EEver since the end of World War II and Germans belatedly realized what Nazi-era rhetoric had done to their country, being boring has become a basic requirement for German politicians. The few postwar politicians whose speeches were inspiring to hear, such as Herbert Wehner and Franz Josef Strauss, came under widespread suspicion, especially because they refused to follow this basic precept. Angela Merkel, who served as Federal Chancellor and head of the German government from 2005 to 2021, had enough foresight to fully comply with this rule.
The insensitivity of her political statements is faithfully reproduced in this memoir. Overall, Merkel’s recollection, with the help of her co-author (Beate Baumann, Merkel’s close longtime ally and personal assistant), is impressive, but I found one rather egregious mistake. In the late 1960s and early 1970s, he appealed to his fellow countrymen to “challenge more freedom.” In fact, what he said was that we should “be bolder about democracy.” This book was translated into American English by a team of over eight translators who remained faithful to the vertical prose of the German original. Macmillan’s editors claim that they added explanations to the text “to make them easier to understand for non-German readers” but that they did not go far enough. Chancellor Merkel seems intent on mentioning every German politician she has ever interacted with, one obscure name after another popping up in a thicket of boring details that even I have never heard of. When there are characters who are not present (and I have been studying Germany for half a century), it is very easy not only to get lost, but also to lose interest.
This is a book that avoids personal insights and is free of literary devices. What Merkel and Bormann offer readers is a kind of year-end report in which the former chancellor provides a detailed narrative. For readers who have not been immersed in the minutiae of German politics over the past few decades, much of it will be of little interest to readers outside Germany, and indeed to readers within Germany.
Chancellor Merkel has overcome two major handicaps as a modern German politician. Two things: the fact that she is a woman, who is too often looked down upon by male political figures, and the fact that she was born and raised in communist East Germany and only entered politics in the fall. After leaving her job as an academic, she found her way to the conservative Christian Democratic Union and quickly rose through the party hierarchy through her detailed command and negotiation skills. There is little to learn about East Germany that we don’t already know. And the minor protests involving the young Merkel, especially as the daughter of a Protestant pastor in a country that professes atheism, were never a big deal. Despite her preoccupation with details, Merkel does not offer any comprehensive assessment of the East German communist state, its achievements and shortcomings, or the reasons for its collapse.
Chancellor Merkel suddenly rose to the top of Germany’s post-unification political leadership following a massive corruption scandal that forced the resignation of Helmut Kohl, a politician from the Christian Democratic Party who was the driving force behind unification. After an early period leading the party against the government led by Social Democratic politician Gerhard Schröder, she won the 2005 national elections and entered the Federal Chancellery, where she remained for 16 years until her retirement in 2021. Remained there for a year.
As head of government in the EU’s most populous and economically powerful member state, Merkel won widespread praise for her calm and assured leadership, which brought much-needed stability and continuity. She was above all a crisis manager, often stepping in quite late to deal with vexing economic and political problems that others seemed unable to solve. “In politics, things can escalate faster than you can blink,” she says. Her motto has always been wir schaffen das (“We can do it”). A good example of her belief that realpolitik is coupled with support for vile anti-patriotic causes is the fact that the one million people who have fled the civil war caused by President Bashar al-Assad’s brutal crackdown on opposition are Her decision in 2015 to allow Syrian refugees into the country. “Germany is a country of immigrants,” and a regular influx of foreign workers is “inevitable.”
From the 2008 financial crisis, when Merkel insisted above all on imposing “fiscal discipline” on the Greek people, to the depredations of COVID-19, which forced fiscal discipline, she has introduces us to the many problems faced by Then, they remake the policy on a whim. Once again, she draws us into a detailed story without having anything interesting to say about the big picture. We learned that she had a good relationship with US President George W. Bush and was able to converse with her in English, but she was not as close with Vladimir Putin, but he spoke German and she could speak Russian. Learning that she is afraid of dogs (after a recent dog bite), he insists that she bring her black Labrador, Koni, to meetings (which she does) to undermine her confidence. (I call it “dog power play.”) She devotes only a few bland sentences to Brexit and says nothing about her impressions of Boris Johnson as a man and a leader.
Few politicians have suffered such a precipitous decline in reputation since leaving office than Chancellor Angela Merkel. More than two months after Putin resigned from office in December 2021, he ordered the invasion of Ukraine, igniting an ongoing conflict that threatens to escalate. Merkel faced harsh criticism for increasing Germany’s dependence on Russian natural gas through the construction of the Nord Stream pipeline, giving Putin a powerful potential coercive weapon against the West.
The considerable amount of space devoted to environmental issues in this book makes it clear how important this issue was to Chancellor Angela Merkel, who, after the Fukushima disaster in 2011, was forced to shut down Germany’s nuclear power plant. The facility was shut down, depriving Germany of a vital energy alternative to fossil fuels. fuel. Her statement that “Germany and Israel share the values of freedom, democracy and respect for human dignity” seems grotesquely misleading in light of Netanyahu’s attack on Gaza.
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Above all, Chancellor Merkel has shown no recognition of the extent to which the German economy is suffering from a failure to modernize and prepare for the post-industrial era. She wholeheartedly admires Germany’s traditional “automobile, mechanical engineering, and chemical industries,” but this is a completely short-sighted view. Under her leadership, Germany’s complacent national culture became even more self-righteous than before, and is now paying the price.
Despite the book’s occasional self-criticisms, Merkel’s failure to see the big picture testifies to her limited, pragmatic, and detail-oriented perception of political reality. Real politics involves more than just solving problems practically. Perhaps what we learn about her isn’t actually what she wanted us to learn.
Hitler’s People: The Face of the Third Reich by Richard J Evans (Allen Lane) is available now
