Angela Merkel’s memories – “Why do I have to do this?”

“Everything is possible,” says Angela Merkel, that is the quintessence of her political experiences. Even her autobiography, which was published on Tuesday under the title “Freedom”. In 30 countries at the same time, because wasn’t she even considered the most powerful woman in the world? She was interviewed by Anne Will at the book premiere in the sold-out Deutsches Theater in Berlin. This was on live television for two hours, albeit only on Phoenix.

She turned 70 in July, and now is the time to look at her “two lives,” as she calls it: 35 years in a state that no longer exists, and 35 years as a Federal German politician in a country where she Became Chancellor in 2005. This had not happened before. If her life had been offered to a publisher as a fictional novel, it would probably have been rejected, she speculates in her foreword, in which her “Everything is possible” sentence can also be found. Everyone talks about their “we can do it” dictum. “For me, however, this sentence was banal,” she writes; it was simply an expression of her attitude, which could also be called “trust in God” “or simply the determination to solve problems.”

It also applies to the design of your book launch in DT. It started out very lame, then gradually became politically interesting. First you saw two empty chairs on the stage and you could hear Merkel reciting her foreword on an audio recording. Immediately it was back, the almost forgotten Merkel effect: spreading a soporific calm in order to control things. The tone in which she then read parts of her book live was even more monotonous, and since she read it a little too quickly, everything became even more unclear.

It was only through questioning Will that she became more lively and entertaining. “I had to learn to speak assertively in meetings and not to smile awkwardly when I was attacked,” she writes in the book about her rise in the Union, which one cannot imagine as bourgeois and authoritarian enough. In 1991, as a young Minister for Youth and Family on the board of the CDU/CSU, commenting on Paragraph 218 gave her a stiff neck, which she suffered from for several weeks, she recalls in “Freiheit”. And when she was sworn in as a minister in the Bundestag, she saw the pants suit she wore instead of a dress as a “test of courage.”

“What was the bigger problem on her way to the Chancellery, asked Anne Will in the DT, being an East German or a woman?” – “A woman,” replied Merkel, who today also likes to be described as a “reluctant feminist.” In the DT, with the exception of Kohl and Schäuble, she simply called the men she pushed aside “the middle management of the CDU” without elaborating on them or making fun of them. But Merkel claims that you can read between the lines in her book.

She repeatedly thanked her decades-long office manager, Beate Baumann, with whom she wrote it, that it came about at all. Baumann is considered the key advisor who transformed Merkel’s tendency to hover on the edge of boredom in search of the “majority,” as she likes to call it, into her strength. Always appear normal, as a decidedly neoliberal politician, in order to come across as polite, friendly and seemingly vague.

“We know that they exist, but the exact details are not known,” it said in “Spiegel” in 2009. Baumann does not appear in public and is “a phantom.” She was also backstage at the DT and heard the applause as Anne informed Will. Merkel mostly spoke in the we form when it came to the book, except that she was “in public” and Baumann was not. Maybe things are as relaxed and formal between them as at the supermarket checkout, when one cashier calls to the other: “Mrs Merkel, do you know how expensive that is?”

In fact, Merkel is a PR professional like few others. The physicist, who has a doctorate, began her political rise in political marketing in the late GDR: as press spokeswoman for the civil rights splinter party Democratic Awakening, which then became deputy government spokeswoman for the last GDR government under Lothar de Maizière, with whom she then went to Bonn, where he was pro forma minister “for special tasks”, although these were not intended for the ex-GDR politicians.

As a PR professional, Merkel chose a vague gray image of an unjust state for the GDR. In the book she calls the atmosphere there an “incarnation of tastelessness”: “Only imitations instead of real, natural materials, never joyful colors.” But on stage she emphasizes that the GDR was more than just this state, shaped by the people, who dwelt in the land, with their feasts and joys. A typical Merkel move that appeals to a pre-stable normality, reinforced by the claim that she “went into politics in 1990 because I was interested in the people.” Not their “values,” as the right would say, nor their “true needs,” as the left would say, but “the people” themselves; Who or what exactly is unfortunately unclear – it doesn’t matter, it sounds good at first.

In the GDR, she wrote that she, who grew up in the provinces in a pastor’s household that she carefully describes as “politically rather left-wing,” was unable to express herself without “scissors in her head” – and that continued in the Federal Republic of Germany when she was Chancellor. While she previously feared that she might somehow be too little GDR, she later wanted to avoid being accused of being too much GDR. And so this state lives on in the person of Angela Merkel. But today she can express herself better about it.

And she remains pragmatically confident. As her book’s narrative becomes more rigid and official the higher she climbs the political ladder, she became more animated during its presentation in the DT. Merkel also assured in November 2024 that her “friendly face” policy in refugee policy in 2015 was the right one. Likewise her decision to exclude Ukraine from NATO membership in 2008, because that made the world safer at the time. Although Will almost inquisitorially forced her to do so, she did not want to distance herself from her previous Russia policy, neither from the Minsk Agreement nor from the Normandy format.

Instead, she raised the question of how strange it was to automatically demand moral repentance for her past policies in light of today’s Russian war against Ukraine: “Why do I have to do this? Is that a seal of quality in itself?” That’s why she advocated military strength and “ready-made” diplomacy. Because if you don’t know what you want, you can’t negotiate.

“Everything is possible” – is that a threat or a promise? In the GDR, Angela Merkel wanted to preserve “an inner freedom” so as not to “wither away, become stultified,” she told Will. But why only talk about yesterday? That should also apply to tomorrow.

Angela Merkel (with Beate Baumann): Freedom. Memories 1954–2021. Kiepenheuer & Witsch, 736 p., hardcover, €42. This Thursday she will speak to Maybrit Illner on her talk show, 10:15 p.m., ZDF.