“Never explain, never complain,” is a maxim supposedly espoused by the British royal family. As Angela Merkel writes in her exhaustive yet surprisingly fast-paced autobiography, “Freedom,” it also became a phrase that she would repeat to herself during her 16 years as German chancellor, from 2005 until she stepped down in December 2021.
Readers of “Freedom” might be surprised that Merkel brings up this English dictum not in a discussion of the consequences of a fraught policy decision, though there are many in this 709-page book, but in response to the bullying microaggressions of the Russian president Vladimir V. Putin, who on one occasion in 2007 brought his Labrador to a press-filled meeting with Merkel, even after his staff was told that the chancellor had a phobia of dogs. (She was bitten by one in 1995.) “Stay calm, focus on the photographers, it won’t be for long,” she recalls telling herself.
The episode also serves as an unintended parable, perhaps, of the way Merkel’s staid disposition, cultivated through her political coming-of-age in Germany’s buoyant 1990s, seemed more and more ineffectual as Putin and other illiberal leaders proliferated across the continent.
Despite her favorite motto, “Freedom” does offer something like an explanation of the countless decisions that Merkel made in response to the series of crises that hit Germany during her long stay in office. Many observers have noted that, after the catastrophic demagoguery of the Third Reich, frankness and a steady hand have often been assets in German politics. She was so popular when she left office that the campaign to replace her was essentially a contest between candidates to see who could emulate her circumspect manner the best.
Yet, in the three years since, Germany’s reliance on increasingly authoritarian countries — Russia for energy, China as a trading partner — and, in a different but, especially now, worrisome sense, on the United States for defense, has left the nation in a vulnerable position.
Germans have begun to re-examine the Merkel era with a much more critical eye, and the formerly quiet chancellor has felt compelled to speak — re-emerging, after a long period of relative silence, in the pages of “Freedom” with the help of Beate Baumann, her co-author and closest collaborator since 1992. For the English edition of “Freedom,” Merkel, ever the consensus builder, has also employed no fewer than eight translators, who somehow manage not to get in one another’s way as they present the German leader’s innermost thoughts and feelings.
Merkel would have every reason to hope for a victory lap. Despite finishing her tenure in the middle of a pandemic, she left Germany with a recovering G.D.P. and a sense that she had weathered a turbulent era with relative fortitude. Her political ascent was also anything but inevitable, and in “Freedom” she rightfully emphasizes the many difficulties she encountered as a woman from East Germany. For two decades, she led the center-right Christian Democratic Union (C.D.U.), which was traditionally dominated by men from the West. In 2020, a party-affiliated retrospective described how she’d brought to politics “the ballast of her life in” the East and therefore “could not be a dyed-in-the-wool, fully socialized old-Federal-Republic C.D.U. creature.” By that point she’d been in the party for 30 years.
On the other hand, it’s also true that Merkel’s origins were partly responsible for her astounding political success. She represented, and became, a kind of big-tent figure to many Germans, encapsulating so much of the experience of living in a fractured country. Born in 1954 in West Germany to a Protestant pastor who decided to take a position at a church in what had become East Germany, Merkel grew up in a family whose religious beliefs made it suspicious in the eyes of the Socialist dictatorship. As a child she learned to “blow off steam” only within the safe space of her home, holding a “debriefing” with her mother when she came home for lunch.
Freedom was unthinkable, until it wasn’t. Merkel devotes a long section of her book to the rapid and unexpected events that followed November 1989. The fall of the Berlin Wall presented her, at 35, with a new life. “I expected many things,” she once said, “but not the gift of freedom before I reached retirement age.”
Much — indeed, too much — has been written about the outlook on the future in the ’90s in the West and Francis Fukuyama’s theory on the so-called “end of history.” But, given Germany’s past, a new class of German politicians bought into it with special tenacity: Gone was the importance of personal agency and charisma in politics. “History was bending toward liberal democracy,” the German diplomat Thomas Bagger later wrote. “It was deeply reassuring that greater but abstract forces of history would take care of its general direction.”
One gets a broad sense of this ethic from Merkel’s many descriptions of consensus building — which to some Germans appeared as a leadership style that lacked leadership — and her frequent plea that there is “no sensible alternative.” (The phrase would come back to haunt her when the new far-right party, Alternative for Germany, was founded in 2013.)
After the collapse of Communism, Merkel was eager to help build a new society. She became a deputy spokeswoman for the German government in 1990 and ascended quickly through a series of ministerial postings. Along the way she felled many of her male rivals and even some allies. In 1999, after a donation scandal, she published a legendary letter in the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung that helped force her former mentor, the C.D.U. chancellor Helmut Kohl, who reunited Germany, to step down. The move cleared her path to party leadership in 2000 and earned her a reputation as a brilliant but brutal political assassin. Of course, in “Freedom” she presents such actions as common sense and necessary. She became chancellor when her coalition won a majority in 2005.
Merkel’s account of dizzying world events is illuminating, if not entirely satisfying, as her optimism prevents her from fully grappling with the consequences of her choices. She stands by her decision to shut down all of the nuclear energy plants in Germany following the 2011 Fukushima disaster, though some experts now say this was a mistake. She also refuses to accept blame for Germany’s dependence on Russian gas, which has hamstrung its industry-heavy economy. (The Nord Stream 2 pipeline, she argues awkwardly, was never actually put to use, although this was no thanks to her.)
The controversy that Merkel credits most for motivating her to write a memoir at all is what she calls the “caesura in my chancellorship” — her decision in September 2015 to allow open passage into Germany for refugees fleeing mainly from Syria (Germany would register 1.1. million arrivals that year). Merkel reflects with special anguish on the famous phrase she uttered: “We can do this!” She is bewildered that this was misconstrued to mean that Germany would welcome all the world’s refugees. “If, at that time, someone had told me that ‘We can do this’ — those four commonplace words — would be used to reproach me for weeks, months and years to come,” Merkel writes, “I would have looked at them in disbelief and said: I beg your pardon?”
In regional elections earlier this year, the political fallout from further migrant crises and Germany’s fragile economy lifted the fortunes of the far right, especially in the country’s former East. Still, in “Freedom,” Merkel reaffirms her liberal ideal that moderation is a “precondition for the success of democratic parties.” She also conveys an unwavering commitment to the convictions by which she governed: the universality and inviolability of individual human dignity, and the boon of an open, interconnected world, built on shared prosperity. She may very well be right in her convictions; and yet being right might come as small solace to the millions of Germans facing the future with a deep sense of distress and not looking, as she writes toward the end, for “joy in our hearts” and “lightness of spirit.”
The post Angela Merkel Tells Us What She Really Thinks appeared first on New York Times.
