be sworn in as the political leader of Germany.
It’s been said that while the “growing up in the GDR” part of the book is lively, the heavily detailed trudge through her chancellorship is leaden. This is often unfair. Her gossipy chapter about German football, with sporting idols Franz Beckenbauer and Jürgen Klinsmann in and out of her office, is fun to read. And her blow-by-blow account of the 2010 Eurozone crisis, the conference-table wrestlings and the private mutters of angry, baffled politicians is fascinating. On Greece, at the epicentre of the sovereign debt emergency, she is absolutely unapologetic about her refusal to soften bailout conditions or advance more money, a policy that plunged the Greek people into destitution unknown since the Nazi occupation. Her empathy was simply switched off. And yet it was the same power of empathy that astounded all Europe in September 2015, when she kept Germany open to the refugee thousands pressing against its southern border. Over the next four years, nearly two million migrants and refugees applied for asylum in Germany.
Famously, Merkel said: Wir schaffen das (“We can manage this”). At first, she was proved broadly right. But now Germany’s imminent federal elections, four years after Merkel’s retirement, will show whether the far-right Alternative for Germany’s (AfD) anti-immigrant campaigning has made the Germans change their mind. As she writes here, that refugee decision marks a sort of “caesura” break in her career—there’s before September 2015, and after. In Germany, it’s the act by which she will be remembered.
The refugee decision in 2015 marks a sort of ‘caesura’ break in Merkel’s career
In the outside world, however, it was Merkel’s reluctance to abandon a “special relationship” with Russia, even after Vladimir Putin’s seizure of Crimea in 2014, that has hardened criticism of her international policy. Europe has good historical reasons to fear rapprochements between Moscow and Berlin; it was no surprise that the Poles were among the first to worry about Germany’s dependence on Russian gas and oil, expressed in the joint construction of the Nord Stream pipelines across the Baltic. Merkel admits that “at the beginning of Russia’s war of aggression against Ukraine, I was accused more forcefully than ever of having led Germany into an irresponsible dependency on Russian gas”. But her multi-page defence amounts to little more than demonstrating how necessary the gas was to Germany as it renounced nuclear energy.
As chancellor, she could seem imperturbable, even stolid. But this book shows a livelier Merkel. Through all the solemn recitations of chancellery routines and functions, there gleams a sense of enjoyment, even fun. This was her natural “lightness”, which she managed to preserve against East German gloom and West German pomposity. Another Ossi characteristic has been her wary reluctance to join causes, to be counted as a committed militant for anything. This sometimes led to charges of moral cowardice from groups who had assumed they had her backing: over abortion, or over her wriggle away from supporting same-sex marriage. An insistent audience spent hours vainly trying to extract from her the words “I am a feminist”, although in many ways she was.
There are sharp sketches of many statesmen here. Barack Obama was clearly Merkel’s favourite; George W Bush too boisterous at conferences and in his overwhelming hospitality. Nicolas Sarkozy was a shrewd if erratic ally in European emergencies, while Vladimir Putin—once a partner of sorts—grew staggeringly rude. He kept a G8 summit chaired by Merkel waiting for 45 minutes while he finished some beer in his hotel room, and—well aware of her phobia of dogs—deliberately sent his labrador to nuzzle up to her. Brits and Britain are scarcely mentioned, beyond a few pages lamenting Brexit’s damage to the EU. There is more about Donald Tusk of Poland than about Tony Blair or David Cameron.
Merkel’s principles have been Christian democracy and the “social market economy” (wrongly translated here as “social capitalism”), which puts respect for the moral and physical welfare of the people on equal priority with growth. If anything, this resembles the faith of the one-nation Tory wets expelled from British politics by Boris Johnson: even the most right-wing grumpies in Merkel’s party regarded Thatcherism as un-Christian and shocking.
And while Merkel hasn’t always lived by those principles—her attitudes towards Greece or the miseries and injustices inflicted by reunification have been almost neoliberal—her 16-year rule of Germany is now remembered as a time of steadiness and optimism. Today, even the sound of Angela Merkel’s unexcited voice is reassuring. She once compared the GDR to a cosy cardigan with one button done up wrong. Now, as the certainties of Germany and the world come unstitched, she feels like a cardigan whose buttons were always in the right place.
