What is it about her?

Merkel spectacularly fails to make her case; maybe I could do it for her

I first met Angela Merkel in 1990 when she was a young adviser to the GDR’s short-lived democratic government. I’ve followed her closely since and, as readers know, I have lived the German story intensely. I wanted to let the dust settle before penning my thoughts about her memoirs. Here is my essay on her, in my monthly column for Foreign Policy. You can click that link or read it below.

When he read the piece yesterday, a senior political figure here in Berlin sent me the following text: ‘her laconicism invites the view there’d be a readership for a more colourful version. Have you considered..?!’ Who knows. (I have to get my current, non-Germany book done first). I certainly think, in amongst the present orgy of Germany-bashing and German-self-loathing (which certain Brits can’t get enough of) there is another story to tell. But not now. Not yet. Meantime, let me know any thoughts.

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When Angela Merkel stepped down in December 2021 after four terms in office, many Germans wondered how on earth they would cope without her. An entire generation had grown up knowing only this reserved woman from the east as their chancellor. She had brought them prosperity, something they took for granted, and stability, something they regarded as indispensable.

Weeks later, as Olaf Scholz and his three-party coalition were still finding their footing, Russian President Vladimir Putin invaded Ukraine. All the assumptions that voters had made about their country and the world came crashing down. And so, soon after, did Merkel’s reputation.

Three years into her retirement, having said almost nothing about her record, Merkel has finally had her say. Her much awaited and heavily marketed autobiography, titled Freedom, hit the shelves simultaneously in dozens of languages in November and revealed … very little. It is a stunning disappointment.

Celebrity interviewers from several countries were given 30-minute television and radio slots to speak with Merkel. Selected newspapers were given extracts. Yet no matter how hard they tried, the best they got were a smattering of predictable thoughts about U.S. President-elect Donald Trump and a few other crumbs from the table. As for the book itself, some of the episodes that Merkel recalls are tamer than those already in the public domain.

Despite the slim pickings, these 700 pages of recollections do provide some insights for historians and political scientists. The tome is not an entirely fruitless endeavor for the general reader. It provides an insider’s guide to most of the major global events during Merkel’s 16 years at the top, with sometimes amusing snapshots about her interlocutors.

The tensest negotiations are recounted in a contemporaneous style: She describes her refusal to loosen the European Union’s and Germany’s fiscal rules surrounding the euro, to the consternation of the Greeks, as well as her refusal to give early and immediate NATO membership to Ukraine, to the frustration of the Americans.

In these cases and more, however, Merkel provides only the most superficial explanations for her actions—she confines herself to saying that she feared the demise of the single currency and that she feared that Russia (a nuclear power, as she keeps on repeating) would respond violently.

Her relationship to Putin has long been considered the most complex. As I wrote in my book Why the Germans Do It Better, she believed that she understood his mindset better than any other world leader could. That was by virtue not just of language (both his German and her Russian were fluent), but also by shared communist upbringings.

Apart from letting it be known that the Kremlin leader has a penchant for Radeberger beer and—in a needy “don’t you know who I am” kind of way—likes to keep his interlocutors waiting, she reveals nothing else of particular interest. The infamous January 2007 incident of Putin bringing his labrador Koni into the room during a meeting, despite reportedly knowing about her phobia of dogs, has been told many times—and, in fact, is more sparsely detailed in her account.

Given that Merkel describes Putin as a pathological liar and says that she has never been under any illusions about his obsession with grievance as well as his contempt for democracy and the rule of law, then why did she cling to the belief that mutual economic dependency (the two Nord Stream gas pipelines being the most egregious case) would make him behave better?

“Two decades of mutual encounters lay behind us, an era during which Putin, and with him Russia, had changed from an initial position of openness to the West to one of alienation from us, culminating in a total hardening of its stance,” Merkel insists in the new book. “With hindsight, I still believe in spite of everything I was right to make a point, to the end of my tenure, of preserving our contact with Russia.”

Merkel gives only the most perfunctory answer to the central question of why her accommodation of Putin, and pursuit of cooperation with him, was a defensible policy—she suggests that to have done anything else would have enraged him further. Plus, it was good for German business; plus, it provided cheap energy, and nobody in her cabinet was arguing for any other approach. Is that the extent of the analysis, after all the time that she has had to ponder further a question that has become her country’s most vexing?

At least as egregious is her unwillingness to engage in discussion of the big decisions that she took—or didn’t take—on the economic front. Germany’s lamentable digital record, its refusal to diversify and modernise much of its industry, the failures of the auto sector, and the over dependency on trade with China barely merit much more than throwaway lines.

Perhaps I’m being too harsh. If so, it is because I have always held Merkel up as an exemplar. Even when her reputation went from hero to zero, I still regarded her type of rationalist, deliberative politics as better than all the others that were on offer around the world.

And I still do. Indeed, as the narrative sweeps the reader from one global crisis to another, almost on a weekly basis, you understand better just what Merkel faced and how so many of the other leaders came to depend on her calm.

Of all the challenges that she confronted, the one that—by Merkel’s own admission—defined her chancellorship was the influx of refugees in 2015. Curiously, she devotes an extended section to quibbling with journalists’ use of her phrase wir schaffen das, “we can do it.” She writes that this was not meant to be interpreted as a catch-all statement of national self-confidence.

Yet Germany did do it. It displayed an enviable mix of compassion and organization. Its record of assimilation of refugees—and the proportion who are in employment or training—is far better than it is portrayed in the orgy of retrospective denunciation in the increasingly fickle media. In any case, as she points out herself, what else was she supposed to do? Germany did not have legal standing to shut its open borders; nor, for reasons that do not require spelling out, could it build camps.

The rise of the far right and population flows from poorer to richer countries are here to stay. And they cannot be reduced back to this one moment in history. In my view, irrespective of the clamor of post hoc denunciation, 2015 was Merkel’s finest hour.

As I write this, I wonder whether I’m doing a more passionate job than she did in defending her legacy—or at least, those parts of her legacy that deserve defending.

Why, I wonder, does she manage to be so pedestrian in her attempts at explaining her actions? One prosaic explanation is the book’s style—it has all the hallmarks of a ghostwritten narrative, ironed out incessantly to remove any creases, thereby removing passion.

Another possibly more interesting explanation is that this was Merkel’s chosen approach to shaping the narrative. She quotes the late British queen’s nostrum, “never complain, never explain.”

Maybe it has more to do with psychology and her early political life. This is where her memoir is at its most revealing—the young, unassuming woman scientist from the communist East Germany maneuvering her way to the top job, to the consternation of her predecessor Helmut Kohl and the physically domineering men around him. Once there, she had to put up with incessant, if low-level, condescension. Perhaps she has not been able to shed the restraint that she felt required adopt throughout.

The Merkel memoir and the Merkel record are cast into a particularly sharp light with the advent of a renewed Trump administration and his second and more dangerous wave of populism.

In December 2016, as he prepared to depart the White House, then-U.S. President Barack Obama went on a short farewell tour. Over dinner in Berlin, Merkel told him she was thinking hard about standing down. I was told by her close advisors (and have subsequently written it several times) that he begged her to stay. With Trump preparing to enter office, the Brexit movement gaining steam, and France’s Marine Le Pen on the horizon, Europe needed a grown-up in the room. (Strangely, her version of the story is more limited in its recollection).

Whatever Obama actually said, Merkel concluded that she needed to carry on. And when she did finally leave, she recounts the Nina Hagen song about East Germany, “They Forgot the Colour Film,” that she requested as one of the songs for the military parade that marked her departure, and the meatballs and potato salad and sparkling wine that she shared with friends before being driven away into retirement.

It was this final period of office, between 2016 and 2021, that would be her undoing. This is the era that is now retrospectively so denounced: the continued insistence on the Nord Stream pipeline, the continued line of communication to Putin, the continued trade dependence with China, and the continued inability to meet NATO defence spending targets.

Had she left office at the time of the previous election, her place in history would have been altogether different. So might have been any book she had chosen to write.