A much-maligned German chancellor punches back, in understated Merkel style

Once upon a time Germany’s Angela Merkel was feted as “the chancellor of the free world.” Now a growing chorus of critics at home and abroad is chastising the former leader for everything from a faltering economy to the rise of the far-right party Alternative for Germany. “Angela Who?,” the Economist recently asked, declaring: “Her record looks increasingly terrible.”
Does it? Or is Merkel being turned into a scapegoat for problems that are afflicting Western democracies more generally?
In her absorbing memoir, “Freedom,” Merkel seeks to set the record straight. Written with the assistance of her longtime aide Beate Baumann, Merkel’s book chronicles her improbable journey from living in communist East Germany to becoming a four-term chancellor of a reunified Germany. As chancellor, she encountered a welter of crises, ranging from the eurozone debt crisis to President Trump’s threats in his first term to exit NATO. Perhaps the surprising thing isn’t that she failed to accomplish more. It’s that she accomplished as much as she did.
Much of her steely tenacity and reserve can be ascribed to her unusual childhood. Merkel, who was born Angela Kasner on July 17, 1954, in Hamburg, traveled a few months later with her mother, Herlind, to Soviet-occupied East Germany. There they met up with her father, Horst, a Lutheran minister who had gallantly answered the church’s summons to serve its remaining parishioners in the officially atheistic East.
Merkel, who grew up in a rural parsonage called Waldhof, quickly learned to function in a kind of twilight zone of intentions and thoughts. Merkel’s parents explained that the ubiquity of the Stasi, or state security, meant that it was prudent to mask her true thoughts and feelings when talking on the telephone or to fellow pupils. “We learned,” she writes, “very early on to be careful.” In 1968, when Soviet troops marched into Czechoslovakia to crush the freedoms inaugurated by the Prague Spring, Merkel was despondent: “I can … still feel the blow to the stomach that the news dealt me. At fourteen I learned that there are few things worse in life than shattered hope.”
For all her caution, Merkel could occasionally stumble. In 1973, while attending an obligatory lecture on Marxism-Leninism as part of her coursework for a physics degree, she found herself observed and denounced (for ignoring the tedious talk and doing outside homework) by an informant sitting three rows above her. “Get out of here!” the incensed lecturer below shouted. As her classmates silently watched, a trembling Merkel slowly walked down the stairs of the room and left. “I will never forget that walk,” Merkel recalls. “It was humiliating — pure victimization.”
With the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, Merkel traded her position as a researcher at the Academy of Sciences in East Berlin to become national spokeswoman of a citizens’ initiative called Democratic Awakening. After it merged with the conservative Christian Democratic Party, her rise was meteoric — much to the chagrin, if not fury, of many of her male colleagues in the traditionally patriarchal party. Some, it seems, had confused her self-effacing personality with a lack of ambition.
Thanks to the patronage of chancellor Helmut Kohl, she was appointed minister for women and youth in 1991. She went on to win election as party general secretary in 1998, the first female leader of the Christian Democrats. A year later she created a furor by publishing an op-ed in the country’s most prominent newspaper, the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, decrying Kohl’s acceptance of millions of Deutschmarks in illegal party donations. With Kohl sidelined, she became chancellor in 2005.
From the outset, she sparred with Russian leader Vladimir Putin, who had been stationed in Dresden as a KGB agent and was fluent in German. She first encountered him in June 2000, when he visited Berlin, but didn’t really interact with him until 2006 in the Siberian city of Tomsk, where they discussed economic ties. After the meetings concluded, Putin took her to the airport and pointed to ramshackle wooden houses along the way, stating that the people living there had little money and could be as easily misled as the Ukrainians who, he claimed, had been bought by the American government during the Orange Revolution in 2004. “I will never allow anything like this to happen in Russia,” a paranoid Putin vowed.
Merkel was not blind to Putin’s authoritarian proclivities. Given the widespread popularity in Germany of the détente with the East that began in the late 1960s, she had little choice but to continue it. Her critics who expected otherwise are sorely mistaken: The notion that she could have waved a magic wand and dispelled overnight the geopolitical threat Russia posed to Europe is a pip edream. Merkel herself notes that the conviction that Ukraine and Georgia could have been safely integrated into NATO in the mid-2000s is “illusory.” Even today, Berlin, for historical and strategic reasons, remains wary of provoking Moscow.
If Merkel has received brickbats for her supposedly emollient approach to Russia, she also has been drubbed for her welcome of more than a million refugees from the Middle East in 2015 with the statement “Wir schaffen das” — we will get it done. Had Merkel refused to pursue a liberal asylum policy, however, Germany would have been denounced internationally for shirking its obligation since the Holocaust to provide succor to the beleaguered. It’s also the case that Germany is experiencing demographic decline and that the refugees have mostly been successfully integrated. That the Alternative Party for Germany has profited politically from attacking immigration cannot be laid solely at Merkel’s doorstep. The current Social Democratic chancellor, Olaf Scholz, also is incurring a good deal of hostility on the immigration front.
The real blunder that Merkel committed was to champion the abolition of nuclear power plants after the Fukushima disaster in 2011. According to Merkel, “We can achieve climate targets without nuclear power, and achieve technological success while giving other countries the courage to follow our example.” Not so. In 2023 Germany’s cabinet approved temporarily reactivating coal-fired plants to ensure sufficient energy for the winter months.
More acute are Merkel’s assessments of her foreign counterparts. She notes, for example, that when she first met Trump at the White House in March 2017, he queried her extensively about Putin. “In the years that followed,” she disdainfully writes, “I received the distinct impression he was captivated by politicians with autocratic and dictatorial traits.”
Merkel never was. As the only modern German chancellor to depart office voluntarily, she exemplifies restraint and sobriety, observing in her epilogue that “true freedom is not directed only toward one’s own advantage; it has inhibitions and scruples.” At a moment when authoritarianism is on the rise, her memoir could not be timelier.
Jacob Heilbrunn is the editor of the National Interest and the author of “America Last: The Right’s Century-Long Romance With Foreign Dictators.”