angela merkel biography in german

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Angela Merkel, the scientist who became a world leader

In word portraits, those who know the German chancellor, Harvard’s Commencement speaker, explain her rise to longtime prominence

Christina Pazzanese

Harvard Staff Writer

World War II was at a critical juncture when British Prime Minister Winston Churchill traveled to Harvard in September 1943 at the urging of his ally and friend President Franklin D. Roosevelt 1904, L.L.D. ’29. Taking a rare respite from the war, Churchill came to accept an honorary Doctor of Laws degree recognizing his international leadership that “turned back the tide of tyranny in freedom’s darkest hour.”

In 1947, as Europe’s vast devastation from that war had become clearer, U.S. Secretary of State George Marshall accepted an honorary Doctor of Laws degree for his success as the five-star Army general who had overseen much of the U.S. war operations in Europe. Marshall used his Commencement appearance in June that year to deliver a landmark speech pledging $13 billion for a new, U.S.-led aid program for Europe. That effort became known as the Marshall Plan and revitalized the continent.

Now, as national-populist forces again threaten to overtake much of Europe and undermine relations between the U.S. and the continent, Harvard again welcomes a pivotal democratic figure, a woman widely regarded as the most respected leader in the world, German Chancellor Angela Merkel. On Thursday, Harvard will award Merkel an honorary Doctor of Laws degree during Morning Exercises, and she will address the annual meeting of the Harvard Alumni Association during the Afternoon Program at the 368th Commencement.

Trained as a quantum chemist, Merkel spent her first 35 years living in Soviet-controlled East Germany working at a state-run research center until the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989. That historic shift prompted Merkel to abandon scientific work and embrace a lifelong interest in politics, steadily ascending the ranks of a newly unified German government.

Elected chancellor in 2005, Merkel is the first woman and the first East German to hold her nation’s highest elective office. When she steps down in 2021, she will be Germany’s second-longest-serving leader of the modern era, after her former mentor, Helmut Kohl, who spoke at Harvard’s Commencement in 1990.

In advance of her visit, the Gazette spoke with current and former Merkel colleagues, diplomats, scholars, and journalists about her life, her rise to political power, and her extraordinary influence on Germany and the world. Here are their reflections.

A figure of hope

AN AUTHENTIC LEADER She is extraordinary. She knows who she is. She does not try to be anything other. She is an authentic leader, which is critical. She has a set of strong values, and she understands Germany’s history exceedingly well, in part because she comes from East Germany. So she has a certain humility that comes from her particular biography. She fights for her country and for her people. She is analytical, she’s fierce, she’s a very skilled politician. She didn’t start out that way, but she certainly has become that. And she knows how to operate on the world stage — no easy task.

WENDY R. SHERMAN (Click to expand)

Under secretary of state for political affairs (2011‒2015); counselor of the State Department under Secretary Madeleine K. Albright (1997‒2001); special adviser to President Bill Clinton. Now professor of the practice of public leadership and director of the Center for Public Leadership at Harvard Kennedy School (HKS).

SOMEONE WHO DOESN’T FLINCH The most dangerous issue in the West is that democracy is under siege. It’s being challenged by Russian cyberattacks, by divisive politics here at home, by the rise of the anti-democratic populists in Europe, and by Donald Trump. And for a lot of us who think that the West is important, the idea of a democratic world, she’s now the leader of the West. I’m told that she doesn’t want that mantle. But for all of us who think that democracy is under challenge and we must do everything we can to revive it, she’s the one Western leader who’s never flinched. I think she will arrive at Harvard with many, many people on both sides of the Atlantic seeing her as a figure of hope.

NICHOLAS BURNS

FROM CRISIS TO TURNING POINT As ambassador to the Holy See, I witnessed the reaction to the way Merkel handled the migration crisis. She was viewed as “the woman who saved the dignity of Europe.” For Merkel, this decision was critical. While populists were maneuvering to use the issue to their advantage, she viewed it as the hour of truth for a Christian democracy. How Europe treated refugees was a testament to how it treats human beings. For her, the migration crisis was a turning point for Europe to demonstrate how to act responsibly.

ANNETTE SCHAVAN

ONE OF THE GREAT CHANCELLORS Considering the challenges she has faced, I would rank her as one of the great chancellors because she dealt with, like some of her predecessors, a major critical development: the breakdown of the established rules-based system in the wake of the U.S. election. She’s handled that very well, so far. That is her big crisis. She kept the European Union together in difficult times, particularly when the question came up of dealing with Russia, which is another crisis where she did well. Inside the European Union, there was a lot of divergence on whether or not to impose sanctions on Russia after the annexation of Crimea. She twisted the arms of some countries quite successfully to keep them on board, in close cooperation with the White House under [Barack] Obama.

KARL KAISER

SECRET TO HER SUCCESS What constitutes her success? If you ask me, it’s not visible at first sight. Probably the most remarkable achievement will be to have kept so much stability and continuity to the system in Germany, to government, to the country, to everyone’s life — with continued growth in economic terms, but also politically. When she took office, we were living through the terrorist age, then immediately slid into the most tumultuous economic times with 2008 and the ensuing economic crises, the European currency crisis. Her biggest, first achievement was preventing the euro from disintegrating. The second was to keep the EU together as it is now. Even the way the British show how difficult it is to get out, and what attraction the EU still can project, this shows that there must be something to it. She’s not a big performer, she’s not a huge visionary. She’s the stable hand.

STEFAN KORNELIUS

“She doesn’t need to win every argument. She doesn’t have to get in the last word. She quietly assesses the different factors involved in a given situation and then decides which way she wants to go, and does it quietly and without fanfare.”

A MISTAKE TO UNDERESTIMATE She does everything possible not to talk about herself. She doesn’t give interviews to correspondents from leading Western newspapers and magazines; she gives interviews to local papers when it’s politically advantageous. She seems to have no vanity. I’m sure she does, but she seems to have none, and that’s been one of her great assets as a politician. Whenever she runs up against a powerful and vain male German politician, she’s inevitably underestimated. She bides her time, and then, when the moment is right, she gives a small but decisive shove, and that person has to find some other line of work. That’s been her way to the top from the beginning. She doesn’t need to win every argument. She doesn’t have to get in the last word. She quietly assesses the different factors involved in a given situation and then decides which way she wants to go, and does it quietly and without fanfare. It’s a different kind of political style that Germans had not known until Merkel.

GEORGE PACKER

A LEADER RESPECTED She’s seen to be a problem-solver who sometimes puts other people’s best interests forward. And that’s just so remarkably unlike most politicians, on both sides of the Atlantic, that she’s stood out — to be serious, analytical, not always looking for the votes. She leads a country that has become, without any question, the strongest in Europe economically and politically, far stronger than France or Britain, the other two of that triumvirate. Her personal behavior, her seriousness, the way she drills down on issues — she’s substantive, she’s not superficial. If you took a private poll of the G20 leaders, the most powerful leaders in the world, and you asked, “Who do you respect the most in this group?” Merkel wins the poll. Or ask “Who would chair this group in a fair way?” They’d put the gavel in her hands. — NICHOLAS BURNS

DOESN’T NEED POLITICS A number of things are distinctive about her, but the thing that distinguishes her from most other politicians is that she’s genuinely not needy. She genuinely doesn’t need politics to be happy. People who know her much better say she ran for a fourth term because she felt responsible. She felt that she needed to, as it were, “finish her job.” Whenever she gets to step away, she will do so very happily. And I find that more credible than with most other politicians I’ve met.

CONSTANZE STELZENMÜLLER

A LATE RISE TO POWER Her political career could have never been anticipated, and never gave the idea that she could end up as chancellor or that she would be the leader of the Western world somehow. The speed in which she took on politics after ’89, especially when she joined the first unified German cabinet in ’91 and the continuing years, was breathtaking. There’s hardly a political career in these professionalized times where you start that late, at age 35, and not that high. So yes, this is stunning.

The second stunning thing is that her private character, the base on which all of this stands, has changed remarkably little. Yes, she has become, through and through, a political animal. She is breathing and thinking and dreaming politics, I guess. But on the other side, her character has not changed at all — the way she deals with people, the way she shows interest, the way she engages. She has not disappeared in the fog of prominence or of being a superhero. She’s a very down-to-earth woman, very self-critical. She’s always suspicious of people adoring her too much. She has kept that kind of ability to stand beside herself, watch herself, and tell herself, “Don’t take yourself too seriously, Angela.” — STEFAN KORNELIUS

Ever the East German

A CHILD OF THE EAST Her father was called “The Red Minister” because when everyone else was going west after the division of Germany following World War II, he went east and took over a parish north of Berlin, in the heartland of Brandenburg. It’s known for its correctness and its uprightness and the values of German Protestantism: hard work, discipline, self-effacement, all those things different from the German south. That was the region that shaped Merkel. That was the father who gave her a sense of purpose and responsibility. But she certainly didn’t take his politics and live by them. She was a good East German. She did not become a dissident. She avoided all the traps that could have derailed her career and even worse. She kept her head down and did what you had to do in order to have a decent life and a reasonably successful career. — GEORGE PACKER

FROM SCIENCE TO POLITICS She always was deeply interested in politics. She tells the story that she listened to West German radio in secret at her parents’ home, that she always dreamt of visiting Westminster in London, and so Parliament. Her first trip abroad led her to London. The first thing she did from Heathrow was to come up the escalator at Parliament Square in London and see the Churchill statue and then Parliament. Then, going on to Speakers’ Corner, watching those people debating. She had this deep desire to engage in public affairs and the public exchange of arguments. — STEFAN KORNELIUS

Angela Merkel worked as a research scientist until 1989. Here, as Federal Minister for the Environment, Nature Conservation and Nuclear Safety, she examines a beaker filled with water at a water-control station.

Photo by Ulrich Baumgarten via Getty Images

BEFORE THE WALL FELL I met Angela Merkel for the first time on Sept. 23, 1989, at an event organized by the Pastoral College in Templin. Her father, Horst Kasner, was in charge of this continuing education institution for the Protestant church. Together with friends and acquaintances, I attended a seminar with Professor Christofer Frey from Bochum on the relation of theology and natural sciences, ethics and responsibility, etc. My friend Marcus Kasner, Angela Merkel’s brother, also participated. One of the participants was Hans-Jürgen Fischbeck from the initiative Democracy Now, whose texts our ecumenical peace group had distributed the weekend before, after the worship. Another one was Angela Merkel, who was visiting her parents. I remember that she did not say much, but at one point when her father, as was typical for his generation, was suggesting moderation, she contradicted him. She was open-minded and acted politically in the spirit of the new civil rights movements, although she did not belong to one. For us, the most important date is the 9th of October, the Monday of the peaceful rally in Leipzig. One month later, the wall came down.

AFTER THE WALL FELL She wasn’t among the first to go over to the West. After it became clear people could cross, she didn’t go immediately. She actually took a sauna with a friend while others were crossing, and then joined a crowd. I picture her quietly taking it all in and assessing what it meant, rather than getting caught up in the euphoria and taking the lead. And that’s sort of been true of her for most of her political career. She doesn’t like to get out in front of the crowd. She likes to test the winds and make her decision like a scientist, based on a careful calculation of all the different factors at play.

She was a quantum chemist. She was divorced without children. She was working at an East German scientific institution that was decaying throughout the ’80s. You can’t think of a less-likely origin story for a world leader. I just have to speculate that as a really intelligent, ambitious, and capable person, she saw the fall of the wall as a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity and showed up at the local CDU [Christian Democratic Union] meeting and from there began to make her way upward. But whether she’d been planning it all along, I don’t believe it’s possible, because the fall of the Berlin Wall took everyone by surprise, including Merkel. I think she just saw the opportunity and realized that this was her moment, and she took it. — GEORGE PACKER

A NEW EXPERIMENT She had this career as a physicist, and she knew that the academic credentials she brought, the training and learning on the job she had enjoyed for about five to seven years in East Germany, wasn’t nearly enough of what was expected in the West. The East was so far behind in terms of equipment, in terms of scientific advances, that she knew she wouldn’t stand a chance in this competitive new environment. So she made the decision to join politics. She went from one political party to another to check on what she liked best. She disliked, for example, with the Social Democrats, the way that they always addressed each other by first name. That was too casual for her — or always this obligation to sing songs at the meetings. And the Greens, the same. That was alien to her. Her initial steps led her to a party called the Democratic Awakening, or Demokratischer Aufbruch . This party was, soon after unification, dissolved. — STEFAN KORNELIUS

“The key to understanding Angela Merkel is that her biographical experiences have shaped her world view. With the fall of the wall, her political life began.”

‘WE CAN DO IT’ The key to understanding Angela Merkel is that her biographical experiences have shaped her world view. With the fall of the wall, her political life began. That extraordinary event changed everything, shaped how she views political developments, and how to handle them. Merkel is motivated by a perspective that says, “What is impossible can be made possible.” When she lived in East Berlin, it appeared that life would never change. Even six months before the Berlin Wall fell, most people thought that its fall would be impossible. Her position on the migration crisis and her statement “Wir schaffen das” (“We can do it”) is a case in point. Merkel looks at a situation and then looks at its possibilities, not its obstacles. Her critics demanded that she take back this statement. But by doing so, they would have taken away her ability to lead. She, however, shaped the situation herself and decided how to handle it. She reacted the same way as with other topics. Rather than complaining, she looked at the opportunities the situation offered. — ANNETTE SCHAVAN

NO FENCES FOR REFUGEES After a long cabinet meeting, we went out of her office. During the meeting there had been tough conversations between some members of the government about the [Syrian] refugee issue. Some cabinet members asked for closing the borders and building fences. I was vice chancellor and leader of the Social Democratic party. She took me aside and said, “Please promise me that we will never build new fences in Germany against people who are refugees of civil wars and who only want to save their lives and the lives of their children.” To understand her position, one has to remember that she lived in East Germany, which was divided from West Germany through a fence. For me, it was her deep conviction that it is her duty as a Christian to help people who are in danger. And, of course, we did not build new fences in Germany.

HER CORE VALUES For a long time, there was a line I heard from many German journalists and politicians that she had no core values, that she was a politician who just went with what was popular and followed public opinion rather than led it — and that may have been true, but it’s no longer true. The second great event of her life, after the fall of the wall, has been something that echoes it: the arrival of hundreds of thousands of refugees at the borders of Germany. Those two moments are the bookends of her career. And there, she led and people learned that Merkel has core values, that they were shaped by being a product and a victim of Communism and being an East German, with all that that means. — GEORGE PACKER

FREEDOM AND SUPPRESSION Her suspicion of the police state, her suspicion of authoritarian systems, her deep, deep belief that liberalism and individualism are core to our whole existence — this all comes from her 35-year-old experience of being taught there and having to grow up in a system where she always felt suppressed. She grew up in a pastoral household. Her father was the priest-teacher in East Germany, the Protestant pastors’ teacher. So, yes, the family was watched. She was approached by the East German secret police when she started to study at the age of 17, 18, in Leipzig. She refused to cooperate, or actually told them she couldn’t keep a secret anyway, so it wouldn’t be worth recruiting her. So this is all part of her upbringing. It’s not pretension, it’s true. It is extremely honest, and you still do feel this honesty when she talks about democracy and liberalism and freedom. — STEFAN KORNELIUS

Taking power and leading

NO PLACEHOLDER Chancellor Helmut Kohl had good instincts, and choosing her as a successor was a good move. There was nothing for anybody to object to. There was nothing really for people to be able to say, “This is a real visionary; this is a person of great moral stature.” She was not that, but she clearly was not an apparatchik in any sense. She was a person whom no one could take offense with. I think the people in her party felt she’ll be the transitional figure between Kohl and whoever was the next major leader of the party. And, as it turned out, she was the major leader of the party.

In 1991, Merkel was appointed Federal Minister for Women and Youth by Helmut Kohl, her mentor and, before her, the longest-serving German chancellor.

Michael Jung/Picture-alliance-dpa/AP Images

CALM OVER BOMBAST In Germany, there is a kind of blandness and blindness to politics, at least as I saw it back then. It’s changing; Germany is becoming more like the rest of Europe, but slowly. We here [in America] don’t recognize a politician like Merkel. It’s part of Germany’s political culture to distrust bombast. Look at what bombast led to in Germany. When Merkel and then-Chancellor Gerhard Schröder sat around a table on a news talk show after the 2005 election, it was clear that her party had won the most votes. But Schröder was trying to claim a victory. He was certainly bombastic. Merkel just quietly let him talk and talk and finally said, “We won the election. We will form the government.” It was so devastating that it deflated him in front of the eyes of the country. That’s Merkel. That’s how she has succeeded. Not in spite of that, but that is how she’s succeeded. — GEORGE PACKER

THE WOMAN CALLED ‘MUTTI’ In the German vernacular, we have this expression that has become a verb: to merkeln , which is “to wait for the strategic opportunity, or see how the chips lie, or how a landscape presents itself, and then make a strategic move.” Because she’s a woman, they call her Mutti , which is short for Mommy. Mommy Merkel. That’s partially in admiration, because she’s not mommy-ish at all. She’s not the mother hen of the nation. She’s a shrewd, straightforward, straight shooter who doesn’t take too many risks. She’s comforting in that sense — because she’s not a risk-taker. That’s why when she did open the doors to millions of refugees; that, for people, really broke character, because usually she’s so calculated, she’s so strategic, she’s so good at thinking a couple steps ahead.

DOESN’T DOUBT HERSELF She’s not taken away by the grandeur of the office. She’s not a pomp-and-circumstance woman. She hates standing at a party conference giving a speech and being applauded for 20 minutes. You can see she is physically uncomfortable being pushed into the limelight. She prefers to govern quietly and step by step, not by grandiose ideas, approaches, speeches. She rejects that role, and this makes her suspicious of all of us who expect more of that leadership type. The thing is, she’s utterly self-confident. There’s no question about that. She never has any doubt that she is right. She has the strength to make it through troubles. She went through at least three or four near-death moments in her political life where she was solely alone, especially during the refugee crisis. She never had any doubt that she was doing the right thing. How does this go along with the lack of the wish to show off? I can’t explain. — STEFAN KORNELIUS

WICKEDLY FUNNY I think what people really appreciate about her is her sense of humor. That’s something you hear all the time, that she is wickedly funny in private and really good at imitating other people. She’s famous for that. She is also one of the most experienced world leaders, if not the most. Merkel can point to a degree of experience, including with American presidents, that just makes for a sense of judgment and ability to bridge conversations that is in very short supply right now and is really appreciated by politicians who are newer to the game. A case in point is how she managed to charm Alexis Tsipras of Greece. I’m very critical of Germany’s policy toward Greece, but, bizarrely, the German-Greek relationship and the relationship between Merkel and Tsipras appear to be excellent and have come through all this with a consensus that the Greeks are now in a better place. That’s a fairly remarkable achievement. My sense is that she is very good at three things: reasonableness, listening, and empathy. That creates a certain amount of trust. She is never theatrical. She doesn’t grandstand. What you see is what you get, and that also inspires trust. There’s a fundamental sense that you may disagree with her, you may think that she takes too long to make decisions, that she isn’t fast enough or bold enough, but there’s never the sense that there is double-dealing. And that, in this day and age, is helpful. — CONSTANZE STELZENMÜLLER

QUIETLY BUILT TRUST Persuasion, using German resources like her predecessors did. Her word counts because she represents the biggest economic power in the European Union, and her personal standing does too. She is very cautious and very diplomatic, and the way she treats other politicians is very different from who’s now in the White House. She’s respected because of her success, because of her competence, because of her rationality, and because of her reliability. And she’s been in power for a long time — that helps. Her strength is to find consensus quietly and not publicly, never to humiliate anybody publicly, and to work until the early morning hours to work out a compromise, which is the method of the European Union. That’s her style: Work long nights, and then come out with a compromise. — KARL KAISER

MASTER NEGOTIATOR In nearly every European or international negotiation during the last decade, she played a very important role. Without her, it would have not been possible to stop the war at a certain level in the east of Ukraine. It was her outstanding role to convince the heads of state and government to participate at the Paris Climate Summit in 2015. Without the participation of many heads of state and government, the summit would not have been so successful. And she was, without great media participation, very active in the difficult regions of West Africa. — SIGMAR GABRIEL

“I think what people really appreciate about her is her sense of humor. That’s something you hear all the time, that she is wickedly funny in private and really good at imitating other people.”

HER POLICIES AND EUROPE Over the 13 years, France and Germany have pulled off many important things. The most important bilateral challenge was definitely to hold the eurozone together, particularly after the sovereign debt and banking crisis broke. That was not an easy bilateral cooperation. Both worked their way toward each other. And in the end, Germany did change its position on some of the key issues because of that intense dialogue with France and also because of the reality of the crisis evolving even further.

She simply underestimated how strong the resistance would be on the quota system that was introduced for the refugees who arrived to get distributed across the EU member states. That was never accepted, although the decision was taken in the European Council with a majority vote. I would say there was a lack of understanding for the east/west and north/south divides in Europe over various issues: migration, the eurozone, questions of national identity. But on the other hand, at the time of Brexit negotiations, Germany was one of the states that firmly stuck to the EU negotiation line, and that was crucial for the EU to really hold together.

THE RISE OF NATIONALISM Her technocratic style of government certainly left room for new political groupings that spoke to people’s emotions, to the sense of insecurity, to the fear generated by the great series of crises and the sense that globalization was something that affected people negatively and there was no way of fending off those negative impacts. On the migration decision, it’s often said, particularly in America, that she “threw open the borders.” That’s just factually untrue. We would have broken European law if we had closed them. We would have also left the Austrians and the central Eastern Europeans and the Balkan countries with that problem, political economies that were much more vulnerable to stress than ours was. We would have pushed off the problems in a way that we would have been justifiably accused of irresponsibility for. Frankly, what caught people by surprise in the negative was that the government then struggled for such a long time to get a grip on the situation. — CONSTANZE STELZENMÜLLER

A CHANGED GERMANY German society has become much more open, much more welcoming, much more liberal. Where all Western societies were engulfed by racial issues or gender issues, gay marriage, all of these things, she pushed her conservative party extremely to the center and changed the political landscape. Second, and this is the much more important point, during her chancellorship, this country grew into a foreign policy role which postwar Germany never had and never dreamt of: being a foreign political actor, being the central balancing moderating power in Europe, leading the European Union. Holding it together was always France, Germany, and Britain doing that in concert. Now, with Britain dropping out of that equation, and France with President Emmanuel Macron being engulfed in huge domestic problems, this role of keeping Europe together and yet not dominating it falls to Germany. The age-old trap this country fell into — it was always too small to rule Europe, but too big to be denied as the role of the main actor. So you have to calibrate that role of leading without dominating extremely carefully. This is what she mastered very well. — STEFAN KORNELIUS

Fraying ties of U.S. and Germany

AMERICA AS A MODEL Merkel has always said how much America was an ideal for her when she was still a young adult in the GDR [German Democratic Republic, or East Germany]. I’ve seen that in a lot of East Germans who were not in conformity with the system or part of the system. America always represented a hope, an ideal, and … the whole Trump era has been so hard to process because we have clung for such a long time to this notion of America as a model. I don’t think that Trump has destroyed that model because that ideal is much bigger than Trump or the people around him. But I think that what we’re seeing is, in many ways, an America that mirrors our own troubles, a society that, despite the fact that it’s wealthy and highly developed, is really struggling with the impact of globalization and integration, is really struggling with political polarization and with adapting its democratic structure to the new international gale-force winds that are buffeting all countries, large and small. — CONSTANZE STELZENMÜLLER

DISAPPOINTED IN THE U.S. She is a typical German in the sense that she considers a close relationship with the U.S. the most important part of Germany’s foreign policy and she’s profoundly disappointed by the destructive impact of Trump’s foreign policy in questioning that basis. She has tried to minimize the damage as much as possible and tried to educate her German compatriots, but also the European Union, that, on the one hand, one can no longer rely in the same way as in the past on the U.S., but on the other, to do everything one can to preserve the basics of that relationship. — KARL KAISER

Last year, this photo of a defiant Donald Trump facing Merkel and other leaders of the European Union at the G7 summit in Quebec went viral.

Photo by Jesco Denzel/German Federal Government via AP

THE VALUE OF FREEDOM Of all the honors Merkel has received, the most meaningful to her was the Presidential Medal of Freedom that President Obama presented to her on June 7, 2011. It underscored what she holds most dear: her deep conviction of the value of freedom. From her perspective, Europeans are losing [a sense of] the value of freedom. — ANNETTE SCHAVAN

WHY SHE SOUGHT A FOURTH TERM The main reason why she ran for the fourth time was Donald Trump. She was undecided by the time he was elected in November 2016. She had to decide by December 2016 whether she would run again or not. After he was elected, she decided she couldn’t leave the West exposed to so much change at once. There was a French election coming up that year with, at that point, an extremely unperceivable outcome. Marine Le Pen was strong in the polls, and [French President] Emmanuel Macron wasn’t there yet. There was the danger that France would be the next to jump off the ship. Brexit was just starting to become reality. We had Trump in the United States. So at that point she decided that, “Even if I would consider it best to have a democratic change in Germany, it is far too dangerous right now.” — STEFAN KORNELIUS

TOTALLY LIBERATED AT MUNICH I’m one of the oldest members of the Munich Security Conference. I’ve been there since the late ’70s. It has never happened that a person got such a standing ovation. This is not done. And it was done. Because for the first time in the history of the conference, you had an America that consisted of two parts: one that challenges everything this conference had been standing for, and the other one that represented what had been the consensus of what originally was a NATO conference. That is why there was this enormous relief. Here is somebody who represents what we think: she, as the German chancellor, and then [former Vice President Joseph] Biden as the American. What struck all of us who know her from other occasions, she was totally liberated. I’ve never seen that. — KARL KAISER

Considering her legacy

ONE WHO PRESERVES The biggest misunderstanding is that she is simply sitting on her hands and that she really hasn’t changed the country, that she never came up with one big major theme or issue which will define her chancellorship. That’s not true. Probably these are things that might become clearer in retrospect: being the one who preserves rather than destroys, being the one who maintains, the one who solves crises rather than causes crises. This is defensive, not offensive, and this is probably the biggest misunderstanding: that these gifts are actually valuable and not for nothing. But she was never able to explain it, and she will never be, so it will be up to historians to judge. — STEFAN KORNELIUS

LEAVING AT THE TOP I guess [history will recognize her for] two things: to handle – quietly — really great international and domestic challenges while keeping the European Union together; and secondly, to preside over Europe’s most powerful country without reviving any fear of German power. It’s obviously her decision to have an orderly transition and not to repeat what happened under some of her predecessors. Some of the German chancellors ended very sadly. To leave when you’re at the top is very desirable, and to make sure that you have a successor you think is the best to continue your work. — KARL KAISER

“She slowly walks out now into the sunset.”

In 2021, Merkel will step down from office, perhaps exiting the world stage.

Photo by Jesco Denzel

A FEMINIST, OR NOT It’s been a really interesting road for her because she’s had a difficult relationship with the idea of being a feminist. In the modern European era, aside from British Prime Minister Maggie Thatcher, she’s the longest-serving female leader, but that hasn’t necessarily meant that the state of women, or how women are seen in [Germany], or how women are perceived as leaders in the corporate or political environment, has radically shifted. I do believe she wrestles with whether she’s a feminist or not. I think she would just consider herself a shrewd and calculating politician regardless of her gender, and that has been entirely borne out in the way that she ascended the ranks to party leadership. Despite that, we now have a would-be female successor to her in Annegret Kramp-Karrenbauer. — CATHRYN CLÜVER ASHBROOK

A FEMINIST BY EXAMPLE She is a feminist by example and by asserting the right of women to be at the table and to lead at the table. Part of [that] is generational, and part is she is someone who believes in doing more than saying. I hope it doesn’t escape anyone that her likely successor is a woman. I think she believes that if you have the competence, if you have the skill, if you have the wherewithal — whoever you are — you should be able to move ahead. — WENDY R. SHERMAN

CHAMPIONING LIBERAL VALUES Within the EU, the migration crisis and the strong stance Germany took on eurozone issues will remain points of criticism. The question is whether, under her leadership, Germany will move further with its positions on eurozone questions. With the current coalition, this is possible. We’ll see. But I don’t think domestically this will define her legacy. In terms of European affairs or international affairs, I think [she will be remembered for] her determined stance on Russia and the way she engaged for the EU with Vladimir Putin on Ukraine and Russia, and the way that she became “The European” to talk with Putin. And secondly, standing up for liberal international values and a strong Europe in a situation where trans-Atlantic relations are fragile at least, or challenged by the U.S. president. — DANIELA SCHWARZER

WHY SHE WON’T RUN AGAIN She might have won it, but the price would have been huge. The country would have been paralyzed by that debate. She would have been engulfed by domestic fights or party fights, so she decided to decide on her own terms how to leave and when. Actually, the “when” is not decided yet, but at least she regained the initiative. Public opinion swung around immediately, and many applauded her. She slowly walks out now into the sunset. — STEFAN KORNELIUS

AMERICA’S GREATEST SUCCESS What I wish her to do is to use this occasion as an appeal to America about the basic premises of what America and Europe are about and what their relationship is about in the age of Trump. She is one of the leading spokesmen of Europe and of everything America stood for and what America created. Germany is the greatest success of American foreign policy. And to have re-created that country, the country of the Holocaust, which went to war with America, and is now America’s most important ally? Fantastic when you think about it and see it in historic terms. — KARL KAISER

HER HARVARD VISIT [South African leader Nelson] Mandela had been the biggest, most respected global leader, without question, when he was alive. I think that leader is now Merkel. The career incentives for our students are so unbalanced — the salaries in the private sector and on Wall Street. We want Harvard students also to think about their obligations and the good they can do in the public sector. And so, you think back to Marshall and [Aleksandr] Solzhenitsyn and Mandela, all on a Harvard stage. She’s someone whom our students can look up to and say, “This is someone I can follow. This is someone I can try to emulate.” That’s powerful for a Harvard Commencement, I think. Very powerful. — NICHOLAS BURNS

These interviews have been edited for clarity and length .

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Angela Merkel

Who Is Angela Merkel?

Angela Dorothea Kasner, better known as Angela Merkel, was born in Hamburg, West Germany, on July 17, 1954. Trained as a physicist, Merkel entered politics after the 1989 fall of the Berlin Wall. Rising to the position of chairwoman of the Christian Democratic Union party, Merkel became Germany's first female chancellor and one of the leading figures of the European Union, following the 2005 national elections.

Early Years

German stateswoman and chancellor Angela Merkel was born Angela Dorothea Kasner on July 17, 1954, in Hamburg, Germany. The daughter of a Lutheran pastor and teacher who moved his family east to pursue his theology studies, Merkel grew up in a rural area north of Berlin in the then German Democratic Republic. She studied physics at the University of Leipzig, earning a doctorate in 1978, and later worked as a chemist at the Central Institute for Physical Chemistry, Academy of Sciences from 1978 to 1990.

First Female Chancellor

After the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, Merkel joined the Christian Democratic Union (CDU) political party. Soon after, she was appointed to Helmut Kohl's cabinet as minister for women and youth, and later she served as minister for the environment and nuclear safety. Following Kohl's defeat in the 1998 general election, she was named secretary-general of the CDU. In 2000, Merkel was chosen party leader, but she lost the CDU candidacy for chancellor to Edmund Stoiber in 2002.

In the 2005 election, Merkel narrowly defeated Chancellor Gerhard Schröder, winning by just three seats, and after the CDU agreed a coalition deal with the Social Democrats (SPD), she was declared Germany's first female chancellor. Merkel also became the first former citizen of the German Democratic Republic to lead the reunited Germany and the first woman to lead Germany since it became a modern nation-state in 1871. She was elected to a second term in 2009.

Merkel made headlines in October 2013 when she accused the U.S. National Security Agency of tapping her cell phone. At a summit of European leaders she chided the United States for this privacy breech, saying that "Spying among friends is never acceptable." Shortly afterward, in December 2013, she was sworn in for a third term.

Fourth-Term Challenges

Angela Merkel was reelected for a fourth term as chancellor in September 2017. However, although her CDU party held its majority in the Bundestag, the national parliament, the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) won 13 percent of the vote to become the third-largest group in parliament, after the CDU/CSU and SPD. It was the first time a far-right party had entered the Bundestag since 1961.

“We expected a better result, that is clear,” Merkel said following the election. “The good thing is that we will definitely lead the next government.” She also said she would address supporters of the AfD “by solving problems, by taking up their worries, partly also their fears, but above all by good politics.”

Additional problems surfaced in mid-November, when attempts to form a new government coalition collapsed. Following weeks of negotiations, the Free Democratic Party (FDP) suddenly pulled out of talks with the CDU/CSU and the Greens, over differences regarding immigration and other policies. The rejection marked another blow to Merkel, who said that her party would "continue to take responsibility for this country, even in such a difficult situation."

In March 2018, the SPD voted to renew its coalition with the CDU, clearing the path for Merkel to finally move forward with her fourth term. Talks had stalled between the parties, though the gridlock eased after SPD leader Martin Schulz stepped down in February.

That summer, Merkel again had to walk a political tightrope when facing an ultimatum from Horst Seehofer, her interior minister and the leader of Bavaria's Christian Social Union. Seehofer had threatened to quit over Merkel's refusal to deny entry to migrants with asylum claims pending elsewhere in the European Union, but in early July the two announced they had agreed to a compromise, in which transit centers would be established on the border with Austria to route asylum seekers to their responsible countries.

In October 2018, Merkel announced that she planned to step aside as chair of the CDU at the end of the year and would not run for reelection as chancellor in 2021. Annegret Kramp-Karrenbauer subsequently took over leadership of the CDU, a move seen as an endorsement of Merkel's legacy, until Kramp-Karrenbauer's surprise resignation in February 2020 clouded the picture for the chancellor's final months in office.

Further complicating matters was the outbreak of the coronavirus which shut down industries and forced lifestyle changes for people around the world. Merkel implemented rules to close restaurants and other gathering areas, but the measures were not enough to prevent her exposure to a doctor with the virus, leading to her self-quarantine in late March.

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Angela Merkel was sworn in as Chancellor on November 22, 2005. She is the first woman and the first East German to hold this office. Her CV traces the most important milestones on her way to taking this office.

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Kanzlerin Angela Merkel

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Angela Merkel was born in Hamburg on 17 July 1954. She is a Protestant Christian and is married to Joachim Sauer.

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Angela Merkel: How a poor girl from East Germany rose to become the 'Empress of Europe'

Perched on the edge of a 3-metre diving board, Angela Kasner was paralysed by fear.

With her class waiting below, the nine-year-old stared down into the swimming pool for 45 minutes, hesitating on whether to take that next step.

But as the school bell trilled to mark the end of the lesson, she finally made the plunge.

"That's just how I am, not particularly courageous," she remarked later in life.

"It always takes me a while to weigh the risks."

It was the early 1960s, and Angela Kasner, later known as Angela Merkel, was   within the confines of the German Democratic Republic (GDR), a communist state established post World War II.

Tucked away in the small town of Templin, just north of Berlin in East Germany, Merkel grew up surrounded by picturesque forests and glacial lakes.

Divided from the West and with a troubled economy, her childhood in GDR wasn't always idyllic. It was common to see people lining up in long queues for food and other goods.

The impression it left on a young Angela would last a lifetime.

Years later, she confessed to a habit of hoarding and buying things even if she didn't need them.

To this day, she does her own grocery shopping.  She makes breakfast for her husband every morning. 

The girl who yearned for a pair of Levi's jeans grew into a woman who happily repeats an 18-year-old ensemble . 

But  Merkel has also reflected  that life in the GDR, where so much was out of her control, was simple. 

"Sometimes [it was] almost comfortable in a certain way because there were some things one simply couldn't influence," she says.

The remarks offer some insight into the woman who would go on to earn the nickname 'Empress of Europe'. 

Her childhood would instil a cautiousness and thoughtfulness that became hallmarks of her leadership of Germany for 16 years.

A watcher of the West

A quiet but studious child who excelled at school, Merkel mastered Russian.

Like many kids, she joined the Free German Youth (FDJ) and managed her way through the communist system, but always with a whimsical eye for the West, borne out of movies and books smuggled into the parsonage by family members.

"I was also a fan of a certain brand of jeans that couldn't be bought in the GDR, but I had an aunt in the West who used to send them to me," Merkel would recall years later, in an address to the US Congress .

Merkel's formative years coincided with the early stages of the GDR, which had been formed just five years before her birth, according to Matthew Karnitschnig, POLITICO's Europe bureau chief. 

"She really grew up right at the genesis of the German Democratic Republic and her own life followed the trajectory of that project, which was ultimately doomed," he said.

As a young student, she squatted in a vacant apartment out of "desperation" .

Eventually, she chose to pursue a career in physics because as she put it, "there, the truth isn't so easily bent".

But when she arrived for a job at a university in the 1970s, she was met by a Stasi secret police officer who came to recruit her. She declined, saying she couldn't keep her mouth shut.

When the Berlin Wall dramatically fell in 1989, removing the artifice between East and West overnight, she did not rush to the other side like so many of her compatriots.

Instead, she went to the local sauna, as she did every Thursday, with a friend.

"I figured if the wall had opened, it was hardly going to close again, so I decided to wait," she recalled.

It was quintessentially Merkel in her understated, pragmatic approach, a style that would stay with her as she made her unlikely rise to the chancellorship.

From physicist to unlikely leader

The collapse of the GDR in 1990 meant today's Germany was cobbled together in a hurry.

Then a 35-year-old scientist, Merkel seemed an unlikely figure to enter politics.

Within a year of reunification, she was an elected representative in the Bundestag and appointed the minister for women and youth.

"Her ambition would have been to be steady, build up a kind of basis in the party — she had none remember — and she really was chaperoned all the time by the chancellor at the time Helmut Kohl," Judy Dempsey, author of The Merkel Phenomenon, told the ABC.

"To say at the time that, 'Oh gosh, this is going to be a chancellor of Germany,' I don't think it was in anybody's mind at all."

Back then, the Christian Democratic Union Party (CDU) was predominantly made up of Catholic men from the West.

"They thought they could really walk over her, but she saw her male opponents off one by one," Dempsey said.

"This was a woman, not to be pushed around, or to be insulted, or her gender to be taken for granted."

While she was not to be strong-armed, it was almost as if she fell into higher office, Karnitschnig added.

"She wasn't just a surprising figure, I would say that she was almost an accidental figure," he said.

"A series of scandals enveloped the other leaders of the party, and she ended up being the last woman standing."

Merkel became party leader in 2002, and a narrow victory of just 1 per cent in the 2005 general election led to her power. 

"She was surprising in many ways also because … she's not the kind of person that people are automatically sort of viscerally drawn to," Karnitschnig said.

Over time, that understated approach came to be the biggest selling point for Chancellor Merkel.

The new chancellor, uneasy in the public spotlight, began to hold her hands together.

It would soon be known as the 'Merkel Raute', which translates to Merkel Rhombus. 

"It is really a sign of how shy she is at the end of the day, and again a reminder that this is somebody who is not a typical politician," Karnitschnig said.

Sixteen years on, she remains the most popular figure in German politics.

If she chose to run again, she almost certainly would be re-elected.

It is a testament to her political deftness within her party and a credit to the respect she commands from the German people, despite fronting decades of crises.

A steady hand in a tumultuous time 

Merkel would become the ultimate crisis manager, a steady hand as her country and the world struggled with economic crises, humanitarian catastrophes, the rise of populism and the COVID-19 pandemic.

Her style, methodical, thoughtful, and analytical, has won her praise both at home and abroad.

Even if, to some, her approach, has been seen as overly cautious and slow.

But the first major crisis Merkel faced as chancellor wasn't even in Germany. It was in Greece.

In 2008, as the consequences of the Lehmann Brothers collapse in New York rippled around the world, a banking crisis threatened the European project and the common currency – the Euro.

Countries like Greece, Spain and Ireland found themselves on the brink of financial collapse, with huge levels of national debt.

They all turned to Germany, the biggest and most financially secure country in Europe. And although Merkel had the ability to bail Greece out, she refused unless the debt-stricken nations made significant structural changes.

"[She] ran Europe tough when it came to the global financial crisis and the philosophy was, 'You've got huge debt problems, it's total corruption'," Dempsey said.

"And, heavens, she did this to Portugal, she did this to Spain, she did this to Ireland and she did this to Greece."

On the streets of Europe, anger — particularly towards the chancellor — was palpable .

"The Greeks really loathed Merkel and accused [her] of being a kind of Nazi and so on," Dempsey said.

"But actually, she's stuck by her policy. Her reputation was … a tough 'Iron Chancellor' who's going to clean up Europe's fiscal mess."

If the handling of the global financial crisis defined her as a tough figure, her approach to the refugee crisis of 2015 turned that definition on its head.

It was in the summer when 1.3 million migrants, mostly fleeing war-torn Syria, arrived on Europe's doorstep.

Pressure was building on Germany and Europe. The 'Iron Chancellor' was widely criticised after she told a 14-year-old Palestinian teen that she may be deported.

The clip went viral, showing a wooden and uncomfortable Merkel trying to console her. 

A month later, after visiting a refugee camp in Dresden, she made the most iconic speech of her chancellorship.

"Wir schaffen das!" she told a crowd, which roughly translates to "We can do this!".

The deliberator makes a spontaneous call 

Her decision to allow refugees to flow into Germany — more than 1 million all told — inspired and divided the nation. And the great deliberator appeared to have made a hasty, emotional decision.

"It was a decision made at the heat of the moment that she might not make in the same way today, because at the time she believed that fewer people would come than ended up coming," Karnitschnig said.

Merkel went on to defend her position.

"I have to be honest, if we start having to apologise for showing a friendly face in emergencies, then this is not my country," she said. 

But that decision became a catalyst for inflaming a side of Germany that she had worked so hard to bury.

In her final election campaign, Merkel's CDU/CSU saw its vote share plummet by more than eight points.

The previously unrepresented Alternative For Deutschland (AfD), with its far-right, anti-immigrant rhetoric, surged into the Bundestag with more than 12 per cent of the vote.

The major parties formed a grand coalition to limit AfD's influence. But by doing so, they turned them into Germany’s de facto opposition party.

"Now, politically, when the dust settled, Merkel paid a price for this, with the rise of the Alternative for Germany," Judy Dempsey said of the Chancellor’s policy on refugees.

"But Merkel stuck to her principles."

The rise of the AfD coincided with populism emerging around the world, from Brexit to Donald Trump, all becoming forces that Merkel was forced to confront and navigate in the later years of her chancellorship.

"The government has to buckle up," Alexander Gauland, AfD party leader told supporters after the surprise result in 2017.

"We will hunt them. We will hunt Frau Merkel."

But soon, troubles at the ballot box were the least of the chancellor's worries.

The murders of nine people in two shisha bars in Hanau, near Frankfurt in 2020 and the deaths of two others in a shooting on a synagogue in Halle in 2019 exposed a raw underbelly the country had tried so desperately to leave behind.

The AfD’s support appears to have plateaued ahead of this weekend's national poll, but they have firmly ensconced within the German political conversation. 

And the country Angela Merkel expertly navigated for 16 years appears to be fraying at the seams. 

Merkel leaves behind a mixed legacy

When Merkel came to power, George W Bush was in the White House, Tony Blair occupied 10 Downing Street and John Howard had the keys to Kirribilli House.

As figures of that era fell away, Merkel remained.

And, as populism ran rampant across the world, her acrimonious relationship with US President Donald Trump saw her bestowed with the title of the 'liberal West's last defender'  and the 'Empress of Europe'. 

Often the only woman in the room, she displayed a stoic weariness for the antics of some of her male counterparts.

During one memorable G8 summit, George W Bush crept up behind her to rub her shoulders, while Russia's leader Vladimir Putin brought along his big black labrador to a meeting with the dog-phobic Merkel.

Known affectionately by some in Germany as "Mutti" or Mama, she became the mother of a nation. 

And while she has gained that reputation internationally, her approach to governing domestically has often been seen as slow. 

In many ways, she remains the girl standing on the edge of the diving board, weighing up the risks and benefits of jumping in. 

A generation of Germans, who have spent their entire childhoods with her at the helm, are itching for change.

In recent years, the verb, "Merkeln" has found its way into the local lexicon, a verb for holding off on making decisions.

"In the last few years, government policy in Germany has run on autopilot," Annalena Baerbock, the Greens leader who is vying to replace her as chancellor, said.

Merkel dragged Germany, a nation once known as the "poor man of Europe" into an economic powerhouse.

But critics argue Merkel's reign is defined by the pursuit of Germany's economic interests above all else.

"It [Germany] hides behind the United States or other countries when it comes to a lot of these difficult questions and it's opened it to a lot of accusations that it is ultimately only interested in the health of its economy," Matthew Karnitschnig said.

While Merkel has lulled the German people into relying on the stability of her understated leadership, voters are turning away from her party in droves. 

By vacating her place as chancellor, it also leaves a void in Europe's leadership, which French President Emmanuel Macron clearly sees himself filling — for now.

And whoever replaces her will pale in significance to the authority she has wielded on the global stage for decades.

"It's definitely the end of an era," Karnitschnig said.

While incremental change and process-driven politics may also leave with Merkel, her status as a stateswoman of Europe will remain.

"Her legacy might be as the last dominant leader of Germany," Karnitschnig said.

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Angela Merkel: The Authorised Biography by Stefan Kornelius – review

O n a recent trip to Washington, I went to the Newseum , one of those American museums dedicated entirely to the history of one thing, in this case news reporting. In the foyer is an entire segment of the Berlin Wall, the largest outside Germany. Walking around that concrete slab, I marvelled at the scale of the thing, its gunshot pockmarks and the arabesque graffiti: real history, written in a kind of cryptic braille.

And then I looked at the plaque alongside, which tries to explain the wall's meaning in the language of journalism. The graffiti on the Berlin Wall, it says, was sprayed on by "freedom-lovers" – a phrase so ideologically overcharged it sounds absurd. The more times I read it, the more meaningless it seemed: what if the sprayers just simply loved graffiti?

Reading Stefan Kornelius's biography of the German chancellor, I was reminded several times of the display in the Newseum. Angela Merkel may currently be the most discussed and least understood ruler in the world. Likely to be re-elected on 22 September for the third term in a row, she is as despised as she is admired. Some think she is a neoliberal zealot, others reckon she is a closet Marxist; she's both an austerity addict and the first conservative social democrat, a scientifically minded rationalist and a religious ideologue. The true nature of the Merkel phenomenon is as elusive as North Sea fog. For some reason, this makes it irresistible for journalists to wheel out the equivalent of the "freedom-lover" tag.

Kornelius, for one, can't resist. In an attempt to explain what makes Merkel tick, he points to her speech at the Christian Democrats' party conference in October 2003. This is considered the moment she came closest to baring her ideological soul, but it's quite hard to tell what she was going on about: "Without freedom there is nothing! Freedom is the joy of achievement, the flourishing of the individual, the celebration of difference, the rejection of mediocrity, personal responsibility."

Another speech, from 2010: "On one side stands freedom from something; on the other, freedom to do something. So when we speak of freedom we are always speaking of someone else's freedom." Freedom lies in the release of the individual from the collective, but also the solidarity individuals feel towards the collective.

What is the cultural glue that holds Europe together, she was asked in 2007, three years before the first Greek bailout: "Freedom in all its form[s]: freedom to express opinions, freedom to believe or not believe, freedom to trade and do business, the artist's freedom to shape his work according to his own ideas." Freedom means everything to Merkel, but possibly also nothing; it's impossible to tell.

Luckily, Angela Merkel isn't really an attempt to explain Merkel's true political convictions, but a biography about foreign policy and Merkel's political decision-making process – and in that respect Kornelius, whose career as a journalist has tailgated hers since they first met in 1989, proves an illuminating guide.

Born in 1954 to a Protestant pastor and an English teacher, Angela Merkel nee Kasner moved from Hamburg in the west to the village of Quitzow in the east when she was just a few years old: it bears repeating that by the time the Berlin Wall went down she was 35 years old. "The Merkel mystery," Kornelius writes, "is rooted in the failed east German republic."

She is revealed in this book as more culturally eastern European than we tend to think. Her Stasi file noted that while she viewed the Soviet Union as a dictatorship, she was also "enthusiastic about the Russian language and culture". In her early teens, she was selected as third-best Russian student in the GDR. My favourite of Kornelius's anecdotes is that she learned English not by secretly reading Orwell under the covers, but with the help of the British communist newspaper, the Morning Star.

References to Merkel's past are often used to smear her character, and for that reason, more respectable profiles focus on her training as a physicist or her religious household when explaining her political style. But Kornelius draws conclusions from her upbringing that go beyond the cliches. East Germany's progressive attitude to women at work, he suggests, may explain her distaste for "the tendency that certain male politicians have constantly to assert themselves", as she once put it. Her most influential and longest-serving adviser is a woman, and Kornelius claims she would have preferred a President Hillary Clinton to Obama, with whom she has a rather frosty relationship.

She showed little scruple abandoning her father figure Helmut Kohl, who had recognised her talent when she was still the press officer of the GDR's Democratic Awakening party and given her a first ministerial post in 1990. On 22 December 1999, in a newspaper comment piece, she called for her party to let go of the man who had led it for 25 years – a nice Christmas present.

Those 35 years to the east of the iron curtain may also hold a clue to her reluctance to take a lead during the eurozone crisis : the philosopher Jürgen Habermas has criticised her for "dozing on a volcano". Merkel's critics have said she does not feel passionately about European unity in the way her predecessors did, that it takes third place to her cultural yearning for Russia and her ideological admiration for America. But Kornelius argues convincingly that she has a clear sense of the value of European culture – it's just she believes sentimentality won't guarantee its survival. "I know what living in a collapsing system feels like," she has said, "and I don't want to go through that again."

This aversion to misty-eyed idealism, her refusal to score cheap goals, commands admiration; nothing demonstrates it better than when she was asked by a Der Spiegel journalist whether she was proud to be German. "I don't think the Germans are particularly bad or outstandingly wonderful. I am fond of kebabs and pizza, I think the Italians have a nicer alfresco cafe culture, and I think there is more sunshine in Switzerland." But of course likable people can make terrible decisions: in Merkel's case, a strategy of aping social democracy at home while demanding austerity of the EU may be at the centre of Europe's current social imbalance. Kornelius mentions this theory, but seems reluctant to explore it further. The problem with this "authorised biography" is the problem of any book by an active correspondent: too much frank talking is risky. Thus the praise drowns out the criticism.

So we have to make do with reading between the lines. At the start of her chancellorship, Kornelius writes, Merkel was keen to seek advice from external experts. More recently, however, she has allowed her circle of confidants to close around her. As a result, "she now rules largely unchallenged, particularly in foreign policy". It's all too reminiscent of a recent British prime minister, whose control of his backbenchers she so admired that on taking office in 2005 she dispatched her own head of staff for two-weeks' work experience in Downing Street. Just under a decade later, Tony Blair could perhaps teach Merkel another lesson: one disastrous foreign-policy decision can undo almost everything.

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German elections: How Angela Merkel changed her country

• Published 18 September 2021

As one of the world's most influential leaders, Angela Merkel has helped to determine the course of European and global politics. But during her 16 years as German chancellor, she's also had a considerable impact on her own country, shaping the lives of millions of citizens for better or worse.

Among them, the students who celebrated the end of their school days this summer.

At one prom in Berlin, excited teenagers in smart jackets and formal dresses danced to a thudding bass in a marquee. The class of 2021 has come of age in Mrs Merkel's Germany; they have never known another German leader.

"We don't have a perfect democracy," says Ole Schroeder, "but I think we have a good democracy."

"Germany is good with the immigration system," adds Alisa Gukasov. "Everyone has the chance to live here and to achieve their dreams."

But they worry about the future.

Lina Ziethen's main concern is climate change. "We have to stand up and say stop driving cars, stop flying on holiday because we need to reduce emissions - but we should have also already done this 50 years ago, not just now."

It is on the minds of many Germans, not least because of this summer's deadly floods in the west of the country.

Under Mrs Merkel, Germany has reduced emissions and invested in renewables.

But it's widely acknowledged that current targets aren't strict enough; and Germany is still burning coal, in part because Mrs Merkel abandoned nuclear power after the Fukushima disaster in Japan 10 years ago.

If you wander through the fairy-tale forests that carpet so much of this country, you can see the damage wrought by climate change.

The Borkenkäfer, a beetle that bores into trees and destroys them, is proliferating in warmer, drier conditions.

The trees' natural defences are weakened too. Hans Schattenberg, who manages the forests of the eastern Harz region, says all he and his staff can do is cut down acres of woodland to try to halt the spread.

"We never thought the forest would react so quickly to climate change," he says. "'What shocked us most is that it wasn't just the conifers that were badly affected, but also old oak and beech trees."

Old certainties are shifting here.

Under Mrs Merkel, Germany has prospered, though her predecessors must take some of the credit for the wealth of today. And critics worry that, as competitors move ahead with technological and digital advances, this economic giant is struggling to keep up.

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Her family have been brewing beer since 1877; one of the so-called Mittelstand (family firms) responsible for much of this country's economic success.

These have been good years, she says, and Angela Merkel has done a good job.

"We don't really have much to complain about," adds her husband Phillip, who took her surname when he married into the family business. The Mittelstand could, he says, do with more support and less bureaucracy.

"We are doing well in Germany. But, of course, the danger is you feel too content and stagnate and fall behind."

Perhaps Mrs Merkel's greatest influence can be seen in German society. Her refusal to close the doors to hundreds of thousands of people seeking asylum in the country in 2015 was a pivotal moment in her chancellorship.

Germany has long relied on migrants to fill jobs, keep the economy going and rejuvenate an ageing population - ever since the Turkish "Gastarbeiter" who came to help rebuild the country after World War Two.

Today more than a quarter of people living in Germany have a migrant background.

Among them is Negin, who arrived from Iran as a teenage asylum seeker and told us she nearly drowned as she crossed the Mediterranean in a small, overcrowded boat.

Today, she's an apprentice at a Berlin dental practice and, in fluent German, says she plans to become a dentist herself.

Life's good. I have an aim in life. I'm fighting. But some things are still too difficult. I have to study a lot and work harder than other people. Sometimes I still feel new Negin

Mrs Merkel famously told Germany "Wir schaffen das" (we can do it) during the so-called migrant crisis. Six years later, many would agree she was right. The sense of crisis has long passed.

But some Germans - a minority - are still furious. They point to migrant crime and terror attacks.

A far-right anti-migrant party, the AfD, now sits in the national parliament. Fuelled by lingering resentment that is particularly strong in the former communist East.

When the Iron Curtain fell, people in the East were promised blooming landscapes. But 30 years on opportunities are fewer, and salaries and pensions lower than in the rest of the country. It's hard to convince young people to stay.

In their typical German Schrebergarten (allotment garden) Hannelore and her friends say they thought Mrs Merkel would do more for the former East. After all, the chancellor herself grew up behind the Iron Curtain.

Disillusioned with Germany's long-established political parties, they vote AfD.

"Since 2015 when the migrants came marching in uncontrolled, since then it has gone downhill for Germany," says Hannelore.

There is nothing left of the Germany we knew because we have been overrun and are still overrun by migrants Hannelore

Inequalities persist in today's Germany.

Mrs Merkel's critics, for example, say she could have done more to address the gender pay gap, one of the worst in Europe, or encourage more women into leading positions in business and politics.

"She did try," says Daniela Schwarzer from the Open Society Foundation. Like many here, she believes that by simply occupying Germany's top job, Mrs Merkel has been a powerful role model to younger women.

She cites her support for Germany's current Defence Minister Annegret Kramp-Karrenbauer, who was once in the running to succeed her as chancellor.

"When you hear about how she actually managed the chancellery, there were women in key positions, and she was actually surrounded by women as her closest advisers."

And Mrs Merkel remains a popular figure in the country she's led for so long.

"In the long run people will see that these 16 years, if you sum it up, were quite successful, not only economically, but also in shaping the country towards preparing it for a future which will not be easy," says Professor Magnus Brechtken from Munich's Institute of Contemporary History.

Her legacy is to have represented "rational, pragmatic solution-orientated" thinking, in a world he sees as more shaped by people who have taken an approach that is either national, irrational, narcissistic or populist.

At a casual glance, the world of German politics can look rather boring. It's all about compromise, consensus and continuity.

In that sense Mrs Merkel has given her country what it expects from a leader. A voice of calm in a turbulent and shifting world.

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• Published 27 September 2021

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The Quiet German

By George Packer

A summer afternoon at the Reichstag. Soft Berlin light filters down through the great glass dome, past tourists ascending the spiral ramp, and into the main hall of parliament. Half the members’ seats are empty. At the lectern, a short, slightly hunched figure in a fuchsia jacket, black slacks, and a helmet of no-color hair is reading a speech from a binder. Angela Merkel, the Chancellor of the Federal Republic of Germany and the world’s most powerful woman, is making every effort not to be interesting.

“As the federal government, we have been carrying out a threefold policy since the beginning of the Ukraine crisis,” Merkel says, staring at the binder. Her delivery is toneless, as if she were trying to induce her audience into shifting its attention elsewhere. “Besides the first part of this triad, targeted support for Ukraine, is, second, the unceasing effort to find a diplomatic solution for the crisis in the dialogue with Russia.” For years, public speaking was visibly painful to Merkel, her hands a particular source of trouble; eventually, she learned to bring her fingertips together in a diamond shape over her stomach.

The Reichstag was constructed under Kaiser Wilhelm I and Chancellor Otto von Bismarck, in the eighteen-eighties, when a newly unified Germany was making its first rise to preëminence in Europe. Two days before the end of the First World War, with a Bolshevik revolution spreading across the country, a social-democratic politician interrupted his lunch inside the Reichstag, stood at a second-floor balcony, and declared the end of imperial Germany: “Long live the German republic!” The Reichstag was the turbulent seat of parliament through the Weimar era and into the start of Nazi rule, until, on the night of February 27, 1933, a suspicious fire broke out in the session chamber and nearly gutted the building. Germany’s new Chancellor, Adolf Hitler, rushed to the scene with his aide Joseph Goebbels and blamed the fire on the Communists, using the crisis to suspend civil liberties, crush the opposition, and consolidate all power into the Nazi Party. Parliament voted to render itself meaningless, and the Nazis never repaired the damaged building. At the end of the Second World War, the Soviets saw the Reichstag as the symbol of the Third Reich and made it a top target in the Battle for Berlin, laying heavy siege. A photograph of a Red Army soldier raising a Soviet flag amid the neoclassical statuary on the roof became the iconic image of German defeat.

During the Cold War, the Reichstag—its cupola wrecked, its walls bullet-pocked—was an abandoned relic in the no man’s land of central Berlin, just inside the British sector. The Wall, built in 1961, ran a few steps from the back of the building. A minimal renovation in the sixties kept out the elements, but the Reichstag was generally shunned until the Wall came down, in 1989. Then, at midnight on October 3, 1990, President Richard von Weizsäcker stood outside the Reichstag and announced to a crowd of a million people the reunification of Germany, in freedom and peace. Berlin became its capital.

For the next decade, until the Bundestag began convening there officially, the Reichstag was reconstructed in an earnestly debated, self-consciously symbolic manner that said as much about reunified Germany as its ruin had said about the totalitarian years. The magnificent dome, designed by Norman Foster, suggested transparency and openness. The famous words on the colonnaded entrance, “ DEM DEUTSCHEN VOLKE ” (“To the German People”)—fabricated out of melted-down French cannons from the Napoleonic Wars and affixed during the First World War—were preserved out of a sense of fidelity to history. But, after parliamentary argument, a German-American artist was commissioned to create a courtyard garden in which the more modest phrase “ DER BEVÖLKERUNG ”—“To the Populace,” without the nationalistic tone of the older motto—was laid out in white letters amid unruly plantings. During the Reichstag’s reconstruction, workers uncovered graffiti, in Cyrillic script, scrawled by Red Army soldiers on second-floor walls. After another debate, some of these were kept on display as historical reminders: soldiers’ names, “Moscow to Berlin 9/5/45,” even “I fuck Hitler in the ass.”

No other country memorializes its conquerors on the walls of its most important official building. Germany’s crimes were unique, and so is its way of reckoning with the history contained in the Reichstag. By integrating the slogans of victorious Russian soldiers into its parliament building, Germany shows that it has learned essential lessons from its past (ones that the Russians themselves missed). By confronting the twentieth century head on, Germans embrace a narrative of liberating themselves from the worst of their history. In Berlin, reminders are all around you. Get on the U-Bahn at Stadtmitte, between the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe and the Topography of Terror Gestapo museum, and glance up at the train’s video news ticker: “80 years ago today PEN Club-Berlin forced into exile.” Like a dedicated analysand, Germany has brought its past to the surface, endlessly discussed it, and accepted it, and this work of many years has freed the patient to lead a successful new life.

At the lectern, Merkel continues addressing parliament, recounting a meeting, in Brussels, of the Group of Seven, which has just expelled its eighth member, Russia, over the war in Ukraine. “We will be very persistent when it comes to enforcing freedom, justice, and self-determination on the European continent,” she says. “Our task is to protect Ukraine on its self-determined way, and to meet old-fashioned thinking about spheres of influence from the nineteenth and twentieth century with answers from the global twenty-first century.” Merkel has reached her rhetorical high point—signalled by a slowing of her monotone and a subtle hand gesture, fingers extended. To the non-German speaker, she could be reading out regulatory guidelines for the national rail system.

The Chancellor finishes to sustained applause and takes a seat behind the lectern, among her cabinet ministers. Merkel has lost weight—bedridden last winter after fracturing her pelvis in a cross-country-skiing accident, she gave up sausage sandwiches for chopped carrots and took off twenty pounds—and her slimmer face, with its sunken eyes and longer jowls, betrays her fatigue. She’s been Chancellor since 2005, having won a third term last September, with no challenger in sight.

After the Chancellor, it’s the turn of the opposition to speak—such as it is. The ruling coalition of Merkel’s Christian Democrats and the Social Democrats has eighty per cent of the seats in the Bundestag. The Greens, who did poorly in last year’s election, have had trouble distinguishing their agenda from Merkel’s, and often lend her support. On this day, the role of opposition is left to Die Linke, the leftist party of mostly former East German politicians, which has just ten per cent of parliament. Sahra Wagenknecht, an orthodox Marxist in a brilliant-red suit, steps behind the lectern and berates Merkel for her economic and foreign policies, which, she says, are bringing Fascism back to Europe. “We must stop abusing a highly dangerous, half-hegemonic position that Germany slid into, in the ruthless old German style,” Wagenknecht declares. She then cites the French historian Emmanuel Todd: “Unknowingly, the Germans are on their way to again take their role as bringers of calamity for the other European peoples, and later for themselves.”

Merkel ignores her. She’s laughing about something with her economics minister, Sigmar Gabriel, and her foreign minister, Frank-Walter Steinmeier, both Social Democrats. While Wagenknecht accuses the government of supporting Fascists in Kiev, Merkel gets up to chat with her ministers in the back row. She returns to her seat and rummages in an orange-red leather handbag that clashes with her jacket. When she glances up at Wagenknecht, it’s with a mixture of boredom and contempt.

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The speaker ends her jeremiad, and the only people to clap are the members of Die Linke, isolated in the far-left section of the chamber. One by one, Social Democratic and Green parliamentarians come forward to defend Merkel. “How can you connect us Germans to Fascists?” Katrin Göring-Eckardt, a Green leader, asks, to applause. Another woman from Die Linke throws a quote of Bertolt Brecht at Göring-Eckardt: “Who does not know the truth is simply a fool, yet who knows the truth and calls it a lie is a criminal.” Göring-Eckardt is outraged. The vice-president of the Bundestag orders the woman from Die Linke to observe protocol. Merkel keeps ignoring the exchange, at one point turning her back, at another leaving the hall. Later, German news accounts will speak of high drama in the normally drowsy Bundestag, but Merkel’s body language tells the story: the drama has been provided by an insignificant minority. Chancellor Merkel has the parliament under control.

The historian Fritz Stern calls the era of reunification “Germany’s second chance”—a fresh opportunity to be Europe’s preëminent power, after the catastrophic period of aggression that began a century ago. Merkel seems perfectly matched to the demands of this second chance. In a country where passionate rhetoric and macho strutting led to ruin, her analytical detachment and lack of apparent ego are political strengths. On a continent where the fear of Germany is hardly dead, Merkel’s air of ordinariness makes a resurgent Germany seem less threatening. “Merkel has a character that suggests she’s one of us,” Göring-Eckardt told me. Germans call the Chancellor Mutti, or Mommy. The nickname was first applied by Merkel’s rivals in the Christian Democratic Union as an insult, and she didn’t like it, but after Mutti caught on with the public Merkel embraced it.

While most of Europe stagnates, Germany is an economic juggernaut, with low unemployment and a resilient manufacturing base. The ongoing monetary crisis of the euro zone has turned Germany, Europe’s largest creditor nation, into a regional superpower—one of Merkel’s biographers calls her “the Chancellor of Europe.” While America slides into ever-deeper inequality, Germany retains its middle class and a high level of social solidarity. Angry young protesters fill the public squares of countries around the world, but German crowds gather for outdoor concerts and beery World Cup celebrations. Now almost pacifist after its history of militarism, Germany has stayed out of most of the recent wars that have proved punishing and inconclusive for other Western countries. The latest E.U. elections, in May, saw parties on the far left and the far right grow more popular around the Continent, except in Germany, where the winners were the centrists whose bland faces—evoking economics professors and H.R. managers—smiled on campaign posters, none more ubiquitous than that of Merkel, who wasn’t even on the ballot. American politics is so polarized that Congress has virtually stopped functioning; the consensus in Germany is so stable that new laws pour forth from parliament while meaningful debate has almost disappeared.

“The German self-criticism and self-loathing are part of the success story—getting strong by hating yourself,” Mariam Lau, a political correspondent for the weekly newspaper Die Zeit , told me. “And Merkel had to reëducate herself, too. She’s part of the self-reëducation of Germany.”

Among German leaders, Merkel is a triple anomaly: a woman (divorced, remarried, no children), a scientist (quantum chemistry), and an Ossi (a product of East Germany). These qualities, though making her an outsider in German politics, also helped to propel her extraordinary rise. Yet some observers, attempting to explain her success, look everywhere but to Merkel herself. “There are some who say what should not be can’t really exist—that a woman from East Germany, who doesn’t have the typical qualities a politician should have, shouldn’t be in this position,” Göring-Eckardt, another woman from East Germany, said. “They don’t want to say she’s just a very good politician.” Throughout her career, Merkel has made older and more powerful politicians, almost all of them men, pay a high price for underestimating her.

Merkel was born in Hamburg, West Germany, in 1954. Her father, Horst Kasner, was an official in the Lutheran Church, one of the few institutions that continued operating in both Germanys after the postwar division of the country. Serious and demanding, he moved the family across the frontier just a few weeks after Angela’s birth—and against his wife’s wishes—to take up ecclesiastical duties in the German Democratic Republic. That year, almost two hundred thousand East Germans fled in the other direction. Kasner’s unusual decision led West German Church officials to call him “the red minister.” Joachim Gauck, a former East German pastor and dissident, who, in 2012, was elected Germany’s largely ceremonial President, once told a colleague that people in the Lutheran Church under Communism knew to stay away from Kasner, a member of the state-controlled Federation of Evangelical Pastors. By most accounts, Kasner’s motives were as much careerist as ideological.

Angela, the oldest of three children, was raised on the outskirts of Templin, a cobblestoned town in the pine forests of Brandenburg, north of Berlin. The Kasners lived in the seminary at Waldhof, a complex of around thirty buildings, many from the nineteenth century, belonging to the Lutheran Church. Waldhof was—and remains—home to several hundred physically and mentally disabled people, who learned trades and grew crops. Ulrich Schoeneich, who managed the estate in the eighties and knew the Kasners, described Waldhof under the East Germans as a grim place, with up to sixty men crammed into a single room, and no furniture except cots. Merkel once recalled seeing some residents strapped to benches, but she also said, “To grow up in the neighborhood of handicapped people was an important experience for me. I learned back then to treat them in a very normal way.”

Merkel’s upbringing in a Communist state was as normal as she could make it. “I never felt that the G.D.R. was my home country,” she told the German photographer Herlinde Koelbl, in 1991. “I have a relatively sunny spirit, and I always had the expectation that my path through life would be relatively sunny, no matter what happened. I have never allowed myself to be bitter. I always used the free room that the G.D.R. allowed me. . . . There was no shadow over my childhood. And later I acted in such a way that I would not have to live in constant conflict with the state.” During her first campaign for Chancellor, in 2005, she described her calculations more bluntly: “I decided that if the system became too terrible, I would have to try to escape. But if it wasn’t too bad then I wouldn’t lead my life in opposition to the system, because I was scared of the damage that would do to me.”

Being the daughter of a Protestant minister from the West carried both privileges and liabilities. The Kasners had two cars: the standard East German Trabant, an underpowered little box that has become the subject of kitschy Ostalgia , and a more luxurious Wartburg, their official church car. The family received clothes and food from relatives in Hamburg, as well as money in the form of “Forum checks,” convertible from Deutsche marks and valid in shops in large East Berlin hotels that sold Western consumer items. “They were élite,” Erika Benn, Merkel’s Russian teacher in Templin, said. But the Church retained enough independence from the state that the Kasners lived under constant suspicion, and during Angela’s childhood religious organizations came to be seen as agents of Western intelligence. In 1994, an official report on repression in East Germany concluded, “The country of Martin Luther was de-Christianized by the end of the G.D.R.”

Angela’s mother, Herlind, suffered the most in the family. An English teacher who imparted her passion for learning to Angela, Herlind wrote to the education authorities every year asking for a job, and every year she was told that nothing was available, even though English teachers were in desperately short supply. “She always felt oppressed by her husband,” Schoeneich, the Waldhof manager, told me.

Angela was physically clumsy—she later called herself “a little movement idiot.” At the age of five, she could barely walk downhill without falling. “What a normal person knows automatically I had to first figure out mentally, followed by exhausting exercise,” she has said. According to Benn, as a teen-ager Merkel was never “bitchy” or flirtatious; she was uninterested in clothes, “always colorless,” and “her haircut was impossible—it looked like a pot over her head.” A former schoolmate once labelled her a member of the Club of the Unkissed. (The schoolmate, who became Templin’s police chief, nearly lost his job when the comment was published.) But Merkel was a brilliant, ferociously motivated student. A longtime political associate of Merkel’s traces her drive to those early years in Templin. “She decided, ‘O.K., you don’t fuck me? I will fuck you with my weapons,’ ” the political associate told me. “And those weapons were intelligence and will and power.”

When Angela was in the eighth grade, Benn recruited her for the Russian Club and coached her to compete in East Germany’s Russian-language Olympiad. During skits that the students practiced in the teacher’s tiny parlor, Benn had to exhort her star student to look up and smile while offering another student a glass of water in Russian: “Can’t you be a little more friendly?” Merkel won at every level, from schoolwide to countrywide, a feat that she managed three times, to the glory of Frau Benn, a Party member with small-town ambitions. In her tidy apartment in Templin, Benn, who is seventy-six, proudly showed me a victory certificate from 1969. “I have the Lenin bust in the cellar,” she said. Not long before Horst Kasner died, in 2011, he sent a newspaper clipping to a colleague of Benn’s, with a picture of Merkel standing next to Russia’s President, Vladimir Putin. To Benn’s delight, Putin was quoted expressing his admiration for the first world leader with whom he could converse in his mother tongue.

In 1970, an incident exposed the fragile standing of the bürgerlich Kasner family. At a local Party meeting, the Russian Club’s latest triumph was announced, and Benn expected praise. Instead, the schools supervisor observed acidly, “When the children of farmers and workers win, that will be something.” Benn burst into tears.

Merkel studied physics at Leipzig University and earned a doctorate in quantum chemistry in Berlin. She was allowed to pursue graduate studies, in no small part because she never ran afoul of the ruling party. Ulrich Schoeneich, who became Templin’s mayor after reunification, expressed bitterness to me that Merkel hasn’t been challenged much on her accommodation with the East German system. Schoeneich’s father, Harro, was also a Protestant minister, but, unlike Kasner, he openly dissented from the state. Ulrich Schoeneich refused to join the Free German Youth, the blue-shirted “fighting reserve” of the ruling party which the vast majority of East German teen-agers joined, including Angela Kasner, who participated well into adulthood. “Not just as a dead person in the files but as the officer responsible for agitation and propaganda,” Schoeneich told me, referring to a revelation in a controversial recent biography, “The First Life of Angela M.” He added, “I’m convinced that she could get her doctorate only because she was active in the Free German Youth, even in her postgraduate days. Most people say it was forced, but I demonstrated that you didn’t have to join it.” Merkel herself once admitted that her participation in the Free German Youth was “seventy per cent opportunism.”

Schoeneich wasn’t permitted to finish high school, and he spent much of his early life in the shadow cast by his family’s principled opposition. Angela Kasner had other ideas for her future, and became, at most, a passive opponent of the regime. Evelyn Roll, one of Merkel’s biographers, discovered a Stasi document, dated 1984, that was based on information provided by a friend of Merkel’s. It described Merkel as “very critical toward our state,” and went on, “Since its foundation, she was thrilled by the demands and actions of Solidarity in Poland. Although Angela views the leading role of the Soviet Union as that of a dictatorship which all other socialist countries obey, she is fascinated by the Russian language and the culture of the Soviet Union.”

Rainer Eppelmann, a courageous dissident clergyman under Communism, who got to know Merkel soon after the fall of the Wall, refuses to criticize her. “I don’t judge the ninety-five per cent,” he told me. “Most of them were whisperers. They never said what they thought, what they felt, what they were afraid of. Even today, we’re not completely aware what this did to people.” He added, “In order to be true to your hopes, your ambitions, your beliefs, your dreams, you had to be a hero twenty-four hours a day. And nobody can do this.”

After 1989, when the chance came to participate in democratic politics, these same qualities became useful to Merkel, in a new way. Eppelmann explained, “The whisperer might find it easier to learn in this new life, to wait and see, and not just burst out at once—to think things over before speaking. The whisperer thinks, How can I say this without damaging myself? The whisperer is somebody who might be compared to a chess player. And I have the impression that she thinks things over more carefully and is always a few moves ahead of her competitor.”

In 1977, at twenty-three, Angela married a physicist, Ulrich Merkel, but the union foundered quickly, and she left him in 1981. She spent the final moribund decade of the G.D.R. as a quantum chemist at the East German Academy of Sciences, a gloomy research facility, across from a Stasi barracks, in southeastern Berlin. She co-authored a paper titled “Vibrational Properties of Surface Hydroxyls: Nonempirical Model Calculations Including Anharmonicities.” She was the only woman in the theoretical-chemistry section—a keen observer of others, intensely curious about the world.

People who have followed her career point to Merkel’s scientific habit of mind as a key to her political success. “She is about the best analyst of any given situation that I could imagine,” a senior official in her government said. “She looks at various vectors, extrapolates, and says, ‘This is where I think it’s going.’ ” Trained to see the invisible world in terms of particles and waves, Merkel learned to approach problems methodically, drawing comparisons, running scenarios, weighing risks, anticipating reactions, and then, even after making a decision, letting it sit for a while before acting. She once told a story from her childhood of standing on a diving board for the full hour of a swimming lesson until, at the bell, she finally jumped.

Scientific detachment and caution under dictatorship can be complementary traits, and in Merkel’s case they were joined by the reticence, tinged with irony, of a woman navigating a man’s world. She once joked to the tabloid Bild Zeitung , with double-edged self-deprecation, “The men in the laboratory always had their hands on all the buttons at the same time. I couldn’t keep up with this, because I was thinking. And then things suddenly went ‘poof,’ and the equipment was destroyed.” Throughout her career, Merkel has made a virtue of biding her time and keeping her mouth shut.

“She’s not a woman of strong emotions,” Bernd Ulrich, the deputy editor of Die Zeit , said. “Too much emotion disturbs your reason. She watches politics like a scientist.” He called her “a learning machine.” Volker Schlöndorff, the director of “The Tin Drum” and other films, got to know Merkel in the years just after reunification. “Before you contradict her, you would think twice—she has the authority of somebody who knows that she’s right,” he said. “Once she has an opinion, it seems to be founded, whereas I tend to have opinions that I have to revise frequently.”

Every morning, Merkel took the S-Bahn to the Academy of Sciences from her apartment in Prenzlauer Berg, a bohemian neighborhood near the city center. For several stretches, her train ran parallel to the Wall, the rooftops of West Berlin almost in reach. Sometimes she commuted with a colleague, Michael Schindhelm. “You were confronted every day, from the morning on, with the absurdity of this city,” he told me. Schindhelm found Merkel to be the most serious researcher in the theoretical-chemistry section, frustrated by her lack of access to Western publications and scientists. Whenever her colleagues left the building to cheer the motorcade of a high-profile guest from the Communist world on its way from Schönefeld Airport, she stayed behind. “She really wanted to achieve something,” Schindhelm said. “Others just liked sitting in that comfortable niche while the country went down the drain.”

In 1984, Schindhelm and Merkel began sharing an office and, over Turkish coffee that she made, became close. They both had a fairly critical view of the East German state. Schindhelm had spent five years studying in the Soviet Union, and when news of Mikhail Gorbachev’s perestroika policy seeped into East Germany, through West German television, Merkel questioned him about the potential for fundamental change. They both felt that the world on the other side of the Wall was more desirable than their own. (Years later, Schindhelm, who became a theatre and opera director, was revealed to have been coerced by the Stasi into serving as an informer, though he apparently never betrayed anyone.)

One day in 1985, Merkel showed up at the office with the text of a speech by the West German President, Richard von Weizsäcker, given on the fortieth anniversary of the end of the Second World War. Weizsäcker spoke with unprecedented honesty about Germany’s responsibility for the Holocaust and declared the country’s defeat a day of liberation. He expressed a belief that Germans, in facing their past, could redefine their identity and future. In the West, the speech became a landmark on the country’s return to civilization. But in East Germany, where ideology had twisted the history of the Third Reich beyond recognition, the speech was virtually unknown. Merkel had procured a rare copy through her connections in the Church, and she was deeply struck by it.

Being an East German meant retaining faith in the idea of Germany even though many West Germans, who needed it less, had given up on reunification. As East Germany decayed, its citizens had nothing else to hold on to, whereas Westerners had been taught to suppress feelings of nationhood. “People were really lacking identity—there was an enormous vacuum to making sense of your existence,” Schindhelm said. Merkel’s excitement about the speech showed that “she had a very particular passion for Germany as a country, its history and culture.”

The next year, Merkel was granted permission to travel to Hamburg for a cousin’s wedding. After riding the miraculously comfortable trains through West Germany, she returned to East Berlin convinced that the socialist system was doomed. “She came back very impressed, but she came back,” Schindhelm said. “She stayed not out of loyalty to the state but because she had her network there, her family.” Merkel, in her early thirties, was looking forward to 2014—when she would turn sixty, collect her state pension, and be allowed to travel to California.

Merkel’s second life began on the night of November 9, 1989. Instead of joining the delirious throngs pouring through the Wall, which had just been opened, she took her regular Thursday-evening sauna with a friend. Later, she crossed into the West with a crowd at the Bornholmer Strasse checkpoint, but instead of continuing with other Ossis to the upscale shopping district of Kurfürstendamm she returned home, in order to get up for work in the morning. Her actions on that momentous night have been ridiculed as a sign of banality and a lack of feeling. But, in the following months, no East German seized the new freedoms with more fervor than Merkel. Few irreducible principles have been evident in her political career, but one of them is the right to the pursuit of happiness. “There aren’t many feelings that she’s really into, but liberty and freedom are very important,” Göring-Eckardt, the Green leader, said. “And this is, of course, linked to the experience of growing up in a society where newspapers were censored, books were banned, travel was forbidden.”

A month after the Wall fell, Merkel visited the offices of a new political group called Democratic Awakening, which were near her apartment. “Can I help you?” she asked. She was soon put to work setting up the office computers, which had been donated by the West German government. She kept coming back, though at first hardly anyone noticed her. It was the kind of fluid moment when things happen quickly and chance and circumstance can make all the difference. In March, 1990, the leader of Democratic Awakening, Wolfgang Schnur, was exposed as a Stasi informer, and at an emergency board meeting Rainer Eppelmann, the dissident clergyman, was chosen to replace him. Merkel was asked to handle the noisy crowd of journalists outside the door, and she did it with such calm assurance that, after the East German elections that March, Eppelmann suggested Merkel as a spokesman for the country’s first and last democratically elected Prime Minister, Lothar de Maizière.

“She was fleissig —the opposite of lazy,” Eppelmann recalled. “She never put herself in the foreground. She understood that she had to do a job here and do it well, but not to be the chief. Lothar de Maizière was the chief.” De Maizière already had a spokesman, so Merkel became the deputy. “The No. 1 press speaker showed off while she did all the work,” Eppelmann said. In this way, she earned de Maizière’s trust, and he brought her with him on visits to foreign capitals. He once described Merkel as looking like “a typical G.D.R. scientist,” wearing “a baggy skirt and Jesus sandals and a cropped haircut.” After one foreign trip, he asked his office manager to take her clothes shopping.

In the early nineties, Volker Schlöndorff began attending monthly dinners with a small group that included Merkel and her partner, Joachim Sauer, another scientist. (They married in 1998.) Some participants were from the East, others from the West; at each meal, the host would narrate his or her upbringing, illuminating what life was like on one side of the divide. Schlöndorff found Merkel to be an earnest but witty conversation partner. One evening, at the extremely modest country house that Merkel and Sauer had built, near Templin, she and Schlöndorff went for a walk through the fields. “We spoke about Germany, what it is going to become,” Schlöndorff recalled. “I was trying irony and sarcasm, which didn’t take with her at all. It was as if she were saying, ‘Come on, be serious, matters not to be joked about.’ ”

Merkel’s decision to enter politics is the central mystery of an opaque life. She rarely speaks publicly about herself and has never explained her decision. It wasn’t a long-term career plan—like most Germans, she didn’t foresee the abrupt collapse of Communism and the opportunities it created. But when the moment came, and Merkel found herself single and childless in her mid-thirties—and laboring in an East German institution with no future—a woman of her ambition must have grasped that politics would be the most dynamic realm of the new Germany. And, as Schlöndorff dryly put it, “With a certain hesitation, she seized the day.”

Reunification really meant annexation of the East by the West, which required giving East Germans top government positions. Merkel’s gender and youth made her an especially appealing option. In October, 1990, she won a seat in the new Bundestag, in Bonn, the first capital of reunified Germany. She got herself introduced to Chancellor Helmut Kohl, and de Maizière suggested that Kohl bring her into his cabinet. To Merkel’s surprise, she was named minister of women and youth—a job, she admitted to a journalist, in which she had no interest. She wasn’t a feminist politician, nor was economic parity for the former East her cause. She had no political agenda at all. According to Karl Feldmeyer, the political correspondent for the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung , what drove Merkel was “her perfect instinct for power, which, for me, is the main characteristic of this politician.”

Kohl, then at his height as a statesman, presented Merkel to foreign dignitaries as a curiosity, belittling her by calling her “ mein Mädchen ”—his girl. She had to be taught how to use a credit card. Cabinet meetings were dominated by Kohl, and though Merkel was always well prepared, she seldom spoke. But inside her ministry Merkel was respected for her efficient absorption of information, and feared for her directness and temper. According to her biographer Evelyn Roll, she acquired the nickname Angie the Snake, and a reputation for accepting little criticism. When, in 1994, Merkel was given the environment portfolio, she quickly fired the ministry’s top civil servant after he suggested that she would need his help running things.

In 1991, Herlinde Koelbl, the photographer, began taking pictures of Merkel and other German politicians for a study called “Traces of Power.” Her idea was to see how life in the public eye changed them in the course of a decade. Most of the men, such as Gerhard Schröder, a Social Democrat who became Chancellor in 1998, and Joschka Fischer, who became his foreign minister, seemed to swell with self-importance. Merkel remained herself, Koelbl told me: “in her body language, a bit awkward.” But, she added, “You could feel her strength at the beginning.” In the first portrait, she has her chin slightly lowered and looks up at the camera—not exactly shy, but watchful. Subsequent pictures display growing confidence. During the sessions, Merkel was always in a hurry, never making small talk. “Schröder and Fischer, they are vain,” Koelbl said. “Merkel is not vain—still. And that helped her, because if you’re vain you are subjective. If you’re not vain, you are more objective.”

Democratic politics was a West German game, and Merkel had to learn how to play it in the methodical way that she had learned how to command her body as a “little movement idiot” of five. She became such an assiduous student that some colleagues from the former East found it unsettling. Petra Pau, a senior member of the Bundestag from Die Linke, once caught Merkel saying “we West Germans.” But what made Merkel a potentially transformative figure in German politics was that, below the surface, she didn’t belong. She joined the Christian Democratic Union after Democratic Awakening merged with it, ahead of the 1990 elections; the C.D.U. was more hospitable than the Social Democrats were to liberal-minded East Germans. But the C.D.U. was also a stodgy patriarchy whose base was in the Catholic south. “She never became mentally a part of the C.D.U., until now,” Feldmeyer, of the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung , said. “She is strange to everything in the Party. It is only a function of her power, nothing else.”

Alan Posener, of the conservative newspaper Die Welt , told me, “The things that motivate the heartland of the C.D.U. don’t mean a thing to her”—concerns about “working mothers, gay marriage, immigration, divorce.” The same was true of the transatlantic alliance with America, the cornerstone of West German security: Posener said that she studied its details in “the C.D.U. manual.” Michael Naumann, a book publisher and journalist who served as culture minister under Schröder, said, “Her attitude toward the United States is a learned attitude.” Dirk Kurbjuweit, a biographer of Merkel and a correspondent for Der Spiegel , said, “Merkel really is a friend of freedom, because she suffered under not being free in the G.D.R. But in the other way she’s a learned democrat—not a born democrat, like Americans.”

West German politicians of Merkel’s generation were shaped by the culture wars that followed the upheavals of 1968, which didn’t touch her at all. Over dinner one night in the mid-nineties, Merkel asked Schlöndorff, a former radical, to explain the violence perpetrated by the Baader-Meinhof Group. He told her that young people had needed to break with the authoritarian culture that had never been repudiated in West Germany after the defeat of the Nazis. The more he explained, the less Merkel seemed to sympathize—she wasn’t against authority, just the East German kind. What did kids in the West have to protest about? She didn’t always hide a feeling that West Germans were like spoiled children.

For all the catching up Merkel had to do in her political education, being East German gave her advantages: she had learned self-discipline, strength of will, and silence as essential tools. Feldmeyer said, “The G.D.R. shaped her in such an extreme and strong way as no one who grew up in the Federal Republic can imagine. Everything was a question of survival, and it was impossible to make errors if you wanted to succeed.”

Early in her career, Merkel hired a young C.D.U. worker named Beate Baumann to run her office. Baumann, who remains her most influential adviser, was the perfect No. 2—loyal, discreet to the vanishing point, and, according to some insiders, the only aide who addressed the boss with complete candor. “Baumann could not be a politician, and Merkel didn’t know the West,” Bernd Ulrich, of Die Zeit , who knows both women well, told me. “So Baumann was her interpreter for everything that was typically West German.” Fed up with Kohl’s smug bullying, the two women practiced a form of “invisible cruelty”: they played hardball but relished their victories privately, without celebrating in public and making unnecessary enemies. Their style, Ulrich said, is “not ‘House of Cards.’ ” On one rare occasion, Merkel bared her teeth. In 1996, during negotiations over a nuclear-waste law, Gerhard Schröder, two years away from becoming Chancellor, called her performance as environment minister “pitiful.” In her interview with Herlinde Koelbl that year, Merkel said, “I will put him in the corner, just like he did with me. I still need time, but one day the time will come for this, and I am already looking forward.” It took nine years for her to make good on the promise.

In 1998, amid a recession, Schröder defeated Kohl and became Chancellor. The next summer, Volker Schlöndorff, at a garden party outside his home, in Potsdam, introduced Merkel to a movie producer, half-jokingly calling her “Germany’s first female Chancellor.” Merkel shot Schlöndorff a look, as if he had called her bluff— How dare you ?—which convinced him that she actually wanted the job. The producer, a C.D.U. member, was incredulous. Schlöndorff said, “These guys whose party had been in power forever could not imagine that a woman could be Chancellor—and from East Germany, no less.”

In November, 1999, the C.D.U. was engulfed by a campaign-finance scandal, with charges of undisclosed cash donations and secret bank accounts. Kohl and his successor as Party chairman, Wolfgang Schäuble, were both implicated, but Kohl was so revered that nobody in the Party dared to criticize him. Merkel, who had risen to secretary-general after the C.D.U.’s electoral defeat, saw opportunity. She telephoned Karl Feldmeyer. “I would like to give some comments to you in your newspaper,” she said.

“Do you know what you want to say?” Feldmeyer asked.

“I’ve written it down.”

Feldmeyer suggested that, instead of doing an interview, she publish an opinion piece. Five minutes later, a fax came through, and Feldmeyer read it with astonishment. Merkel, a relatively new figure in the C.D.U., was calling for the Party to break with its longtime leader. “The Party must learn to walk now and dare to engage in future battles with its political opponents without its old warhorse, as Kohl has often enjoyed calling himself,” Merkel wrote. “We who now have responsibility for the Party, and not so much Helmut Kohl, will decide how to approach the new era.” She published the piece without warning the tainted Schäuble, the Party chairman. In a gesture that mixed Protestant righteousness with ruthlessness, Kohl’s Mädchen was cutting herself off from her political father and gambling her career in a naked bid to supplant him. She succeeded. Within a few months, Merkel had been elected Party chairman. Kohl receded into history. “She put the knife in his back—and turned it twice,” Feldmeyer said. That was the moment when many Germans first became aware of Angela Merkel.

Years later, Michael Naumann sat next to Kohl at a dinner, and asked him, “Herr Kohl, what exactly does she want?”

“Power,” Kohl said, tersely. He told another friend that championing young Merkel had been the biggest mistake of his life. “I brought my killer,” Kohl said. “I put the snake on my arm.”

In 2002, Merkel found herself on the verge of losing a Party vote that would determine the C.D.U.’s candidate for Chancellor in elections that fall. She hastily arranged a breakfast with her rival, the Bavarian leader Edmund Stoiber, in his home town. Disciplined enough to control her own ambitions, Merkel told Stoiber that she was withdrawing in his favor. Schlöndorff sent her a note saying, in effect, “Smart move.” By averting a loss that would have damaged her future within the Party, Merkel ended up in a stronger position. Stoiber lost to Schröder, and Merkel went on to outmaneuver a series of male heavyweights from the West, waiting for them to make a mistake or eat one another up, before getting rid of each with a little shove.

John Kornblum, a former U.S. Ambassador to Germany, who still lives in Berlin, said, “If you cross her, you end up dead. There’s nothing cushy about her. There’s a whole list of alpha males who thought they would get her out of the way, and they’re all now in other walks of life.” On Merkel’s fiftieth birthday, in 2004, a conservative politician named Michael Glos published a tribute:

Careful: unpretentiousness can be a weapon! . . . One of the secrets of the success of Angela Merkel is that she knows how to deal with vain men. She knows you shoot a mountain cock best when it’s courting a hen. Angela Merkel is a patient hunter of courting mountain cocks. With the patience of an angel, she waits for her moment.

German politics was entering a new era. As the country became more “normal,” it no longer needed domineering father figures as leaders. “Merkel was lucky to live in a period when macho was in decline,” Ulrich said. “The men didn’t notice and she did. She didn’t have to fight them—it was an aikido politics.” Ulrich added, “If she knows anything, she knows her macho. She has them for her cereal.” Merkel’s physical haplessness, combined with her emotional opacity, made it hard for her rivals to recognize the threat she posed. “She’s very difficult to know, and that is a reason for her success,” the longtime political associate said. “It seems she is not from this world. Psychologically, she gives everybody the feeling of ‘I will take care of you.’ ”

When Schröder called early elections in 2005, Merkel became the C.D.U.’s candidate for Chancellor. In the politics of macho, Schröder and Fischer—working-class street fighters who loved political argument and expensive wine, with seven ex-wives between them—were preëminent. The two men despised Merkel, and the sentiment was reciprocated. According to Dirk Kurbjuweit, of Der Spiegel , Schröder and Fischer sometimes laughed “like boys on the playground” when Merkel gave speeches in the Bundestag. In 2001, after photographs were published of Fischer assaulting a policeman as a young militant in the seventies, Merkel denounced him, saying that he would be unfit for public life until he “atoned”—a comment that many Germans found strident. During the 2005 campaign, Fischer said in private talks that Merkel was incapable of doing the job.

At the time, Schröder’s Social Democrats ruled in a coalition with the Greens, and the public had grown weary of prolonged economic stagnation. Through most of the campaign, the C.D.U. held a large lead, but the Social Democrats closed the gap, and on Election Night the two parties were virtually tied in the popular vote. Alan Posener, of Die Welt , saw Merkel that night at Party headquarters—she seemed deflated, flanked by C.D.U. politicians she had once disposed of, who didn’t conceal their glee. Merkel had made two near-fatal mistakes. First, just before the Iraq War—unpopular in Germany, and repudiated by Schröder—she had published an op-ed in the Washington Post titled “Schroeder Doesn’t Speak for All Germans,” in which she stopped just short of supporting war. “One more sentence for Bush and against Schröder, and she would not be Chancellor today,” Ulrich said. Second, many of her advisers were free-market proponents who advocated changes to the tax code and to labor policies which went far beyond what German voters would accept. After fifteen years, she still didn’t have a fingertip feel for public opinion.

On Election Night, Merkel, Schröder, Fischer, and other party leaders gathered in a TV studio to discuss the results. Merkel, looking shell-shocked and haggard, was almost mute. Schröder, his hair colored chestnut and combed neatly back, grinned mischievously and effectively declared himself the winner. “I will continue to be Chancellor,” he said. “Do you really believe that my party would take up an offer from Merkel to talk when she says she would like to become Chancellor? I think we should leave the church in the village”—that is, quit dreaming. Many viewers thought he was drunk. As Schröder continued to boast, Merkel slowly came to life, as if amused by the Chancellor’s performance. She seemed to realize that Schröder’s bluster had just saved her the Chancellorship. With a slight smile, she put Schröder in his place. “Plain and simple—you did not win today,” she said. Indeed, the C.D.U. had a very slim lead. “With a little time to think about it, even the Social Democrats will come to accept this as a reality. And I promise we will not turn the democratic rules upside down.”

Two months later, Merkel was sworn in as Germany’s first female Chancellor.

Those who know Merkel say that she is as lively and funny in private as she is publicly soporific—a split in self-presentation that she learned as a young East German. (Through her spokesman, Merkel, who gives few interviews—almost always to German publications, and all anodyne—declined to speak to me.) In off-the-record conversations with German journalists, she replays entire conversations with other world leaders, performing wicked imitations. Among her favorite targets have been Kohl, Putin, King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia, former Pope Benedict XVI, and Al Gore. (“Ah have to teach mah people,” she mimics, in a Prussian approximation of central Tennessee.) After one meeting with Nicolas Sarkozy, the French President, during the euro crisis, she told a group of journalists that Sarkozy’s foot had been nervously jiggling the entire time.

Schlöndorff once asked Merkel what she and other leaders discuss during photo ops. The Chancellor described one such moment with Dmitri Medvedev, who briefly interrupted Putin’s fifteen-year reign as Russia’s President. She and Medvedev were posing for the cameras in Sochi when, gesturing toward the Black Sea, she said, in the Russian she had learned from Frau Benn, “President Putin told me that every morning he swims a thousand metres out there. Do you do things like that?” Medvedev replied, “I swim fifteen hundred metres.” To Schlöndorff, the story showed that, “even when she is involved, she is never so totally involved that she could not observe the way people behave and be somehow amused by it.”

“She is a master of listening,” the longtime political associate said. “In a conversation, she speaks twenty per cent, you speak eighty per cent. She gives everybody the feeling ‘I want to hear what you have to say,’ but the truth is that her judgment is made within three minutes, and sometimes she thinks another eighteen minutes are wasted time. She is like a computer—‘Is this possible, what this man proposes?’ She’s able in a very quick time to realize if it’s fantasy.”

Nor is she above embarrassing her minions. Once, in a hotel room in Vienna, in the company of Chancellery aides and foreign-ministry officials, Merkel was telling comical stories of camping trips she’d taken as a student. Her aides fell over themselves laughing, until Merkel cut them short: “I’ve told you this before.” The aides insisted that they’d never heard the stories before, but it didn’t matter: Madame Chancellor was calling them sycophants. After last year’s elections, she met with the Social Democratic leader, Sigmar Gabriel, who is now her economics minister. Gabriel introduced Merkel to one of his aides, saying, “He’s been keeping an eye on me for the past few years. He makes sure I don’t do anything stupid in public.” Merkel shot back, “And sometimes it’s worked.”

“Schadenfreude is Merkel’s way of having fun,” Kurbjuweit said.

Throughout her Chancellorship, Merkel has stayed as close as possible to German public opinion. Posener said that, after nearly losing to Schröder, she told herself, “I’m going to be all things to all people.” Critics and supporters alike describe her as a gifted tactician without a larger vision. Kornblum, the former Ambassador, once asked a Merkel adviser about her long-term view. “The Chancellor’s long-term view is about two weeks,” the adviser replied. The pejorative most often used against her is “opportunist.” When I asked Katrin Göring-Eckardt, the Green leader, whether Merkel had any principles, she paused, then said, “She has a strong value of freedom, and everything else is negotiable.” (Other Germans added firm support for Israel to the list.)

“People say there’s no project, there’s no idea,” the senior official told me. “It’s just a zigzag of smart moves for nine years.” But, he added, “She would say that the times are not conducive to great visions.” Americans don’t like to think of our leaders as having no higher principles. We want at least a suggestion of the “vision thing”—George H. W. Bush’s derisive term, for which he was derided. But Germany remains so traumatized by the grand ideologies of its past that a politics of no ideas has a comforting allure.

The most daunting challenge of Merkel’s time in office has been the euro-zone crisis, which threatened to bring down economies across southern Europe and jeopardized the integrity of the euro. To Merkel, the crisis confirmed that grand visions can be dangerous. Kohl, who thought in historical terms, had tied Germany to a European currency without a political union that could make it work. “It’s now a machine from hell,” the senior official said. “She’s still trying to repair it.”

Merkel’s decisions during the crisis reflect the calculations of a politician more mindful of her constituency than of her place in history. When Greek debt was revealed to be at critical levels, she was slow to commit German taxpayers’ money to a bailout fund, and in 2011 she blocked a French and American proposal for coördinated European action. Germany had by far the strongest economy in Europe, with a manufacturing base and robust exports that benefitted from the weakening of the euro. Under Schröder, Germany had instituted reforms in labor and welfare policies that made the country more competitive, and Merkel arrived just in time to reap the benefit. Throughout the crisis, Merkel buried herself in the economic details and refused to get out in front of what German voters—who tended to regard the Greeks as spendthrift and lazy—would accept, even if delaying prolonged the ordeal and, at key moments from late 2011 through the summer of 2012, threatened the euro itself. The novelist and journalist Peter Schneider compared her to a driver in foggy weather: “You only see five metres, not one hundred metres, so it’s better you are very careful, you don’t say too much, you act from step to step. No vision at all.”

Karl-Theodor zu Guttenberg, who was Germany’s defense minister between 2009 and 2011, said that Merkel took a “Machiavellian” approach to the crisis. She had the stamina to keep her options open as long as possible, and then veiled her decisions behind “the cloud of complexity.” Guttenberg said, “This made it easier for her to change her mind several times rather dramatically, but at the time no one noticed at all.” In the end, under pressure from other European leaders and President Obama, Merkel endorsed a plan for the European Central Bank to prevent Greek sovereign default by buying bonds—much as the Federal Reserve had done during the U.S. financial crisis. In exchange, the countries of southern Europe submitted to strict budget rules and E.U. oversight of their central banks. Merkel realized that she could not allow the euro-zone crisis to capsize the project of European unity. “If the euro falls, then Europe falls,” she declared. The euro was saved, but at the price of ruinous austerity policies and high unemployment. Across much of Europe, Merkel—that Protestant minister’s daughter—is resented as a rigid, self-righteous puritan, while support for the E.U. has fallen to historic lows.

Merkel’s commitment to a united Europe is not that of an idealist. Rather, it comes from her sense of German interest—a soft form of nationalism that reflects the country’s growing confidence and strength. The historic German problem, which Henry Kissinger described as being “too big for Europe, too small for the world,” can be overcome only by keeping Europe together. Kurbjuweit said, “She needs Europe because—this is hard to say, but it’s true—Europe makes Germany bigger.”

Yet Merkel’s austerity policies have helped make Europe weaker, and Europe’s weakness has begun affecting Germany, whose export-driven economy depends on its neighbors for markets. The German economy has slowed this year, while European growth is anemic. Nevertheless, Germany remains committed to a balanced budget in 2015, its first since 1969, and is standing in the way of a euro-zone monetary policy of stimulating growth by buying up debt. In recent weeks, with global markets falling, a divide has opened between Merkel and other European leaders.

After 2005, Merkel had to mute her free-market thinking at home in order to preserve her political viability. Instead, she exported the ideas to the rest of the Continent, applying them with no apparent regard for macroeconomic conditions, as if the virtues of thrift and discipline constituted the mission of a resurgent Germany in Europe. Merkel is obsessed with demography and economic competitiveness. She loves reading charts. In September, one of her senior aides showed me a stack of them that the Chancellor had just been examining; they showed the relative performance of different European economies across a variety of indicators. In unit-labor costs, he pointed out, Germany lies well below the euro-zone average. But the population of Germany—the largest of any nation in Europe—is stagnant and aging. “A country like that cannot run up more and more debt,” the senior aide said.

Stefan Reinecke, of the left-wing daily Die Tageszeitung , said, “Half an hour into every speech she gives, when everyone has fallen asleep, she says three things. She says Europe has just seven per cent of the world’s people, twenty-five per cent of the economic output, but fifty per cent of the social welfare—and we have to change this.” Merkel frets that Germany has no Silicon Valley. “There’s no German Facebook, no German Amazon,” her senior aide said. “There is this German tendency, which you can see in Berlin: we’re so affluent that we assume we always will be, even though we don’t know where it will come from. Completely complacent.”

It makes Germans acutely uneasy that their country is too strong while Europe is too weak, but Merkel never discusses the problem. Joschka Fischer—who has praised Merkel on other issues—criticizes this silence. “Intellectually, it’s a big, big challenge to transform national strength into European strength,” he said. “And the majority of the political and economic élite in Germany has not a clue about that, including the Chancellor.”

The two world leaders with whom Merkel has her most important and complex relationships are Obama, who has won her reluctant respect, and Putin, who has earned her deep distrust. When the Wall fell, Putin was a K.G.B. major stationed in Dresden. He used his fluent German and a pistol to keep a crowd of East Germans from storming the K.G.B. bureau and looting secret files, which he then destroyed. Twelve years later, a far more conciliatory Putin, by then Russia’s President, addressed the Bundestag “in the language of Goethe, Schiller, and Kant,” declaring that “Russia is a friendly-minded European country” whose “main goal is a stable peace on this continent.” Putin praised democracy and denounced totalitarianism, receiving an ovation from an audience that included Merkel.

After decades of war, destruction, and occupation, German-Russian relations returned to the friendlier dynamic that had prevailed before the twentieth century. German policymakers spoke of a “strategic partnership” and a “rapprochement through economic interlocking.” In 2005, Schröder approved the construction of a gas pipeline that crossed the Baltic Sea into Russia. He and Putin developed a friendship, with Schröder calling Putin a “flawless democrat.” In the past decade, Germany has become one of Russia’s largest trading partners, and Russia now provides Germany with forty per cent of its gas. Two hundred thousand Russian citizens live in Germany, and Russia has extensive connections inside the German business community and in the Social Democratic Party.

As a Russian speaker who hitchhiked through the Soviet republics in her youth, Merkel has a feel for Russia’s aspirations and resentments which Western politicians lack. In her office, there’s a framed portrait of Catherine the Great, the Prussian-born empress who led Russia during a golden age in the eighteenth century. But, as a former East German, Merkel has few illusions about Putin. After Putin’s speech at the Bundestag, Merkel told a colleague, “This is typical K.G.B. talk. Never trust this guy.” Ulrich, of Die Zeit , said, “She’s always been skeptical of Putin, but she doesn’t detest him. Detesting would be too much emotion.”

When Putin and Merkel meet, they sometimes speak in German (he’s better in her language than she is in his), and Putin corrects his own interpreter to let Merkel know that nothing is lost on him. Putin’s brand of macho elicits in Merkel a kind of scientific empathy. In 2007, during discussions about energy supplies at the Russian President’s residence in Sochi, Putin summoned his black Lab, Koni, into the room where he and Merkel were seated. As the dog approached and sniffed her, Merkel froze, visibly frightened. She’d been bitten once, in 1995, and her fear of dogs couldn’t have escaped Putin, who sat back and enjoyed the moment, legs spread wide. “I’m sure it will behave itself,” he said. Merkel had the presence of mind to reply, in Russian, “It doesn’t eat journalists, after all.” The German press corps was furious on her behalf—“ready to hit Putin,” according to a reporter who was present. Later, Merkel interpreted Putin’s behavior. “I understand why he has to do this—to prove he’s a man,” she told a group of reporters. “He’s afraid of his own weakness. Russia has nothing, no successful politics or economy. All they have is this.”

In early 2008, when President George W. Bush sought to bring Ukraine and Georgia into NATO , Merkel blocked the move out of concern for Russia’s reaction and because it could cause destabilization along Europe’s eastern edge. Later that year, after Russia invaded two regions of Georgia, Abkhazia and South Ossetia, Merkel changed her position and expressed openness to Georgia’s joining NATO . She remained careful to balance European unity, the alliance with America, German business interests, and continued engagement with Russia. Kaiser Wilhelm I is supposed to have remarked that only Bismarck, who tied Germany to a set of countervailing alliances, could juggle four or five balls. Bismarck’s successor, Leo von Caprivi, complained that he could barely manage two, and in 1890 he ended Germany’s treaty with Russia, helping set the stage for the First World War.

When, this past March, Russia annexed Crimea and incited a separatist war in eastern Ukraine, it fell to Merkel to succeed where earlier German leaders had catastrophically failed.

The Russian aggression in Ukraine stunned the history-haunted, rule-upholding Germans. “Putin surprised everyone,” including Merkel, her senior aide told me. “The swiftness, the brutality, the coldheartedness. It’s just so twentieth century—the tanks, the propaganda, the agents provocateurs.”

Suddenly, everyone in Berlin was reading Christopher Clark’s “The Sleepwalkers,” about the origins of the First World War. The moral that many Germans drew was to tread carefully—small fires could quickly turn into conflagrations. During a discussion about the First World War with students at the German Historical Museum, Merkel said, “I am regarded as a permanent delayer sometimes, but I think it is essential and extremely important to take people along and really listen to them in political talks.”

Merkel ruled out military options, yet declared that Russia’s actions were unacceptable—territorial integrity was an inviolable part of Europe’s postwar order—and required a serious Western response. For the first time in her Chancellorship, she didn’t have the public with her. In early polls, a plurality of Germans wanted Merkel to take a middle position between the West and Russia. A substantial minority—especially in the former East—sympathized with Russia’s claim that NATO expansion had pushed Putin to act defensively, and that Ukrainian leaders in Kiev were Fascist thugs. Helmut Schmidt, the Social Democratic former Chancellor, expressed some of these views, as did Gerhard Schröder—who had become a paid lobbyist for a company controlled by the Russian state oil-and-gas giant Gazprom, and who celebrated his seventieth birthday with Putin, in St. Petersburg, a month after Russia annexed Crimea. The attitude of Schmidt and Schröder deeply embarrassed the Social Democrats.

A gap opened up between élite and popular opinion: newspapers editorializing for a hard line against Russia were inundated with critical letters. Merkel, true to form, did nothing to try to close the divide. For most Germans, the crisis inspired a combination of indifference and anxiety. Ukraine was talked about, if at all, as a far-off place, barely a part of Europe (not as the victim of huge German crimes in the Second World War). Germans resented having their beautiful sleep disturbed. “The majority want peace and to live a comfortable life,” Alexander Rahr, a Russian energy expert who advises the German oil-and-gas company Wintershall, said. “They don’t want conflict or a new Cold War. For this, they wish the U.S. would stay away from Europe. If Russia wants Ukraine, which not so many people have sympathy with, let them have it.” In a way, Germany’s historical guilt—which includes more than twenty million Soviet dead in the Second World War—adds to the country’s passivity. A sense of responsibility for the past demands that Germany do nothing in the present. Ulrich, of Die Zeit , expressed the point brutally: “We once killed so much—therefore, we can’t die today.”

Germans and Russians are bound together by such terrible memories that any suggestion of conflict leads straight to the unthinkable. Michael Naumann put the Ukraine crisis in the context of “this enormous emotional nexus between perpetrator and victim,” one that leaves Germans perpetually in the weaker position. In 1999, Naumann, at that time the culture minister under Schröder, tried to negotiate the return of five million artifacts taken out of East Germany by the Russians after the Second World War. During the negotiations, he and his Russian counterpart, Nikolai Gubenko, shared their stories. Naumann, who was born in 1941, lost his father a year later, at the Battle of Stalingrad. Gubenko was also born in 1941, and his father was also killed in action. Five months later, Gubenko’s mother was hanged by the Germans.

“Checkmate,” the Russian told the German. Both men cried.

“There was nothing to negotiate,” Naumann recalled. “He said, ‘We will not give anything back, as long as I live.’ ”

Merkel takes a characteristically unsentimental view of Russia. Alexander Lambsdorff, a German member of the European Parliament, said, “She thinks of Russia as a traditional hegemonic power that was subdued for a while and now has reëmerged.” Ukraine forced Merkel into a juggling act worthy of Bismarck, and she began spending two or three hours daily on the crisis. Publicly, she said little, waiting for Russian misbehavior to bring the German public around. She needed to keep her coalition in the Bundestag on board, including the more pro-Russian Social Democrats. And she had to hold Europe together, which meant staying in close touch with twenty-seven other leaders and understanding each one’s constraints: how sanctions on Russia would affect London’s financial markets; whether the French would agree to suspend delivery of amphibious assault ships already sold to the Russians; whether Poland and the Baltic states felt assured of NATO ’s support; the influence of Russian propaganda in Greece; Bulgaria’s dependence on Russian gas. For sanctions to bite, Europe had to remain united.

Merkel also needed to keep open her channel to Putin. Even after the E.U. passed its first round of sanctions, in March, it was not German policy to isolate Russia—the two countries are too enmeshed. Merkel is Putin’s most important interlocutor in the West; they talk every week, if not more often. “She’s talked to Putin more than Obama, Hollande, and Cameron combined have over these past months,” the senior official said. “She has a way of talking to him that nobody has. Cameron and Hollande call him to be able to say they’re world leaders and had the conversation.” Merkel can be tough to the point of unpleasantness, while offering Putin ways out of his own mess. Above all, she tries to understand how he thinks. “With Russia now, when one feels very angry I force myself to talk regardless of my feelings,” she said at the German Historical Museum. “And every time I do this I am surprised at how many other views you can have on a matter which I find totally clear. Then I have to deal with those views, and this can also trigger something new.” Soon after the annexation of Crimea, Merkel reportedly told Obama that Putin was living “in another world.” She set about bringing him back to reality.

A German official told me, “The Chancellor thinks Putin believes that we’re decadent, we’re gay, we have women with beards”—a reference to Conchita Wurst, an Austrian drag queen who won the 2014 Eurovision song contest. “That it’s a strong Russia of real men versus the decadent West that’s too pampered, too spoiled, to stand up for their beliefs if it costs them one per cent of their standard of living. That’s his wager. We have to prove it’s not true.” It’s true enough that, if Merkel were to make a ringing call to defend Western values against Russian aggression, her domestic support would evaporate. When eight members of a European observer group, including four Germans, were taken hostage by pro-Russian separatists in April—practically a casus belli, had they been Americans—the German government simply asked Putin to work for their release. Merkel was playing the game that had been successful for her in German politics: waiting for her adversary to self-destruct.

On at least one phone call, Putin lied to Merkel, something that he hadn’t done in the past. In May, after Ukrainian separatists organized a widely denounced referendum, the official Russian statement was more positive than the stance that Merkel believed she and Putin had agreed on in advance. She cancelled their call for the following week—she had been misled, and wanted him to sense her anger. “The Russians were stunned,” the senior official said. “How could she cut the link?” Germany was the one country that Russia could not afford to lose. Karl-Georg Wellmann, a member of parliament from Merkel’s party, who sits on the foreign-affairs committee, said that, as the crisis deepened and Germans began pulling capital out of Russia, Kremlin officials privately told their German counterparts that they wanted a way out: “We went too far—what can we do?” In Moscow restaurants, after the third vodka, the Russians would raise the ghosts of 1939: “If we got together, Germany and Russia, we would be the strongest power in the world.”

On June 6th, in Normandy, Merkel and Putin met for the first time since the crisis began, along with Obama, Hollande, Cameron, and Petro Poroshenko, the newly elected President of Ukraine, to commemorate the seventieth anniversary of D Day. News photographs showed Merkel greeting Putin like a disapproving hostess—lips pursed, eyebrows arched—while Putin’s hard features came as close to ingratiation as is physically possible. In the optics of power, she was winning. “This political isolation hurts him,” her senior aide said. “He doesn’t like to be left out.” (Russia had just been suspended from the Group of Eight.) Later, before lunch, Merkel orchestrated a brief conversation between Putin and Poroshenko. On the anniversary of D Day, Germany’s leader was at the center of everything. As Kurbjuweit put it, “That was astonishing, to see all the winners of the Second World War, and to see the loser and the country which was responsible for all this—and she’s the leader, everyone wants to talk to her! That is very, very strange. And this is only possible, I think, because it’s Merkel—because she’s so nice and quiet.”

The final ball Merkel has to keep in the air is the American one. Her opinion of Barack Obama has risen as his popularity has declined. In July, 2008, as a Presidential candidate, Obama wanted to speak at the Brandenburg Gate, in Berlin—the historic heart of the city, a location reserved for heads of state and government, not U.S. senators. Merkel rebuffed the request, so instead Obama spoke about European-American unity at the Victory Column, in the Tiergarten, before two hundred thousand delirious fans—a crowd Merkel could never have mustered, let alone mesmerized. “What puts her off about Obama is his high-flying rhetoric,” the senior official said. “She distrusts it, and she’s no good at it. She says, ‘I want to see if he can deliver.’ If you want to sum up her philosophy, it’s ‘under-promise and over-deliver.’ ”

In Obama’s first years in office, Merkel was frequently and unfavorably compared with him, and the criticism annoyed her. According to Stern , her favorite joke ends with Obama walking on water. “She does not really think Obama is a helpful partner,” Torsten Krauel, a senior writer for Die Welt , said. “She thinks he is a professor, a loner, unable to build coalitions.” Merkel’s relationship with Bush was much warmer than hers with Obama, the longtime political associate said. A demonstrative man like Bush sparks a response, whereas Obama and Merkel are like “two hit men in the same room. They don’t have to talk—both are quiet, both are killers.” For weeks in 2011 and 2012, amid American criticism of German policy during the euro-zone crisis, there was no contact between Merkel and Obama—she would ask for a conversation, but the phone call from the White House never came.

As she got to know Obama better, though, she came to appreciate more the ways in which they were alike—analytical, cautious, dry-humored, remote. Benjamin Rhodes, Obama’s deputy national-security adviser, told me that “the President thinks there’s not another leader he’s worked closer with than her.” He added, “They’re so different publicly, but they’re actually quite similar.” (Ulrich joked, “Obama is Merkel in a better suit.”) During the Ukraine crisis, the two have consulted frequently on the timing of announcements and been careful to keep the American and the European positions close. Obama is the antithesis of the swaggering leaders whom Merkel specializes in eating for breakfast. On a trip to Washington, she met with a number of senators, including the Republicans John McCain, of Arizona, and Jeff Sessions, of Alabama. She found them more preoccupied with the need to display toughness against America’s former Cold War adversary than with events in Ukraine themselves. (McCain called Merkel’s approach “milquetoast.”) To Merkel, Ukraine was a practical problem to be solved. This mirrored Obama’s view.

On the day I spoke with Rhodes, July 17th, the TV in his office, in the White House basement, showed the debris of Malaysia Airlines Flight 17 strewn across a field in eastern Ukraine. The cause of the crash wasn’t yet clear, but Rhodes said, “If it was a Russian shoot-down, and Americans and Europeans were on board, that’s going to change everything.” In Germany, the change happened immediately. The sight of separatist fighters looting the belongings of dead passengers who had been shot out of the sky hit Germans more personally than months of ugly fighting among Ukrainians had. A civilian airliner, Dutch victims: “People realized that the sentimental attitude toward Putin and Russia was based on false assumptions,” a German diplomat said. The idea of maintaining equidistance between Russia and the West on Ukraine vanished. Though the crisis was beginning to hurt the German economy, Merkel now had three-quarters of the public behind her. In late July, the E.U. agreed on a sweeping new round of financial and energy sanctions.

Since then, Russian troops and weapons have crossed the border in large numbers, and the war has grown worse. In a speech in Australia last week, Merkel warned that Russian aggression was in danger of spreading, and she called for patience in a long struggle: “Who would’ve thought that twenty-five years after the fall of the Wall . . . something like that can happen right at the heart of Europe?” But, on the day she spoke, the E.U. failed to pass a new round of sanctions against Russia. Guttenberg, the former defense minister, said, “We are content with keeping the status quo, and kicking the can up the road—not down—and it keeps falling back on our feet.”

The close coöperation behind the scenes between Washington and Berlin coincides with a period of public estrangement. Germans told me that anti-Americanism in Germany is more potent now than at any time since the cruise-missile controversy of the early eighties. The proximate cause is the revelation, last fall, based on documents leaked by Edward Snowden to Der Spiegel , that the National Security Agency had been recording Merkel’s cell-phone calls for a decade. Merkel, ever impassive, expressed more annoyance than outrage, but with the German public the sense of betrayal was deep. It hasn’t subsided—N.S.A. transgressions came up in almost every conversation I had in Berlin—particularly because Obama, while promising that the eavesdropping had stopped, never publicly apologized. (He conveyed his regret to Merkel privately.) “Tapping her phone is more than impolite,” Rainer Eppelmann, the former East German dissident, said. “It’s something you just don’t do. Friends don’t spy on friends.” (American officials I spoke with, though troubled by the effects of the breach, rolled their eyes over German naïveté and hypocrisy, since the spying goes both ways.)

German officials approached the Americans for a no-spy agreement, and were refused. The U.S. has no such arrangement with any country, including those in the so-called Five Eyes—the English-speaking allies that share virtually all intelligence. German officials claimed that the U.S. offered membership in the Five Eyes, then withdrew the offer. The Americans denied it. “It was never seriously discussed,” a senior Administration official said. “Five Eyes isn’t just an agreement. It’s an infrastructure developed over sixty years.”

“I tend to believe them,” the German diplomat said. “The Germans didn’t want Five Eyes when we learned about it. We’re not in a position, legally, to join, because our intelligence is so limited in scope.”

In July, officials of the German Federal Intelligence Service, or B.N.D., arrested a bureaucrat in their Munich office on suspicion of spying for the U.S. He had been caught soliciting business from the Russians via Gmail, and, when the Germans asked their American counterparts for information on the man, his account was suddenly shut down. Brought in for questioning, he admitted having passed documents (apparently innocuous) to a C.I.A. agent in Austria for two years, for which he was paid twenty-five thousand euros. The Germans retaliated, in unprecedented fashion, by expelling the C.I.A. station chief in Berlin. Coming soon after the N.S.A. revelations, this second scandal was worse than a crime—it was a blunder. Merkel was beside herself with exasperation. No U.S. official, in Washington or Berlin, seemed to have weighed the intelligence benefits against the potential political costs. The President didn’t know about the spy. “It’s fair to say the President should expect people would take into account political dynamics in making judgments about what we do and don’t do in Germany,” Rhodes said.

The spying scandals have undermined German public support for the NATO alliance just when it’s needed most in the standoff with Russia. Lambsdorff, the E.U. parliamentarian, told me, “When I stand before constituents and say, ‘We need a strong relationship with the U.S.,’ they say, ‘What’s the point? They lie to us.’ ” Germany’s rise to preëminence in Europe has made Merkel a committed transatlanticist, but “that’s useless now,” Lambsdorff said. “It deducts from her capital. Rebuffing Washington is good now in Germany.”

Obama was concerned enough to dispatch his chief of staff, Denis McDonough, to Berlin in late July, to mollify German officials. During a four-hour meeting, they agreed to create a framework for clearer rules about spying and intelligence sharing. But the details remain to be worked out, and barely half the German public now expresses a favorable view of the U.S.—the lowest level in Europe, other than in perpetually hostile Greece.

In a sense, German anti-Americanism is always waiting to be tapped. There’s a left-wing, anti-capitalist strain going back to the sixties, and a right-wing, anti-democratic version that’s even older. In the broad middle, where German politics plays out today, many Germans, especially older ones, once regarded the U.S. as the father of their democracy—a role that sets America up to disappoint. Peter Schneider, the novelist and journalist, expressed the attitude this way: “You have created a model of a savior, and now we find by looking at you that you are not perfect at all—much less, you are actually corrupt, you are terrible businessmen, you have no ideals anymore.” With the Iraq War, Guantánamo, drones, the unmet expectations of the Obama Presidency, and now spying, “you actually have acted against your own promises, and so we feel very deceived.”

Beneath the rise in anti-Americanism and the German sympathy with Russia, something deeper might be at work. During the First World War, Thomas Mann put aside writing “The Magic Mountain” and began composing a strange, passionate series of essays about Germany and the war. They were published in 1918, just before the Armistice, as “Reflections of a Nonpolitical Man.” In it, Mann embraced the German cause in terms of national character and philosophy. He allied himself, as an artist, with Germany—“culture, soul, freedom, art”—against the liberal civilization of France and England that his older brother Heinrich supported, where intellect was always politicized. German tradition was authoritarian, conservative, and “nonpolitical”—closer to the Russian spirit than to the shallow materialism of democratic Europe. The war represented Germany’s age-old rebellion against the West. Imperial Germany refused to accept at gunpoint the universal principles of equality and human rights. Though Mann became a vocal supporter of democratic values in exile during the Nazi years, he never repudiated “Reflections.”

Several people in Berlin suggested that this difficult, forgotten book had something to say about Germany in the age of Merkel. The country’s peaceful reunification and its strength through the euro crisis might be returning Germany to an identity that’s older than the postwar Federal Republic, whose Basic Law was written under heavy American influence. “West Germany was a good country,” Georg Diez, a columnist and author, told me. “It was young, sexy, daring, Western—American. But maybe it was only a skin. Germany is becoming more German, less Western. Germany has discovered its national roots.”

Diez didn’t mean that this was a good thing. He meant that Germany is becoming less democratic, because what Germans fundamentally want is stability, security, economic growth—above all, to be left in peace while someone else watches their money and keeps their country out of wars. They have exactly the Chancellor they want. “Merkel took the politics out of politics,” Diez said.

Merkel, at sixty, is the most successful politician in modern German history. Her popularity floats around seventy-five per cent—unheard of in an era of resentment toward elected leaders. Plainness remains her political signature, with inflections of Protestant virtue and Prussian uprightness. Once, with a group of journalists at a hotel bar in the Middle East, she said, “Can you believe it? Here I am, the Chancellor! What am I doing here? When I was growing up in the G.D.R., we imagined capitalists with long black cloaks and top hats and cigars and big feet, like cartoons. And now here I am, and they have to listen to me!” Of course, there’s something calculated about her public image. “She’s so careful not to show any pretensions—which is a kind of pretension,” the senior official said.

Merkel still lives in central Berlin, in a rent-controlled apartment across a canal from the Pergamon, the great neoclassical antiquities museum. The name on the brass buzzer is her husband’s—“ PROF. DR. SAUER ”—and a solitary policeman stands outside. Dwarfed by her vast office in the massive concrete-and-glass Chancellery, Merkel works at an ordinary writing table just inside the door, preferring it to the thirteen-foot black slab that Schröder installed at the far end of the room. “This woman is neurotically busy,” the longtime political associate said. “She sleeps never more than five hours. I can call her at one o’clock at night. She’s awake reading bureaucratic papers, not literature.”

Merkel entertains guests at the Chancellery with German comfort food—potato soup and stuffed cabbage. When she eats at her favorite Italian restaurant, it’s with just a few friends, and she doesn’t look up from the conversation to greet her public, who know to leave her alone. When her husband calls the Philharmoniker for tickets (Merkel and Sauer are music lovers, with a passion for Wagner and Webern) and is offered comps, he insists on giving his credit-card number, and the couple take their seats almost unnoticed. A friend of mine once sat next to Merkel at the salon she frequents, off Kurfürstendamm, and they chatted about hair. “Color is the most important thing for a woman,” the Chancellor, whose hair style is no longer the object of ridicule, offered.

Earlier this year, President Joachim Gauck made headlines when he called on Germany to take its global responsibilities more seriously, including its role in military affairs. It was the kind of speech that Merkel (who had no comment) would never give, especially after a poll commissioned by the foreign ministry in May showed that sixty per cent of the public was skeptical of greater German involvement in the world. German journalists find Merkel nearly impossible to cover. “We have to look for topics in the pudding,” Ulrich Schulte, who reports on the Chancellor for Die Tageszeitung , said. The private Merkel they admire and enjoy but are forbidden to quote disappears in public. Any aide or friend who betrays the smallest confidence is cast out. The German media, reflecting the times, are increasingly centrist, preoccupied with “wellness” and other life-style issues. Almost every political reporter I spoke with voted for Merkel, despite the sense that she’s making their work irrelevant. There was no reason not to.

Meanwhile, Merkel has neutralized the opposition, in large part by stealing its issues. She has embraced labor unions, lowered the retirement age for certain workers, and increased state payments to mothers and the old. (She told Dirk Kurbjuweit, of Der Spiegel , that, as Germany aged, she depended more on elderly voters.) In 2011, the Fukushima nuclear disaster, in Japan, shocked Merkel, and she reversed her position on nuclear power: Germany would phase it out through the next decade, while continuing to lead the world’s large industrial economies in solar and wind energy. (A quarter of the country’s energy now comes from renewable sources.) Meanwhile, she’s tried to rid her party of intolerant ideas—for example, by speaking out for the need to be more welcoming to immigrants. Supporters of the Social Democrats and the Greens have fewer and fewer reasons to vote at all, and turnout has declined. Schneider, a leading member of the generation of ’68, said, “This is the genius of Angela Merkel: she has actually made party lines senseless.”

This fall, in elections held in three states of the former East Germany, a new right-wing party, Alternative for Germany (AfD), showed strength, capturing as much as ten per cent of the vote. AfD wants Germany to withdraw from the euro zone and opposes Merkel’s liberal policies on gay marriage and immigration. In moving her own party to the center, Merkel has created a space in German politics for a populist equivalent to France’s Front National and the United Kingdom Independence Party. If the German economy continues to slow, Merkel will find it hard to float unchallenged above party politics as Mutti, the World Cup-winning soccer team’s biggest fan.

For now, the most pressing political question in Berlin is whether she’ll stand for a fourth term, in 2017. Joschka Fischer described Germany under Merkel as returning to the Biedermeier period, the years between the end of the Napoleonic Wars, in 1815, and the liberal revolutions of 1848, when Central Europe was at peace and the middle class focussed on its growing wealth and decorative style. “She is governing Germany in a period where the sun is shining every day, and that’s the dream of every democratically elected politician,” Fischer said—but “there is no intellectual debate.” I suggested that every Biedermeier has to end. “Yes,” he said. “Mostly in a clash.”

A political consensus founded on economic success, with a complacent citizenry, a compliant press, and a vastly popular leader who rarely deviates from public opinion—Merkel’s Germany is reminiscent of Eisenhower’s America. But what Americans today might envy, with our intimations of national decline, makes thoughtful Germans uneasy. Their democracy is not old enough to be given a rest.

“We got democracy from you, as a gift I would say, in the forties and fifties,” Kurbjuweit told me. “But I’m not sure if these democratic attitudes are very well established in my country. We Germans always have to practice democracy—we’re still on the training program.” Kurbjuweit has just published a book called “There Is No Alternative.” It’s a phrase that Merkel coined for her euro policy, but Kurbjuweit uses it to describe the Chancellor’s success in draining all the blood out of German politics. “I don’t say democracy will disappear if Merkel is Chancellor for twenty years,” he said. “But I think democracy is on the retreat in the world, and there is a problem with democracy in our country. You have to keep the people used to the fact that democracy is a pain in the ass, and that they have to fight, and that everyone is a politician—not only Merkel.” ♦

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By Amanda Petrusich

By David Remnick

Angela Merkel and the art of being ordinary

Enigmatic politician’s 16 years at helm in germany coming to an end.

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German photographer Herlinde Koelbl still remembers her first photo session with a shy and awkward young woman named Angela Merkel back in 1991.  

"I was struck by her power even though she was an inexperienced woman at that time," said Koelbl.  

"She was a scientist and then switched to politics. But even so, she already had a strong individuality and also a strong will. She already knew what she wants and doesn't want." 

Koelbl, now in her 80s, was starting a project to document the impact of power on people over time. She would continue to photograph Merkel, who's stepping down as German chancellor, on and off over the next 30 years.  

When they started, Merkel was 37 and had been a member of Germany's first post-unification parliament for just a year, and recently appointed minister for women and youth in the cabinet of Helmut Kohl, the father of German unification. 

Other politicians in the project included Gerhard Schroeder, who was chancellor from 1998 to 2005, and his foreign minister, Joschka Fischer, in the late 1990s.

Schroeder is pictured with his trademark cigar while Merkel said she didn't know how to sit or where to place her arms, recalled Koelbl, who gave her subjects no direction beyond a request to be "open." 

But it is Merkel who has stood the test of time, rising to become one of the world's best-known political figures, but also one of its most enigmatic. 

That's what makes Koelbl's series of portraits so interesting: searching for the thread linking the awkward MP in her 30s to Time Magazine's Person of the Year in 2015, with a cover headline that read: "Chancellor of the Free World."

By then, Merkel had already been at the helm in Germany for a decade, and Koelbl had started taking her picture more regularly, every year she served as chancellor.    

"She really learnt to wear, in a certain way, a mask," said Koelbl. "She talked about this in the interviews I did with her.  That she had to learn it. And I think she learnt it very well."  

Critics and advocates alike will say that Merkel's poker face and a calm exterior when confronted with more combustible figures has stood her in good stead. 

Think former Italian prime minister Silvio Berlusconi or former U.S. president Donald Trump.  

"If you want an ingredient of her success, it has been that she's a very guarded person," said Klaus Goetz, a specialist in European politics at Munich's Ludwig Maximilian University.  

"It's very rare that anything slips out. And she's not like Boris Johnson or some very sort of impulsive people. She's very controlled. She's controlling and controlled." 

'There is no secret'

"The only secret is that there is no secret," said Ralph Bollmann, author of a recently published Merkel biography called The Chancellor and her Time .  

"She is like she is. And I think only people who have in mind an image of a macho style, a traditional politician's politician, are wondering if there is something [else behind it]." 

Bollmann's theory is that Merkel learned to keep her own counsel as a young girl, growing up in former East Germany as the daughter of a Lutheran minister. 

"As a pastor's daughter in a communist regime and afterwards as a woman, and as an East German in Western [male-dominated] politics, she always had a good sense of resistance, of not ceding." 

Merkel studied quantum chemistry at the University of Leipzig before moving to East Berlin for work. She was there when the Berlin Wall fell in 1989.   

"In politics, there are very often situations where there is only the alternative to go out or go up," said Bollman. "She didn't want to go out."  

Only two other German leaders have served longer in office than Merkel: Prince Otto von Bismarck and Kohl.

Goetz said Merkel stands up poorly when placed against leaders like Kohl, calling her a manager and the latter a visionary. 

Seeking compromise

"Under Helmut Kohl, we had the Maastricht Treaty with the introduction of the euro. We had the opening to central and eastern Europe. We had German unification."

Merkel's advocates say it is her skill as a manager that has defined her premiership: an ability to seek compromise into the wee hours and present a steady hand at the helm during times of crisis.  

In 2015, when hundreds of thousands of mainly Syrian refugees arrived in Europe, Merkel was criticized for leaving Germany's border open. Her response to worried Germans was "we can manage." 

Syrians now settled in Germany call her the "mother of refugees." 

WATCH | The legacy of Angela Merkel:

The legacy of German Chancellor Angela Merkel

But the turmoil of their arrival also provoked anti-immigrant groups and it was on her watch that a far-right party was elected to the German parliament for the first time since the end of the Second World War.  

Bollmann believes her motives were both personal and pragmatic. 

"She was a citizen of the former communist eastern Germany. She didn't want to build new walls in Europe. And she wanted Germany as an open society, as a liberal society to preserve liberalism against populist uprisings."  

Now that Merkel is leaving, the political autopsy on her tenure has begun, one line of criticism being that she has failed to "future-proof" Germany or to leave a vision of where the country should be headed.  

A popularity boost  

"I think she's been a stabilizing force there, but she's definitely not been innovative in any way," said Travis Todd, a dual U.S.-German citizen who runs a campus for start-ups in Berlin.  

COVID-19 gave Merkel another crisis to handle, and another boost in popularity. But it also exposed Germany's out-dated bureaucracy, still relying on fax machines and regular mail.

• Germany, a global leader on COVID-19 response, cautiously comes out of lockdown

"I mean, I think it was maybe last year or the year before we could finally book our train tickets on the public transport via an app, which was mind-blowing," said Todd.

But despite the criticism, voters have kept her in power for 16 years, choosing her even when the enormity of her imprint blurred the lines of the coalition governments she's led.  

"Germany has loved Angela Merkel," said Manual Manzor, a member of the Social Democratic Party that managed to edge ahead of Merkel's Christian Democrats, now led by Armin Laschet, in this week's election.  

"And she was accepted in the whole world as a woman leader, so I think we'll keep her in mind. But it's good to have a change now."  

Where did the sparkle go?

So what about that thread linking the young Merkel to the woman stepping down after 16 years in power?

"I could see that she had a moral guiding line," said Herlinde Koelbl. "And I think she kept it through all these years. 

"She kept herself as a human being and I think she is a great politician and a great woman."

One difference in the Merkel of today, Koelbl noted, is the loss of what she calls a sparkle in Merkel's eye. 

"I think that's the price you have to pay to be chancellor," she said.  

Koelbl had her last photography session with Merkel three weeks ago, as yet unpublished. 

• German Social Democrats seek 3-way coalition after slim election win

"She didn't love the cameras, but she accepted to be photographed because it's part of her position and her job. And so in the last sitting it was the same. It was quite normal." 

Angela Merkel grew up in a divided Germany.

She became a force in Europe and on the global stage.

After 16 years, Germany’s Merkel is stepping down. Here’s how she built her legacy.

After a decade and a half, the era of German Chancellor Angela Merkel is coming to an end. Having chosen not to run in national elections this month, she will become the country’s first premier to leave power of her own volition.

If negotiations to form a new government drag on after the Sept. 26 vote, she could overtake Helmut Kohl as modern Germany’s longest-serving leader. She is the doyenne of European politics — a generation of young Germans remembers no one else at the helm.

Her admirers have hailed her as everything from the leader of the free world to a contemporary Joan of Arc — grand portrayals she has always spurned. Yet she has been repeatedly named among the world’s most powerful women . President Barack Obama, among her most enduring advocates, described her as an outstanding global political leader.

But she leaves a complicated legacy. Some applaud her humble, consensus-driven political style. Others see a lack of bold leadership, particularly in the face of a more aggressive Russia and rising Chinese power.

In 2015, she opened the door to more than 1 million refugees, mostly from war-battered Syria. But Merkel’s watch has also seen a surge in nationalist sentiment that has propelled the far right into parliament.

While dubbed the “climate chancellor” for her environmental promises, she leaves office with Germany the world’s biggest producer of air-choking brown coal.

Historians will debate her impact for years to come. What is certain: Her departure will leave a vacuum after a political career that has spanned more than three decades, beginning amid the dying gasps of the Cold War.

The Berlin Wall

It was the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 that opened up the world of politics to Merkel, the daughter of a pastor in communist East Germany.

In a speech at Harvard University in 2019, she described how she’d walk past the wall every day on her way home from work at a scientific institute.

“The Berlin Wall limited my opportunities,” she said. “It quite literally stood in my way.”

She was 35 when the most enduring symbol of the Cold War dramatically crumbled. “Where there was once only a dark wall, a door suddenly opened,” she said in the speech. “For me, too, the moment had come to walk through that door. At that point, I left my work as a scientist behind me and entered politics. That was an exciting and magical time.”

That history has, in many ways, shaped Merkel’s politics as she has tried to position Germany, and Europe, as a bridge between East and West.

The fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 was a turning point for Angela Merkel, who had grown up in East Germany. RIGHT: From left, Malgorzata Jeziorska, who is now a quantum chemistry professor; Joachim Sauer, the husband of Angela Merkel; and the future German leader during summer school in Bachotek, Poland, in 1989. (Bogumil Jeziorski/AFP/Getty Images)

Political education

Once she entered politics, Merkel’s rise was rapid. She joined the traditional, conservative and male-dominated Christian Democrats and was elected to Germany’s parliament, the Bundestag, in 1990. A protegee of Kohl, then Germany’s chancellor, she was appointed minister for women and youth the following year, when she also became deputy chairman of the party. In the early days of her career, she was nicknamed “Kohl’s girl.”

But in a move that stunned those in German politics, she turned on Kohl in a newspaper opinion piece in December 1999, calling on her former mentor to resign. Now party leader, she argued that his credibility, and the party’s, had been damaged in a donations scandal.

“The party thus has to learn to walk,” she wrote. “[It] has to trust itself to take on the fight with the political opponent in the future even without its old warhorse, as Helmut Kohl often liked to call himself.”

“I brought my killer,” Kohl later said, reflecting on Merkel’s decision to turn against him. “I put the snake on my arm.”

Merkel, then federal minister of women, speaks to Chancellor Helmut Kohl on Dec. 16, 1991, at a party conference in Dresden, Germany. (Michael Jung/picture-alliance/dpa/AP)

‘Small steps’

It was a razor-close electoral win that brought Merkel to power in 2005. Few expected sweeping change, and critics didn’t expect her to last long.

“Many will say, ‘This coalition is taking many small steps and not just one big one,' ” she said in her first speech as chancellor . “I will answer them: ‘Yes, that’s exactly how we do it.’ ”

She took office in a period of relative stability, but Europe would soon be buffeted by successive crises.

ABOVE: Merkel and her Christian Democratic Union kick off their campaign on Aug. 28, 2005, in Dortmund, Germany. (AP) LEFT: Merkel takes her seat as chancellor for the first time, on Nov. 22, 2005, in Berlin. (Andreas Rentz/Getty Images)

Euro-zone storm

As the euro zone’s debt crisis began to unfold in late 2009, Merkel helped lead efforts to save the continent’s shared currency. “If the euro fails, Europe fails,” she argued.

Clinging tightly to Europe’s purse strings, Merkel became the face of northern Europe’s frugality. She became a hated figure in countries such as Greece as they were forced into crippling austerity. Greek newspapers compared her to Hitler, and her visits were marked with protests for years.

Ultimately, she helped Germany and the euro zone face down an existential threat. She recently said she sees it as one of her biggest achievements as chancellor.

RIGHT: Horst Seehofer, then Bavarian governor, and Merkel on Jan. 13, 2009, in Berlin. (Andreas Rentz/Getty Images) ABOVE: On Oct. 9, 2012, Merkel’s trip to Greece was met with mass protests.

Migrant surge

Perhaps the most defining moment of Merkel’s political career came in 2015 as the number of refugees arriving in Europe began to surge. Many were fleeing the civil war in Syria and taking perilous journeys by sea to Europe.

Merkel opened Germany’s doors. In a typically understated comment made after a visit to an asylum center in August that year, she assured the German public: “Wir schaffen das” — “We can do it.”

“She’s on the right side of history on this,” Obama said at the time.

But Merkel’s refugee-friendly stance divided Europe and was assailed by Germany’s far right, which gained ground as her popularity took a hit.

LEFT: A Syrian migrant holds a picture of Merkel as he and approximately 800 others arrive in Munich from Hungary on Sept. 5, 2015. (Sean Gallup/Getty Images) ABOVE: Thousands of migrants were stranded in a refugee camp in Idomeni, Greece. (Zoeann Murphy/The Washington Post)

The pandemic

By the time the world faced its next epochal crisis, Merkel had learned the importance of clear and frank communication. As some world leaders appeared to dither, she stood out for her science-led approach.

The pandemic laid bare some of the country’s deficiencies, including a lack of flexibility that hampered a vaccine rollout. But the majority of Germans supported Merkel’s leadership during the pandemic.

Merkel adjusts her mask Nov. 18 in Berlin. (Tobias Schwarz/AFP/Getty Images)

East and West

Merkel’s 16 years in power have seen a shift in the world order. Washington has pressured Germany to take a firmer stance toward Russia and China. But as a child of the Cold War, Merkel has stressed the importance of avoiding another one.

She has tried to separate Chinese human rights abuses and Russian expansionism from issues of trade and economics, sometimes also finding herself out of step with her European neighbors.

Her relationship with Russian President Vladimir Putin has, at times, been strained and antagonistic. But she has said it is important to keep lines of dialogue open. Despite her fear of dogs, Putin once brought his Labrador into a bilateral meeting in what she says was an effort to intimidate her.

In a chancellorship that has spanned four U.S. presidencies, she has remained staunchly committed to the transatlantic alliance, even as relations became particularly strained under President Donald Trump. In one telling moment in 2018, Merkel’s official Instagram account posted a photo showing her bearing down over a table as Trump sat on the other side with his arms folded.

Merkel speaks with President Donald Trump during the Group of Seven summit in La Malbaie, Quebec, on June 9, 2018. (Jesco Denzel/German Federal Government/AP) RIGHT: Russian President Vladimir Putin brings flowers for Merkel on her last trip to Moscow as chancellor.

Now 67, Merkel has said she isn’t seeking a new political role. “Do I want to write, speak, hike? Do I want to be at home? Do I want to travel the world?” she said this month.

Merkel has regularly dismissed questions about her legacy, saying historical analysis is not for her and she’d rather get on with the job.

But in a town hall in the coastal town of Stralsund in 2019, she was asked what she’d like children to read about her in history books in 50 years.

“She tried,” she said.

Merkel departs from the final session of the Bundestag before federal parliamentary elections Sept. 7 in Berlin. (Sean Gallup/Getty Images)

Luisa Beck in Berlin contributed to this report.

About this story

Project editing by Brian Murphy and Reem Akkad . Photo editing by Chloe Coleman . Video editing by Alexa Juliana Ard . Design and development by Audrey Valbuena . Copy editing by Allison Cho . Additional video by Zoeann Murphy .

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World » Europe » Germany

The best books on angela merkel, recommended by tom nuttall.

For 16 years, as chancellor of Germany, Angela Merkel was the most powerful woman in the world. Here Tom Nuttall , the Economist's Berlin bureau chief, talks us through books to help us understand her time in office, and explains how her East German upbringing influenced her style of governance.

Interview by Benedict King

The Paradox of German Power by Hans Kundnani

After the Wall by Jana Hensel

Die Getriebenen by Robin Alexander

Angela Merkel: The Authorized Biography by Stefan Kornelius

Five Germanys I have Known by Fritz Stern

1 The Paradox of German Power by Hans Kundnani

2 after the wall by jana hensel, 3 die getriebenen by robin alexander, 4 angela merkel: the authorized biography by stefan kornelius, 5 five germanys i have known by fritz stern.

B efore we get into the books themselves, can you just say how Angela Merkel’s reign is being assessed—to the extent that it is—now it’s over? 

There’s a debate in Germany right now over the introduction of compulsory vaccination for COVID-19. The debate has gone off the rails a bit, because Olaf Scholz proposed the idea back in November, before he became chancellor, but has provided very little leadership on the issue. He’s not introducing a bill. He wants it all to come from the Bundestag, rather than from the government. And it’s not at all clear where it’s going, especially with the advent of the less severe Omicron variant.

During the election campaign, Scholz sought to emulate Merkel and to present himself as her natural heir. But this is very un-Merkel-like because she was so careful never to promise anything that she wasn’t able to deliver. And now, almost at the first hurdle, Scholz seems to be failing that test because he has promised something and it’s not at all clear whether it can be delivered.

So you have an interesting contrast. Merkel was often criticized for not providing strong, clear leadership. On the other hand, people are starting to recognize that although she wasn’t one for big speeches and grand plans, when she did say that she was going to do something, you could be sure that she was going to follow through. And with this particular example—although it’s early days—there seems to be a little bit of a contrast in the extent to which you’re able to trust her word versus Scholz’s. I think that tells you a bit about how people may remember her as a leader.

And was she hampered in her ambitions by being in constant coalitions? Or was that the key to her success?

You don’t run Germany without a coalition, so it’s hard to think through the counterfactual. I’d describe it slightly differently because I think power in Germany, in general, is sometimes misunderstood. Every decision that is made here is the result of a constant process of negotiation and back and forth, not only within a coalition—that’s just the most obvious manifestation—but also in many other ways. The states and the federal government have to negotiate with each other, and with parliament. You have endless stakeholders and players, industry groups, unions, municipalities, research groups, churches and social organizations. The fragmentation of power here is extraordinary.

The big meta-lesson of being a correspondent here is that it’s about a hell of a lot more than just sitting in Berlin and watching what ministers in the federal government are doing. You really have to get out and about in the country and talk to these thousands and thousands of different stakeholders if you want to understand how decisions are made.

“She never overestimated the power that was vested in her own office”

Merkel was very good at playing that game. She never overestimated the power that was vested in her own office. Three of her four coalitions were grand coalitions with the SPD, and I think that suited her political temperament fairly well. She was a very centrist chancellor. The only one that wasn’t with the SPD, but rather with the pro-business Free Democrats—who are traditionally considered to be the natural coalition partner of her Christian Democrats—was, in some respects, the least successful of her four coalitions. That may tell you something.

Let’s get on to the books. The first one is Hans Kundnani’s The Paradox of German Power.

This was published in 2014, in the wake of the eurozone crisis, the first phase of which came to an end in 2012, with Mario Draghi’s famous ‘whatever it takes’ statements. Merkel was pretty much the key figure throughout the process. What the book tries to do is to explain the way that German power worked in the course of the eurozone crisis by drawing comparisons with Germany’s position in earlier phases of European history. The ‘German question’ that tormented 19th-century European statesmen after unification in 1871 was in effect settled by Germany’s defeat in two world wars and its Cold War division. The book argues that the eurozone crisis saw it re-emerge in new form, economic rather than military: a fresh example of the old adage of a country that is ‘too big for Europe, but too small for the world’. That was the dynamic that you saw play out during the eurozone crisis. Germany was a semi-hegemonic power. It was not in a position simply to impose its will on the rest of the eurozone, but it was the largest and richest country inside the EU and no decisions could be taken without it.

The Germany we saw emerge through the eurozone crisis was a geo-economic power in a way that it hadn’t necessarily been in the past. Traditionally, inside Europe, you’d had France providing a lot of the political energy and Germany providing the economic power, but not wanting to leverage that into political hegemony. That was a dynamic that shifted a little bit in the eurozone crisis. It became very clear that France and Germany were not equals. That was even manifested in the slightly tricky relationship that you had between Merkel and Nicolas Sarkozy, who was the French president. And although Germany was committed to the euro, not least because it suited its world-beating exporters, it was unwilling to make the grand gestures that a genuine hegemon might make to allow it to thrive, notably committing to common debt. So you got chaos, uncertainty, mistrust and, in southern Europe, a lot of pain.

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At the same time Germany was increasing its economic heft in the rest of the world. A very important dynamic was emerging between Germany and China. It was a very nice, harmonious relationship, where China, as a rapidly growing economy, had a desperate need for the sorts of things that German manufacturers were very good at producing and exporting.

The debate around this has really come back in the last couple of years. There was this notion, encapsulated by the German phrase Wandel durch Handel , which means ‘change through trade’,  that as non-democratic powers grew richer through trading with democracies like Germany, they would naturally liberalise. You’d have the emergence of a middle class, which would go on to push for democratic reforms in places like China. Therefore Germany could both engage and deepen its trading relationships with countries outside of Europe, while at the same time foster the growth of liberalism and democracy inside. That’s obviously an extremely self-serving narrative, but it worked very, very well for Germany. But it’s increasingly questioned now, as it’s become very clear that China has not liberalised and is not democratising as it has become integrated in the global trading system. Essentially, it has become harder for Germany to cloak its economic interests in the normative language of politics.

In fact, I’m sceptical about the extent to which that was ever believed in Germany, as opposed to simply being a nice way for a country that didn’t really want to do geopolitics to tell itself that it was doing geopolitics, while at the same time seeing its own companies getting rich on the back of growing markets in China and elsewhere.

Either way, this slightly diverted German attention away from the rest of Europe as European markets became a little bit less significant as a share of Germany’s overall trade. At the same time, it was a political priority for Germany to be able to hold Europe together. It was very common to say that the eurozone was not going to emerge intact from the eurozone crisis, that Greece was not going to be able to put up with the austerity that was being demanded of it, or that the Germans would force them out of the euro. And, indeed, Wolfgang Schäuble, who was Merkel’s finance minister at the time, wanted to chuck Greece out. Merkel overruled him. In the end, the eurozone did hold together. In fact, it’s even grown by a couple of members since then.

The lesson that we might draw from that is that some people perhaps didn’t pay sufficient attention to how strong the political will was, especially inside Germany, to hold projects like the single currency together. In spite of the brutal treatment meted out to countries like Greece, and the awful austerity, and in spite of some terrible decisions, the project held together. Angela Merkel was at the heart of all of those decisions, and it was important to her that the eurozone remained intact. One of her more famous sayings was that if the euro fails, Europe fails. She weighs her words very carefully. That was a strong signal that she was not going to let the eurozone fall apart because holding the EU together is a core national interest of Germany’s. But it was also going to ensure that the pain of adjustment would fall on the shoulders of others.

Next up is Jana Hensel’s After the Wall.

This is a memoir, published in 2002, by a young East German woman recounting her experiences after the Berlin Wall fell. Jana Hensel is a journalist who works for Die Zeit , which is a weekly based in Hamburg, but grew up in Leipzig. I think she was about 13 when the wall fell. It’s an interesting age because she had a childhood in the East, but an adolescence in reunified Germany. And what the book does very nicely is explain all of the difficulties and the challenges and the torments that some East Germans went through when they found that they had to reinvent their identity in a reunified country—and do so in the knowledge of just how little West Germans understood about what it was they were going through.

A minister once said to me that, on the night of reunification in October 1990, he was in Frankfurt and went to a party, and everyone celebrated. The next day, they all went back to work and they carried on as they always had done. For West Germans, nothing really changed very much. For East Germans, everything changed. It wasn’t only going through deindustrialization and mass unemployment, although that meant that the 1990s were a very difficult period for a lot of East Germans. It was not only that many East Germans had to shed every marker of identity they had acquired and find new ones in an unfamiliar land. It was the fact that West Germans seemed to have very little interest in understanding those changes. I think there was a lot of resentment bred in Easterners during this time.

A couple of years ago, for the 30th anniversary of the fall of the Wall, I tried to explore some of these issues. I travelled around the East, talking to a lot of people. What you realize is that there are buried resentments and traumas. Some of it, fascinatingly, seemed to be transmitted down through the generations. I’d speak to people whose parents had really suffered in the 1990s. A lot of them worked for industrial concerns that were completely uneconomic, had been wound up and they’d lost their jobs. They’d been through extraordinary difficulties and just had to do what they could to survive.

Famously, you had mass emigration from the East to the West, and that created huge demographic problems in the East that have only grown more acute over time. For a lot of people who stayed, it was simply a question of trying to keep their heads above water. What you found is that often kids who may have no memory of the GDR, or maybe only the faintest memory, had developed a sort of Eastern identity, despite having not grown up in the separate country. In many cases that had been transmitted to them by what they had seen their parents go through. It was sometimes grounded in resentment or grievance about experiences that belonged to an earlier generation. I spoke to Jana Hensel at the time. She told me she had recently been shocked to find teenagers in her hometown of Leipzig peppering her with questions over whether special workplace quotas ought to be created for East Germans.

“She was 35 when the Wall came down”

One sociologist who worked on the GDR told me that in the previous two to three years the lectures he was giving, which used to be very sparsely attended, had become some of the most popular in his university. There was an extraordinary revival of interest in what had happened, both inside the GDR, but also in the Eastern states, in the period immediately after reunification. This memoir provides a way to understand these sorts of questions.

If you’d asked most East Germans in 1990 if people were still going to be talking about East-West differences three decades hence they would have thought that was absurd. But during the commemorations for the 30th anniversary, you did seem to have this very belated recognition in large parts of West Germany, especially its media, that they had got the east a little bit wrong by just assuming that if they poured vast amounts of subsidies into the east, and opened their doors to its workers and students, that all of a sudden the world would open up to the East, and that the West didn’t need to do much more than that.

I think that there was a belated recognition that that was wrong, that the history of the East for many people growing up in the GDR had been erased, that their identity had been ignored, and that this had created all sorts of resentments that people in the West, until quite recently, had been oblivious to.

The debate has improved compared to where it was maybe 10 years ago. But, when we look at things like the growth of the AfD, the far right party that does much better in the East than in the West; or even the protests that we’re seeing against COVID measures and potential compulsory vaccination: you find these protests all over the country, but you certainly find them in greater numbers and greater strength in the East. The AfD has been trying to foster some sort of identity of resentment against the West in some Eastern states. All of this goes back to a lot of the stuff that’s discussed in Jana Hensel’s book.

Merkel didn’t talk very much about her Eastern background when she was in charge. I think that was a very deliberate decision. She didn’t want to set herself aside, she wanted to be a chancellor for all Germans. But she made a bit of an exception in the last couple of years, perhaps because she realised she was in a unique position to tackle some of these grievances and resentments. She started to talk about it in very interesting ways, including in an interview with Jana Hensel in Die Zeit , to commemorate the 30th anniversary of the fall of the Wall.

But her Eastern background very clearly marked her. She was 35 when the Wall came down. At the end of the day, you can’t really understand Merkel without understanding that she grew up on the wrong side of the Berlin Wall. And some of the stuff in this book gives you a certain context. It might help you understand some of the ways that Merkel came to rule as somebody who had spent her formative years in the GDR.

I was going to ask you whether it was important to her as a politician, but you say she didn’t actually play on it particularly. But was it electorally important to her? Did she punch above her weight in the former GDR as a Christian Democratic leader?

Let’s move on to Robin Alexander’s Die Getriebenen. 

It’s a slightly tricky one to translate. It basically means ‘the driven ones’. What it implies is that the cast of characters in the book, the governments and the ministers who are making decisions during the refugee crisis of 2015-16, were driven by events rather than driving them. So ‘the driven ones’ is probably the best way to translate it.

Robin Alexander is a correspondent for Die Welt . This is a pacy, journalistic account of the way that decisions were taken, or forced on the main players by the very fast-moving events in the refugee crisis of 2015/ 2016. The book was published in 2017. Before the election, it was a huge hit. Like Jana Hensel’s book, it was top of the bestseller charts for a long time. What’s interesting about it—and I think I broadly agree with this thesis—is that it doesn’t present Merkel and the people around as they’ve often been portrayed in the foreign press, as opening Germany’s borders to a million migrants and asylum seekers, in a grand act of charity that’s based on some kind of principle.

The focus of the book is a moment in September 2015 when you have this column of migrants walking towards Germany from Austria. A decision has to be taken: are they going to be let in or not? Is the border going to be closed or not? Thomas de Maiziere, who was the interior minister at the time, is described as prevaricating, having no idea what the right thing to do is, trying to get hold of Merkel but unable to get hold of her. The police received no clear instructions. In the end, far from being a principled decision of Germany to open its arms and take in all of these people, it appears—at least the way it’s portrayed in this book—that what they wanted to do was to make sure that they didn’t have some awful pictures on TV, of hundreds of thousands of people trying to cross the border and being repelled by police with tear gas and water cannon and whatever else, so they decided they’d better let them in. Then, a retrospective justification was provided and Merkel started to say, ‘you know, we’re big, and we’re rich, and we’re successful, and we can handle it, and we should do it.’ And you have the famous pictures of the railway station in Munich with the Germans lining up to applaud the refugees as they get off the train. This narrative emerges of Germany as a humanitarian champion.

But the picture painted in the book is rather different from that, it’s a very panicked and contingent response to a set of circumstances that nobody really was prepared for, as Merkel herself subsequently acknowledged. You see that also at the European level. I wasn’t in Germany at the time, I was in Brussels, but I was following the migrant crisis very closely. What was clear at the time was that for many European countries, they were very frustrated by Germany’s and Merkel’s lack of consultation with the decisions that she was making. The decisions that she was making obviously had big implications for countries across Europe, particularly those that were on the migrant trail, but also countries that could expect to receive a lot of the asylum seekers that might be making their way through Germany: the Netherlands, Sweden and other countries. There was very, very little consultation offered by Germany.

It was the same thing when she finally did the deal with Erdogan in the spring of 2016 that ended that phase of the crisis. Formally, it was an EU-Turkey deal. In reality, it was a Germany-Turkey deal done, again, without any real consultation.

This is a hallmark of the way that Merkel has tended to go about things. I talked a moment ago about the difficulties that she had in the 2017 election campaign around this issue, and I think one reason that many, many Germans really struggled at that time wasn’t so much that the decision had been taken to let in so many people, but that Merkel never stood up to explain, in a clear and comprehensive fashion, why this was the right thing to do.

There was the famous ‘ Wir schaffen das’ ‘we can handle it’, or ‘we can deal with it’, speech. But that wasn’t really a justification or an explanation for why this was the right thing to do. This was something that Merkel was never really very good at. She could make decisions, for better or for worse, in the teeth of crisis at the German level, or at a European level. She was a very managerial politician. But she struggled to explain to people why she wanted to do this or that, or in this case, why it was the right thing for Germany to do this, and how it fitted into a foreign policy, or how Germany might hope to integrate all these people.

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So I think for a lot of Germans it was doubly traumatic, because you had these extraordinary thing happening very, very quickly, refugee centres filling up all over the country, but no real plan about what to do. Of course, Germany’s a fairly well organized place. Ultimately, that stuff—housing, education, integration—for the most part, was handled fairly well. But that trauma was compounded in many people’s minds by the failure to explain why this had happened and why Germany had chosen to do this. I think that’s why Merkel found herself confronted—throughout the country, not only in the East—by a lot of people who were very unhappy about some of these decisions that were taken. Of course, a lot of people supported the policy. It’s rare to hear Greens or Social Democrats speak well of Christian Democrats. But lots of them regretted Merkel’s departure from office, and her actions during this crisis are the main reason why.

Let’s move on to the biography of Merkel by Stefan Kornelius. 

The book was published in 2013, so around the time of her third election. It’s a so-called authorized biography. It’s not especially critical. It also has a focus on foreign policy, which is maybe not surprising because Kornelius works for Süddeutsche Zeitung , a Munich-based newspaper, as their chief foreign affairs commentator.

This goes back to what we were saying before about the importance of understanding Merkel’s origins in East Germany. There’s a lot of that in the Kornelius book. He suggests that Merkel, as somebody who grew up in the GDR, was always sceptical of the way that power was exercised there, but she was not by temperament a revolutionary. She went into the natural sciences. As she has observed herself, the GDR regime might be able to do all sorts of things, but it wasn’t able to tamper with natural law. So that was perhaps a suitable thing for somebody with Merkel’s temperament to go into.

She was fascinated, like many people from that part of the world and of her generation, by America, more so than the rest of Europe. I think that this actually comes through when you look at the way that she’s conducted herself as an EU decision-maker. She knows that Germany cannot flourish if Europe doesn’t flourish, but she does not have that sentimental attachment to the idea of European unity that you see in lots of other German politicians, like Helmut Kohl, who came from the Rhineland, or Armin Laschet, who had hoped to succeed Angela Merkel as the candidate for her party in the last election, though failed dismally. These politicians had a very sentimental commitment to the idea of European unity, and in particular to the relationship with France.

“Whenever she met Putin, she could speak Russian”

This stuff is more or less entirely absent from Merkel’s approach to Europe. She gave an important speech to the College of Europe in Bruges, during or maybe just after the eurozone crisis. It’s pretty much the closest that you can get to any sort of Merkel theory of Europe. The key part of it was when she explained that she was very sceptical about what’s called the ‘community method’, which means decision-making vested in supranational institutions like the European Commission and the European Parliament. She’s much more interested in a theory of European power where decision making is vested in the leaders of national governments, none of them more important than the Chancellor of Germany. Actually, this has been a much more accurate description of the way that the decisions have been taken at a European level for the last 10 years. The action has all been at the European Council, which is where the national leaders sit, rather than the Commission, which is much weaker than it used to be.

This book does a fairly good job of explaining the context, helping you understand why Merkel’s approach to Europe has been much more business-like and down-to-earth than it’s been with some other senior German politicians and chancellors. The attachment to America has been much stronger. You also have a little bit in the book about her interesting relationship with Russia and the Russian language. When she was a schoolgirl in the GDR, she won a prize for being something like the third-best Russian speaker in East Germany. It’s one of the interesting things about her that whenever she met Putin, she could speak Russian. He, of course, was a KGB agent in Dresden and was able to speak German.

Let’s move on to the last book, Five Germanys I Have Known by Fritz Stern.

This is a bit more of a left-field selection in the sense that it was published in 2006, just a year after Merkel became chancellor. She is mentioned only in a footnote, which celebrates her rise to power as “an implicit recognition of the talents that had been liberated in the old east.” But it’s a great book, a blend of history and memoir by one of the foremost scholars of German history. The five Germanys he refers to in the title are Weimar Germany, Nazi Germany, the two Germanys between 1945 and 1990—West Germany and the GDR—and then reunified Germany. He was born in 1926 and grew up in what was then German Breslau, part of the Weimar Republic and is now the city of Wroclaw in Poland. He came from a family of Jewish origin, although I think his grandparents had converted to Christianity. He certainly didn’t grow up culturally Jewish, although, of course, for the Nazis that didn’t matter, given their biological theories of race.

His family were quite wealthy, very cultured and surrounded by intellectuals. They eventually, belatedly perhaps, emigrated to the US in 1938. So he does have childhood memories of Nazism. But he watched the war from the US and he established his academic career in the US at Columbia, and stayed there, became an American citizen, but made regular recces back to West Germany after the war.

He was quite frustrated with what he considered to be some of the slightly superficial analyses of how Nazism emerged, particularly in American scholarship. That is explored amply in this book, but what sets it aside are the regular injections of memoir, particularly the scenes painted of Weimar Germany and of his childhood. It really brings that period to life colourfully. Nazism is on the edges of things, it doesn’t feel real, or like something that’s going to affect him, until it does.

There are particular vignettes about the emigration office or encounters with SS officers, where you get this creeping feeling that something devastating is happening to this country, and potentially something devastating could happen to him. And, eventually, his family make the decision to emigrate.

Chapter 10, is “Unified Germany: A Second Chance?” It’s really moving because for most of Stern’s adult life, the division of Germany into East and West was considered an immovable, fundamental fact. The Cold War felt eternal and unchangeable. Then, all of a sudden, when Stern is approaching his twilight years, it all changes, the Wall comes down, the country is unified.

There is a moving epilogue to the book, in which Stern is invited in 2002 to give an address to mark the 300th anniversary of the University of Wroclaw, in the town of his birth. Bar a brief visit in 1979, described in noirish fashion at the start of the book, he has not been back since emigrating in the 1930s. The German and Polish presidents attend, he delivers a homily to the European peace and unity that had proved so elusive for most of his life, and a performance of Ode to Joy, the EU’s anthem, drives him to tears.

Here is a city that has now taken on a new life as a Polish city, in a free Poland, after the end of the Cold War , at peace with its German neighbour, as well as with its Russian neighbour, something that for many Poles might have felt almost unthinkable for large parts of history. So although all of those parts of his own personal childhood have been pretty much expunged from the city, he is able to see a fresh beginning as a city in Poland that epitomises the new Europe. And a city that can connect him to a childhood that is by now distant, but not yet forgotten.

It’s a slightly tenuous link to Merkel but it does give you a different context for thinking about the Germany that Angela Merkel inherited, especially for a chancellor that herself grew up in the GDR and who for most of her young life would not have had any idea that her destiny was to be part of a free and unified Germany anchored in a secure Europe at peace with its Polish neighbour. Here it is presented by somebody who remembers not only the Cold War, not only Nazi Germany, but actually remembers Breslau as a German city in the Weimar Republic. It’s a fascinating piece of context for thinking about the Germany in Europe that Angela Merkel was to inherit.

March 11, 2022

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Tom Nuttall

Tom Nuttall is the the Economist's Berlin bureau chief.

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