Old habits die hard as Angela Merkel keeps tight hold on information in memoir

Angela Merkel outsmarted East Germany’s state security police – the so-called Stasi – when two officers tried to recruit her in 1978.
They told the 21-year-old trainee physicist it would be helpful for her career if she could tell them “certain things” about students and staff at her Leipzig university institute.
Mind whirling, she blurted out what her parents told her to say in such a situation.
“I’m a communicative person,” she told the two men, “and I always have to tell other people what’s on my mind.”
[ Angela Merkel saw Donald Trump as spellbound by autocratic leadersOpens in new window ]
Merkel never heard from them again and her career as a Stasi informer ended before it even began. Anyone who completes her 688-page memoir, Freedom, though, will wish the young physicist had been telling the truth.
Key to Merkel’s political longevity was keeping tight control over political and personal information. It is a habit the 70 year-old struggles to break in her book.
Merkel had a remarkable 31-year political career of firsts: the first easterner in Helmut Kohl’s post-unification cabinet in 1990; in 2000, the first woman to lead the centre-right Christian Democratic Union (CDU); and, for 16 years from 2005, the first woman to serve as federal chancellor.
The memoir opens with her idyllic childhood in East Germany, north of Berlin. Her Lutheran pastor father, Horst Kasner, had moved his family here from Hamburg, in the western zone, shortly after Merkel’s birth in July 1954. She describes a carefree rural childhood of blueberry-picking expeditions with her brother and sister – before the eventual intrusion of reality.
When the Berlin Wall was built in August 1961 Merkel, then seven, remembers “everyone was in a state of pure shock, people were crying, my mother was in despair. She didn’t know when she would see her mother and sister in Hamburg again”.
And what of her father? Known to his church colleagues as “Red Kasner”, Merkel says his “vocation” in the socialist German was shattered by the wall and the 1968 Prague Spring – when Soviet tanks crushed liberal Czechoslovak socialism. Just how much of a true believer he was until that point – and how this impacted his Christian values, home life and Merkel’s own politics – remain out of bounds to the reader, bar this: “He didn’t seem to be able to reconcile his theoretical considerations with his practical life.”
[ Germany’s SPD has its Biden-Harris moment as Scholz’s popularity plummetsOpens in new window ]
Even more of a phantom is her first husband, Ulrich, whose surname she still carries. “It was a student romance,” she writes. Apart from saying he was good at DIY, she offers nothing on his appearance, how they met, why they married, why they divorced.
It’s a curious omission but old habits die hard. And Merkel grew up in a socialist, atheist state, where being a pastor’s daughter was a minefield of personal caution and real-life discrimination.
She remembers the vanished Germany as “petty, narrow-minded, tasteless, and… as humourless as it could possibly be”.
“If you overstepped a political boundary,” she writes, “then the state knew no forgiveness and when it struck it was merciless.”
Like most people she was a conformist who “tried to make the best of the situation… and to push myself to the limits of my capabilities wherever possible”.
Her life has made good on those vows with her interest in politics began in December 1989, two months after the Berlin Wall fell.
[ Conservative leader accuses Scholz of sowing division in Germany’s economyOpens in new window ]
By a series of coincidences she became deputy press spokesperson for a small opposition party. Backing full unity rather than a reformed East, she ran for the Bundestag and found herself in 1990 sitting at Helmut Kohl’s cabinet table.
Her first meeting with the so-called unity chancellor was “slightly strange” and their final encounters strained after she disowned him in public for his illegal party fundraising system.
After snatching the party leadership she modernised the CDU, particularly on social policy, to claim the political centre. Even senior conservatives in her party backed her, she insists, one of whom told her: “It’s down to you to make our daughters vote CDU again, they won’t if it’s just us.”
It’s an interesting shot across the bow of today’s more conservative CDU leader Friedrich Merz, an old Merkel rival, who is tempted to move away from her centrist legacy.
She steers clear of daily politics – almost. In her book she admits a change of heart on the so-called “debt brake”, designed by her government to limit new borrowing. It has faced growing criticism that pushing balanced budgets has contributed to low growth, crumbling physical infrastructure and delayed digital transformation. In her memoir, Merkel argues that the debt brake “needs to be reformed to allow higher levels of debt to be assumed for the sake of investment in the future”.
The book’s second half is a document to Merkel’s staggering workload as a four-term chancellor as one crisis segued into another. On Russia, she says “to underestimate [Vladimir] Putin would be a mistake” without making clear whether she did just that in office. All her energy decisions, she points out, had broad political and business backing.
[ Russian missiles target Ukraine’s energy infrastructureOpens in new window ]
When she came to office Germany relied on Russia for 41 per cent of its natural gas. That rose to 63 per cent when she left office, in part to bridge the gap from closing down nuclear plants. In her memoir Merkel never addresses whether it was wise to have nearly two-thirds of Germany’s energy eggs in one basket controlled by a man with “dictatorial traits”.
Pre-release extracts of her book discuss her relationship with Donald Trump – “someone who won’t permit win-win situations” and her pre-war opposition to Ukraine joining Nato.
[ Merkel saw Trump as spellbound by autocratic leadersOpens in new window ]
On defence, she says “Germany must make up for its repeated failure to increase the defence budget” in the decade to 2024, while neglecting to mention her centre-right group’s control of the defence ministry for 16 years when she oversaw considerable budget cuts.
On China, she warns of New Silk Road investment partner countries who have “stumbled into financial dependencies with China” without mentioning considerable exposure of the Germany economy – in particular through companies such as Volkswagen.
On the banking and euro crisis, Merkel acknowledges that austerity measures in Greece and other bailout countries left her reputation “in tatters” there for hitting the worst-off, without reflecting on whether this approach was inevitable.
Ireland is mentioned only in passing, as seeking emergency financial assistance from the European Financial Stability Facility emergency fund in the summer of 2012.
She blames France and the European Central Bank for blocking private investor “haircuts” because they “feared lasting damage to investor confidence in the euro zone”.
Merkel has little new to add on the memorable night of September 4/5th, 2015, when Hungary sent a human convoy of asylum seekers to Austria and Germany, both of which decided not to close their borders.
A decade on, amid a surge in support for anti-asylum parties across Europe, Merkel insists her original decision was correct given the “special circumstances of a humanitarian emergency” – but must never be repeated. “That such a decision had been necessary at all revealed the failure of Europe leading up to that point.”
Amid a surge in support for anti-asylum parties, she warns that mainstream parties will “fail… if they assume they can keep it down by appropriating [their] pet topics and even trying to outdo [their] rhetoric without offering any real solutions to existing problems”.
Merkel describes Brexit as “a humiliation, a disgrace” but insists London’s demand for immigration limits “was an attack on a cornerstone of the European Union, and one I was unable to accept”.