Fallen Angela

By Clare McHugh

Thursday, December 26, 2024

 

When the late-November publication date for Angela Merkel’s memoir was set months ago, who could have predicted it would follow hard on the heels of the German government’s collapse? And yet the timing highlights a vital irony about the former chancellor of Germany. In office, Merkel benefited mightily from the accomplishments of her predecessor, Gerhard Schröder—especially his labor-market reforms. But she set up her own successor, Olaf Scholz, for failure.

 

After Scholz took over from Merkel three years ago, the German economy flatlined, Russia invaded Ukraine and continues to threaten the already under-resourced German armed forces, and parties on the far right and the far left have both surged in state elections.

 

Once hailed by the Economist as “the indispensable European,” Merkel finds her reputation melting faster than an ice sculpture at a summer garden party. And the 720-page door stopper she has written in her defense, called Freedom, is too bland and too unpersuasively self-exculpatory to salvage anything from the sodden wreckage.

 

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Merkel turned 70 in 2024. Exactly half a lifetime ago, in 1989, the fall of the Berlin Wall permitted her to abandon her career as a research physicist and enter politics. A youth spent in Communist East Germany, plus a midlife career pivot, is fertile material, and in Freedom’s prologue Merkel promises to explain how the first part of her life connects to the second.

 

She fails at this, although not for lack of trying. She recounts at length the absurdities and deprivations imposed by the totalitarian GDR regime. She commends her parents for creating a haven for open, intellectual discussion at home. She admires her father’s enduring Lutheran faith; as a pastor he was a suspect figure in the country town northeast of Berlin where she grew up. She remembers her mother’s good advice—if approached by the Stasi to spy on friends or colleagues, she must declare herself too bubbly to keep secrets. (It was a strategy that she employed in her twenties.) And Merkel touches on the despair she felt during the 11 years she worked at the East German Academy of Sciences, worried that nothing in her benighted homeland would ever improve.

 

Still, she leaves unanswered an important question. Why, as an intellectual living in East Berlin in the 1980s, did she never join the peaceful movement for change before the state’s collapse? Was it fear, hopelessness, or an overly cautious nature? Perhaps a mixture of all three? Although Merkel was hardly alone in making this choice, her lack of introspection about it is striking, and telling. A skilled politician avoids opening herself up to reproach, and again and again in Freedom, Merkel reverts to type.

 

In the post-Wall world, Merkel shopped for a political home, hoping, she recalls, to “help some fresh faces change the political landscape.” The party she chose was Demokratischer Aufbruch (Democratic Awakening, or DA)—established earlier in 1989 by, among others, Günter Nooke, a friend of her younger brother’s. Skipping work one December day, Merkel turned up at the party’s office on Marienburger Strasse in East Berlin willing to lend a hand. Supporters in West Germany had sent the DA some computers, but they were still languishing in their boxes because no one knew how to set them up. Nooke figured Merkel might have a clue and assigned her the task. Within weeks, she was a habitué at party headquarters, being tutored by Western experts in public relations, democratic processes, and the structure of government in the Federal Republic of Germany. She took a formal leave from her Academy job to become a spokesperson for the DA in February 1990 and never looked back.

 

DA members felt an affinity with the Christian Democratic Union (CDU), West Germany’s center-right party, led by Chancellor Helmut Kohl, whom Merkel admired for his immediate push to reunite the German nation. “To me, what Kohl did is an inspiring example of a chancellor’s often-discussed authority to decide policy: following one’s own moral compass in certain situations and genuinely assuming ultimate political responsibility,” she writes. And here one senses the foundation of her politics—not resistance in the dark days of the GDR, but the resolute example of her first, and most crucial, mentor.

 

For it was Kohl who plucked Merkel out of obscurity. She won a seat in the Bundestag representing a district in the far northeast, in the election after reunification in 1990. At that moment, the chancellor needed a diversity hire—ideally a woman from the East—for his first all-German cabinet, so Merkel got the post as federal minister for women and youth.

 

Kohl called her his Mädchen—his little girl—a demeaning pet name bestowed by a man who failed to detect the determination and cold-bloodedness Merkel would muster when the time came to denounce him. While out of power in 1999, several CDU bosses were implicated in a financial scandal, involving a slush fund and secret payments. Kohl denied all knowledge, but Merkel, by then party secretary, published a piece in the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung calling for the party to break with Kohl. In April 2000, she was elected the CDU chair. She recounts the whole episode brusquely, as if to say: It could not have been otherwise.

 

Once Merkel ascends to the chancellorship in 2005, the narrative really starts to drag. She dumps her annual schedule on the reader, and thereafter we are on a forced march through the series of economic and geopolitical crises she faced during her 16 years in office: the eurozone debt crunch, Russian expansionism, the phase-out of nuclear power after Fukushima, Nord Stream 2, the flood of asylum seekers. She reveals that she and her staff nicknamed the less inspiring bits of her Bundestag speeches—the nuts and bolts of proposed policies—“Schwarzbrot” (black bread). Freedom is a whole loaf’s worth.

 

And in covering her state visits, the memoir often sounds like an elderly person’s droning account of a long cruise. What she ate, where she stayed, whom she met, how chairs were arranged in the meeting rooms all take up too much space. One reads that on a trip to Israel, she checks into the “legendary” King David Hotel, she admires the desalination plants, she’s gratified to have an honorary degree bestowed upon her by Technion—yada yada. But then, writing of being taken by Prime Minister Shimon Peres to the Sde Boker kibbutz in the Negev, standing on the same spot where in 1965 the 90-year-old former German Chancellor Konrad Adenauer visited David Ben-Gurion, she recalls, “I seemed to sense their physical presence because my skin tingled with goosebumps.” Adenauer’s trademark Rhenish sing-song accent plays in her head, she remembers how he and Ben-Gurion established a strong (and to her mind, unbreakable) bond between West Germany and Israel, and she’s in awe that she and Peres are following in the footsteps of these two statesmen “who truly managed to change things for the better.”

 

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But such stirring moments are few, and it’s not clear that Merkel changed much for the better. Nor does she admit to mistakes, especially in her tortured dealings with Vladmir Putin. Merkel describes in detail the NATO summit in Bucharest in 2008 where she, with support from French President Nicolas Sarkozy, blocked George W. Bush’s efforts to include Georgia and Ukraine in the alliance. And yet she briefly dismisses as “illusory” any notion that admitting them might have discouraged Putin’s subsequent aggression. Green light to attack Georgia a few months later? What green light?

 

She’s shocked when Putin initially lies about his troops taking over the Ukrainian peninsula of Crimea in 2014, but she never contemplates a military response, nor does she push for an immediate ramp-up of German or European defense capabilities. The sanctions that she organized omitted energy exports. Her rationalization for continuing with Nord Stream 2, the pipeline project poised to deepen Germany’s reliance on cheap Russian gas, is particularly muddled. Merkel offers lots of reasons why she couldn’t shut it down, but she never takes ultimate responsibility for continuing to do business with Putin. (Scholz’s government halted the project in February 2022 in response to Russia’s recognition of two breakaway regions in Eastern Ukraine.)

 

Merkel is in no doubt that her choice in 2015 to open Germany’s borders to more than a million migrants, earning worldwide platitudes, was morally correct. She famously declared: “Wir schaffen das”—we can do it. But the country has struggled to absorb the massive majority-Syrian intake.

 

The former chancellor is often compared to Margaret Thatcher, Britain’s first female leader, who also trained as a scientist. Thatcher’s TINA doctrine—“there is no alternative”—found an echo in Merkel’s insistence that her mandates on the European debt crisis were “alternativlos”—in German, literally, alternative-less. In response, a nationalist, Euroskeptic party, Alternative für Deutschland (AfD), was founded in 2013, and it boomed in size after Merkel opened the floodgates and when, subsequently, migrant suspects were accused in a wave of high-profile murders and sexual assaults. In 2017, the AfD became the first party to the right of the CDU to win seats in the Bundestag. Last September, it came first in state elections in Thuringia; it currently polls at 19 percent nationally—potentially a major player in Germany’s coalition politics despite widespread distrust of the far-right among the political class—with the election scheduled for February 23.

 

On the left, Germany is witnessing the rise of the anti-Merkel, a woman from the former East Germany who is a vocal hard-liner, pro-Putin, distrustful of the United States, and emphatically anti-immigration. “Germany has no more room,” Sahra Wagenknecht says. Born in 1969, Wagenknecht joined the ruling Socialist Unity (SED) party before the fall of the Wall, and afterward the Communist faction of SED’s successor party, The Left. Never anyone’s Mädchen, Wagenknecht clashed with party leaders and formed her own party last year. The Bündnis Sahra Wagenknecht (BSD) is polling at 7 percent. She opposes further weapons deliveries to Ukraine and the installation of new American missiles in Germany agreed to last July.

 

Wagenknecht doesn’t get a mention in Freedom, but Merkel speaks briefly and politely of Friedrich Merz, now the CDU’s candidate for chancellor. In the early 2000s, the two were bitter rivals—“from the very start: we both wanted to be boss,” she recalls—and the staunchly conservative Merz, a devout Catholic, withdrew from politics after Merkel became chancellor. He returned once she retired. Public opinion polls suggest he is the favorite to unseat Scholz in February.

 

Merz promises to dispatch with the last vestiges of the Merkel era. Germany would suspend European Union asylum rules and allow border police to turn back migrants. The burden of bureaucracy on businesses would be cut and nuclear-power stations reopened or new, smaller modular reactors built. He would consider delivering Taurus cruise missiles to Ukraine and supporting Ukraine’s membership in NATO. Defense spending would most certainly rise.

 

Meet the new boss, not at all the same as the old boss. Freedom’s just another book with nothing left to say.