Top Quotes: “The Chancellor: The Remarkable Odyssey of Angela Merkel” — Kati Marton
Introduction
“”On the first day of school, Merkel continues, offering a window into the complexity of growing up a pastor’s child in atheist East Germany, “students were required to stand up and state their parents’ profession.” She recalled classmates advising her, “Just say ‘driver,”” driver being a more proletarian-friendly profession than pastor – and, in German, the two words sound nearly identical.
“Pastor,” she answered the teacher.”
“Merkel does not need to explain to this audience how dangerous candor could be in East Germany. Even children had to attempt to pass unnoticed by the all-seeing state. The Stasi’s penetration of society was deeper and wider than that of its predecessor, the Gestapo. The Ministry for State Security had 173,000 employees, including informants, compared with 7,000 in the Third Reich. There was one informer for every 63 people.”
“Anything beyond her official role, Merkel has made plain, is none of the world’s business. Such secrecy is now an article of faith within the chancellor’s entourage. There have been no leaks, no tell-all memoirs written by even former staff or confidants during Merkel’s sixteen years as chancellor. Her exceptionally loyal aides are fiercely protective of the woman whom most of them have served for a decade and a half. “You guys still all here?” US president Barack Obama marvelled, seeing Merkel’s team dur ing a 2016 trip to Berlin, virtually unchanged since he took office in 2008.
After several decades, Germans are not tired of her image, her voice, her looming persona – because Merkel does not loom. Despite knowing little about their chancellor’s private life, other than that she comes across as leading a life not so different from their own, Germans thrice reelected her, each time by a comfortable margin. Once in a great while, they might see her dressed up for the Wagner Festival in Bayreuth, Germany, but they are equally likely to see her doing her own grocery shopping.”
“At a moment of global political and social rupture, no leader on the world stage has protected the post-World War II liberal democratic order as fiercely she did, confronting aggressive authoritarians from Putin to Trump. She transformed Germany into the leader of Europe – not just an economic leader but a moral one too and into an immigrant nation by accepting one million Middle Eastern refugees.
How was this triple outsider – an East German, a scientist, and a woman of that rare European country to never have a queen – able to achieve all this? How did a politician with rhetoric as plain as her appearance gain such power and longevity in this digital age, with our ever-shrinking attention span? Intelligence and hard work are part of the explanation, of course. In a country where grandparents still recall torchlight parades and crowds that roared a demagogue’s name in unison, Merkel’s bland speaking style has also often been an advantage.
When the head of the World Trade Organization, Pascal Lamy, once pleaded with Merkel for “a bit more poetry” in her speeches, Merkel shot back, “I’m not a poet.” Her calm, analytical approach, developed during her years studying physics, allowed her to take a remarkably long-term view of governing. “I think things through starting at the end — from the desired outcome, and work backward …. What matters is what will be achieved in two years, not what we read in the papers tomorrow,” she has said. Nor did she engage in the politics of insinuation or character assassination — or taken the bait of those who do.”
“On many sensitive issues, Merkel succeeded by working sideways, indirectly and without calling attention to herself. The fact that she was a divorced Protestant from the East living with her male lover when she rose to lead the center-right, Christian, culturally conservative, and mostly male Christian Democratic Union (CDU) of Germany is testament to her skill at keeping the spotlight off her persona. With a very light touch, she transformed Germany into a far more liberal society. After appointing Guido Westerwelle, the country’s first openly gay foreign minister in 2009, she publicly praised his husband and their love story yet without explicitly declaring her support for marriage equality. When Germany did vote on marriage equality eight years later, Merkel advised her conservative party to vote its conscience rather than toe the party line against marriage equality. Thus, without speeches or policy statements from the chancellor, marriage equality became the law of the land.
She used the same subtle tactics to expand opportunities for women.”
“Part of her political genius comes in recognizing good ideas wherever they originate. “She’s fulfilled her rival parties’ programs on energy, on child care, on marriage equality and women’s rights,” said Michael Naumann, the former Social Democratic Party (SPD) culture minister. This also serves as a clever way of neutralizing potential opponents. “Angela is very skilled at appropriating any issue as soon as it gains traction,” said Gauck.”
“It is not that Angela Merkel lacks a robust ego. If she did, she would not have pursued a career in politics. When asked once who her role model in life was, Merkel answered, “Myself, as often as possible.””
“During her entire adult life, Merkel has been sustained by her near-photographic memory, her trained scientific ability to break down problems to their component parts, and her ravenous appetite for work.”
Childhood
“Well over six feet tall, the sharp-featured twenty-eight-year-old was one of the few to answer Hamburg bishop Hans-Otto Wölber’s call to service in the underserved Soviet zone.”
“Angela celebrated her thirtieth birthday newly divorced and living in a barely furnished apartment on Templiner Strasse (Street) in Prenzlauer Berg, a neighborhood of gutted, war-damaged buildings occupied primarily by illegal squatters — Merkel among them. Friends helped her“break in” to and fix up an abandoned flat.”
“Unknown to Merkel, her lab partner and confidant, Frank Schneider, had been assigned by the Stasi to inform on her. And while Schneider rarely had anything political to report, he did seem to take a salacious interest in the young divorcée’s love life. “Sometimes, when I picked her up for work, one of her lovers greets me at the door, in a bathrobe. Her love affairs seldom last more than six months,” Schneider informed the Stasi on August 30, 1980.”
“For several decades after the war, West Germany was similarly reluctant to confront its darkest history. Shocking as this sounds now, the country’s first broad exposure to the Holocaust came from a fictional American television drama, Holocaust. As the ABC News correspondent in West Germany, I reported from Bonn in 1977 that the show “has been nothing short of a thunderbolt… an American TV series, seen by twenty million Germans, provoked a long-overdue national debate on the past. Foreign observers, this reporter included, have been astonished at the overwhelming reaction to the broadcast. As one German put it, “I don’t feel personal guilt for all those things that I had nothing to do with. What I do feel now is shame.’”
Politics
“Merkel’s entrance into politics in December 1989 was low-key. Many East Germans who had kept their heads down for forty years of Communist oppression following twelve years of Nazi terror were now eager to form or join new political parties, Merkel among them. “I knew that the time had come to become active politically,” she said. Bored in her dead-end laboratory job, she was no doubt exhilarated by the prospect of helping to shape the future of her newly liberated country, combined with a more adventuresome life for herself. She’d had her fill of socialist experiments, so the West German Social Democratic Party was out. “They were too ideological for me,” she said. And, though she would never say so publicly, choosing a more right-leaning party may have been another way of declaring her independence from her socialist father.”
“Noticing sealed crates in the corner of the DA’s modest office, the scientist rolled up her sleeves and assembled the party’s first computers. Observing her, the neophyte East German politicians were impressed and offered her a seat at the table. “Angela said she worked for the Academy of Sciences. She never mentioned that she had a doctorate. At first she only listened.” Apelt recalled. When she returned a few days later, she joined in the conversation. Angela Merkel was smitten by politics.
Her life in the sciences was over. “I had been a good physicist, but not an outstanding one who would ever win a Nobel Prize,” she reflected later. The comment is revealing: she wanted to pursue only a field in which she could reach the very top and was prepared to wait decades to get there. Yet her years in science had not been wasted: “My thinking was shaped by a scientific education,” she would say. “I try to bring rational thinking to any debate.” This surprised some men who like to say that women aren’t capable of this.”
By the spring of 1990, Merkel had formally resigned from her position at the academy to work full-time in politics. Having observed her methodical approach and calm in chaos, Apelt asked Angela to be the DA’s spokesperson — dealing with the press, shaping the party’s messaging, and briefing its leaders on press coverage.”
“During the period following reunification, Angela Merkel benefitted enormously from being a woman from the East, at a time when Chancellor Helmut Kohl needed to fold both categories of people into the leadership of the new Federal Republic of Germany. Very few other East German politicians were female, and none were as single minded, ambitious, and canny as Angela Merkel. Her political rise would be fueled by self-control, strategic thinking, and, when necessary, passive aggression.
Luck, too, played a role in her success, but good fortune always found her well prepared. Merkel would have three East German mentors, all male, who each fell victim to rumors of previous Stasi connections or corruption. Their demise cleared her path as the Ossi best positioned for a bright political future in the West.”
“Unlike most politicians, Angela spoke to the press with scientific precision and in easy-to-understand sentences. “She hardly used adjectives and said things as they were, without flourishes. She presented twice as much information as her colleagues,” praised de Maizière. A scientist who spoke plainly was indeed a treasure, and the fact that she crammed her briefings with a great deal of information was also a plus, particularly for an East German public hungry for facts.”
“On January 18, 1991, only a year after she’d sauntered into the cluttered offices of a political start-up in her East Berlin neighborhood and offered to assemble the computers, Angela Merkel took her place in the Cabinet of Helmut Kohl, chancellor of a newly united Federal Republic of Germany. He had appointed her as minister for women and youth — ”two subjects Angela really did not care about at all,” de Maizière noted wryly.”
“In May 1993 she found a way to make clear that she was fundamentally, if quietly, a feminist. In a book review of Susan Faludi’s Backlash: The Undeclared War Against American Women for a mainstream German woman’s journal, she wrote:
As long as women aren’t represented in leadership positions, in the media, in political parties, in interest groups, in business, as long as they don’t belong to the ranks of top fashion designers, and top chefs, role models for women will be determined by men…. What are my chances of getting married if I’m in a leadership position? What are my chances of having a miscarriage? How will my children suffer if I try to combine career and family? These questions are discussed time and again using negative examples that discourage women. It’s the attempt by men to keep positions they currently occupy. In my opinion, equality means the equal right for women to shape their own lives.
There is nothing ambiguous about this: Angela Merkel was a feminist. Nevertheless, she would face criticism over the years from those who felt she was insufficiently committed to the advancement of women.”
“”I simply stated that… many parents had the impression that they couldn’t send their children out to play, that people were afraid, and demanded action.” Her tears of frustration shocked the Cabinet into action, passing a set of tough clean air regulations. Her outburst, born of exhaustion and frustration, was a human reaction to the Cabinet’s evasive and rather belittling behavior — endlessly dispatching her on useless public relations exercises — but it worked. It was, however, the last time she was seen crying in the Cabinet.”
“He remarked to the tabloid Bild, “Apparently there is a female minister of the Christian faith who is living in sin.” Merkel did not take kindly to the cardinal’s public scolding. “I drove to his place and explained to him why I believe it is important to be careful if you’ve been married once,” she said. She turned his attack to her advantage as if she, not the cardinal, was the Lord’s chastening servant.
And yet on December 30, 1998, the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, a high-circulation daily newspaper, published the following item, as terse as the couple themselves: “We have married, Angela Merkel and Joachim Sauer.” The low-key ceremony reflected the couple’s obsession with privacy, without even her parents or the groom’s two sons in attendance. “We got married just when no one was expecting it anymore,” Merkel said. Acting when no one is expecting it is her way. In doing so, Merkel, well aware that Germany remains a socially conservative society, cleared a potential obstacle toward her next step up the political ladder.”
“In 1998 Helmut Kohl was defeated in his fifth run for chancellor after sixteen years in power. The following year, he was caught in a financial scandal involving allegations of illegal and anonymous cash donations to his campaigns, stretching back to 1982. Though the Social Democrat Gerhard Schröder was the new chancellor, Kohl, still the powerful leader of the Christian Democrats, was stonewalling investigations by withholding his donors’ names. It was “a matter of honor,” he claimed.
Angela Merkel was by now a familiar figure in the CDU leadership, and, as a recent minister and member of the Bundestag, a fairly well-known politician. But both the party and Germany itself were about to learn that she was not exactly the accommodating Mädchen many had assumed her to be.
On December 2 Germans awoke to find a story headlined “Helmut Kohl’s Actions Have Damaged the Party” in the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, under Angela Merkel’s byline. “The King Is Dead, Long Live the Queen” might have served as an alternate headline. The article was as much of a shock to Merkel’s former mentor and his likeliest heir, Wolfgang Schäuble, as it was to the entire German political class. Calling the scandal a “ragedy,” Merkel made clear that her loyalty was not to one man but to the future of the party. “The time of Party Chairman Kohl is irreversibly over,” she proclaimed coolly. Merkel implied audaciously that she was doing Kohl a favor by relieving him of the burden of power during his advanced years, writing, “The party needs to learn to walk, must dare to take on its political opponents without its Old Warhorse.”
No one else in the party had had the courage to put down the “Old Warhorse” and thereby rescue the Christian Democrats. “Kohl’s attitude was very David and Goliath,” said Volker Schlöndorff, “as in, ‘How dare this street kid throw a stone at me?’” Asked if she wasn’t a little afraid of taking on such a daunting figure, Merkel replied with feigned incomprehension: “Why should I be afraid of him? We worked together for eight years.” Her message: there are no giants among us, just politicians.”
“Germany has a parliamentary system of government, with citizens voting for the legislators who will represent them in Berlin; those legislators then choose the chancellor. The party with the most votes forms a coalition with the next highest vote-getting party or parties, in complicated negotiations for distributing ministries in the Cabinet that can take weeks and sometimes even months. On election night in 2005, Schröder’s and Merkel’s parties were in a virtual tie — neither had won the necessary majority to be declared chancellor without forming a coalition with the other. The election was simply too close to call. Following a German ritual for candidates, they met on TV that evening to submit to a journalistic grilling before setting off to try to form a co-alition. Merkel, baking under the hot klieg lights, looked drawn and exhausted. Next to her, Schröder, filling every inch of his armchair, assured the audience boldly, “I will continue to be chancellor. Do you really believe that my party would take up an offer from Merkel to talk?” his expression midway between gloat and sneer. Just then, the camera panned to Merkel, as an almost imperceptible smile began to lift her sagging features. Keeping silent, she let Schröder bluster on. This is her power move: letting an alpha male keep talking and waiting patiently as he self-destructs.
Finally, Merkel leaned into her microphone and said calmly: “Quite simply, you did not win today.” Turningfrom the raging Schröder to the audience, she added, “I promise, we will not turn democratic norms upside down.” The audience erupted in applause. Merkel allowed herself a smile of satisfaction. She had delivered on her promise to herself that, one day, she would, “put Schröder in a corner.” In the process, she had made history.
Two months later, on November 22, Angela Merkel was sworn in as Germany’s first female chancellor.”
The Chancellor
“Astonishingly, Merkel’s husband was absent from this history-making ceremony. Sauer was, as usual, busy in the laboratory with his own work as quantum chemist.”
“The chancellor of the Federal Republic is not a powerful executive. Power in the Federal Republic — especially in domestic matters — is deliberately dispersed among the sixteen Länder (states) and a robust Constitutional Court. The chancellor thus rules mostly by consensus and persuasion, with far more leeway in foreign affairs than in domestic policy.”
“None of her close aides have ever visited her home, a rent-controlled apartment in a fairly nondescript building minutes from the chancellery.”
“On a flight to inspect German troops deployed in Afghanistan in December 2010, the government Airbus’s electronic warning system — intended to confuse a potential attack — set off flares on the aircraft’s tail as it approached the war zone. As the pilot took evasive action, the plane juddered, smoke from its defensive missiles blowing through the open gun hatches. When all clear was announced, the chancellor turned to her military escort and asked coolly, “So, what other entertainment do you have planned for me?””
“After making a brief effort at being the “First Gentleman,” Sauer would soon decide he was not cut out for the role. Perhaps he made the decision after his state visit to Vienna, Austria, in early 2006, when protocol dictated that he sit behind his wife during a concert. After that humbling event, on the rare occasion when Sauer chose to accompany his wife on official visits, he mostly kept his own schedule.”
“Stationed as a KGB officer in Dresden, a mere two-hour train ride from Berlin, thirty-seven-year-old Vladimir Putin did not share Merkel’s euphoria on the night the wall came down. “When the Berlin Wall fell, it was clear this was the end. We had this horrible feeling that the country that had almost become our home would soon cease to exist,” Putin’s then wife, Lyudmila, said. Putin had spent four productive and contented years as a Soviet spy in East Germany’s second largest city. Once a glittering center of arts and music, Dresden was rich territory for KGB agent recruitment — aided by the fact that it was the one East German town that did not receive Western television. The Allies’ devastating bombing raids of this formerly magnificent Baroque city three months before Germany’s surrender in World War I had created lingering resentment toward the West, including West Germany, which was seen as America’s “puppet.” The East German regime deliberately left the gaping ruin of the great domed Frauenkirche Lutheran church in the city’s heart as a memorial “to the tens of thousands of dead, and an inspiration to the living in their struggle against imperialist barbarism.””
“Vladimir Putin, once a proud standard-bearer of the humiliated Soviet Union, had learned a lesson he would not soon forget. Unchecked demonstrations and sudden eruptions of freedom can topple even the world’s most heavily armed empire.”
“[She still lives in] the same neighborhood where, three decades earlier, Angela had been a “squatter” — where, on her thirtieth birthday, her father had noted bitterly, “Well, Angela, you certainly haven’t come very far.””
“She astonished reporters following her around by drawing diagrams of soccer maneuvers and would soon invite coach Jurgen Klinsmann to her office to explain why the Germans had lost so disastrously to the Italians in the semifinals. With statistics, graphs, and charts, the country’s highest-ranking soccer fan proposed a training plan for the speechless coach.”
“In 2014, when Merkel turned sixty, the former physicist treated friends and colleagues to her idea of a good time: inviting historian Jürgen Osterhammel to deliver a forty-five-minute lecture on how Europe and Asia perceived each other during the nineteenth century. (Merkel, who had broken her pelvis while cross-country skiing the year before, had spent part of her recovery reading Osterhammel’s 1,600-page tome on the subject.) Hundreds of CDU party faithful crowded the cavernous Konrad Adenauer Haus headquarters, listening patiently and awaiting cocktails. “You could see on their faces that they had trouble following what the academic was saying. The impact of expressions like ‘temporal horizon,’ ‘speed of interdependence,’ or ‘composite analysis’ was tough on them,” Der Spiegel magazine reported.
Merkel also looks for ways to squeeze in conversation with other high-achieving women, even during tightly scheduled official trips. The pleasure she takes in their company was on display at a breakfast held in 2015 at Blair House, the president’s official guesthouse, across Pennsylvania Avenue from the White House. At Merkel’s request, the event included a wide array of women she wanted to meet, including Supreme Court Justices Sonia Sotomayor and Elena Kagan, Senators Susan Collins and Dianne Feinstein, and philanthropist Melinda Gates. “We had a very personal conversation around the table.””
“In Syria, a revolution that began with peaceful chanting and marches calling for an end to forty years under the brutal repression of the Assads had taken a dark turn. For the past two years, the Syrian army, backed by Putin, fired on marchers with live ammunition and deployed barbaric “barrel bombs” — shrapnel filled containers dropped from helicopters — on neighborhoods in Damascus and Aleppo, forcing hundreds of thousands to flee. Then, in August 2013, a devastating chemical weapons attack in the suburbs of Damascus killed more than 1,400 Syrian civilians as they slept.”
“A laid-off Greek carpenter won’t find a job as easily in Germany as one in Texas might land in Minnesota. Americans may think little of moving from state to state in search of work; Europeans are frequently tied to their local economies by language, culture, and history — meaning that there is no easy way to reduce a member country’s unemployment rate.”
“Ukraine, the second largest country in all of Europe, has long been the tragic victim of geography. Both Hitler and Stalin aimed to subdue and exploit this region on the Continent’s periphery for its fertile farmlands; rich natural resources, including iron ore, natural gas, and petroleum; and strategic significance straddling East and West. Indeed, more died in Ukraine when Hitler and Stalin were in power than anywhere else in Europe. For Hitler, Ukraine’s large Jewish population made the region an ideal target for mass murder. Before him, Stalin aimed to bring the second most populous part of the Soviet Union to heel by imposing collectivization and industrialization, robbing peasants of their own produce and turning them into beggars — and then cadavers — in the twentieth century’s second-worst man-made famine. (The worst came later in Maoist China.) Rafael Lemkin, a Polish lawyer who coined the word genocide, called Ukraine “the classic example of Soviet genocide.”
After the fall of the Soviet Empire in 1991, Ukraine, its land and population bled dry by Hitler and Stalin, and with virtually no democratic traditions to fall back on, struggled for decades under various corrupt or semicorrupt mostly former Communist leaders until 2014, when it seemed that at last its fortunes might improve. But that was when Putin began to aggressively assert old Russian claims over this long-suffering country.”
“The trouble began in February, when Ukraine was on the brink of signing a wide-ranging political and economic agreement with the European Union that would open up favorable trade with the rest of the Continent, and pull Ukraine closer westward politically while holding out the prospect of eventual EU membership. Determined to block the deal, Putin pressed Ukraine’s corrupt president, Viktor Yanukovych, to instead join Russia’s own Eurasia Economic Union — a political, military, and economic alliance he’d established as a countermeasure to both the EU and China. Assuming he would be able to buy off the restive population with a $15 billion check, Putin promised to bail out Ukraine’s faltering economy. In return, the country was to withdraw from the EU trade deal.
But events took an unexpected turn. Fearless, youthful demonstrators flooded the ancient streets of Kiev, demanding, “Yanukovych must go!” Over the next days, the crowds swelled and grew bolder, and their calls to end the corruption that had long sapped their country’s future grew louder. They demanded that Yanukovych sign the pro-European Union treaty, as he had promised. Putin observed these protests, reminiscent of the traumatic events he’d witnessed in Dresden in 1989, with alarm; mob rule was spreading within a territory he deemed Russia’s “sphere of interest.” His worst nightmare seemed to have jolted him awake.
On February 18 Yanukovych’s troops opened fire on a demonstration in Kiev’s Maidan square, killing a hundred protestors and turning a peaceful protest into an uprising.
Three days later, unable to control the crowds and fearing that his fate would be akin to those of other despised dictators, Yanukovych fled to sanctuary in Russia. Hearing this news, the Maidan demonstrators erupted in wild cheers. Two observers from outside the country — both personally familiar with the mechanics of authoritarianism — understood the significance of the power vacuum that Yanukovych’s departure had created in Ukraine. Angela Merkel recognized its peril; Vladimir Putin grasped the opportunity.
Putin moved first.”
“The weak Ukrainian armed forces were caught flat-footed. Years of neglect and corruption had stripped down the military to a poorly equipped force of thirty thousand — no match for a modern Russian military invasion; the Yanukovych government had even put the building that housed the Defense Ministry up for sale.”
“In late August 2015 Merkel announced — without warning — a change of policy. “Germany will not turn away refugees.” she said, defying the EU’s Dublin Regula-tion and her usual caution. “If Europe fails on the question of refugees, then it won’t be the Europe we wished for,” she continued, calling on the twenty-six other EU members to offer asylum to greater numbers of refugees, each according to its capacity. “I don’t want to get into a competition in Europe of who can treat these people the worst,” she announced. As the number of people crossing the Mediterranean in rickety vessels or trekking across the Balkans toward Germany grew, the burden, she made plain, was not on the refugees who were seeking help but on us. No other leader in Europe or elsewhere spoke with such moral clarity about the West’s obligation toward the casualties of its never-ending wars.”
“Reminiscent of the night the Berlin Wall came down without fanfare or preparation, Germany suddenly allowed thousands of migrants into the country. They came mostly from the Middle East, the majority fleeing the savage Syrian civil war, but also many from Iraq and Afghanistan — fleeing wars the United States had started and largely abandoned. Germany’s border was open, and the usual sorting out of migrants versus political refugees was like the rules regarding numbers allowed in — overwhelmed by their numbers. Unlike in 1989, when Angela went to the sauna, this time Merkel was in charge. She did not order Germany’s borders to close when up to seven thousand refugees arrived each night during September and October. By late fall, two hundred thousand refugees had applied for German asylum, and some eight hundred thousand more were to come by year’s end. Nor did the chancellor sugarcoat to her countrymen the situation they faced collectively, calling this “our greatest challenge since reunification.”
And yet, Angela Merkel was by no means alone in welcoming the refugees to Germany. When their trains pulled into the gleaming Munich station, exhausted men, women, and children were greeted by a sea of signs that read “Welcome to Germany” held aloft by cheering citizens lining the platforms. Volunteers offered warm drinks and flowers. Soon they would help convert schools and stores into dormitories, while others put up posters with offers to mentor young refugees or organize language or music classes.”
“It was a massive effort for the government to organize on the fly: transforming vacant hangars, school gymnasiums, and abandoned factories into shelters and then transporting thousands to their new “homes” throughout the land, all the while keeping a meticulous record of who was sent where and their particular circumstances. And they kept coming. De Maizière, Merkel’s longest-serving minister, along with Ursula von der Leyen, left the Cabinet in 2018 but still serves in the Bundestag, “No one had to sleep on a park bench.””
“Thousands of volunteers stepped up to help a vast new bureaucracy that adapted with relative speed. Hundreds of thousands of refugees, including Reem Sahwil and her family, were granted permanent asylum. By late 2018, three years into Germany’s new refugee policy, fully half of the eight hundred thousand new arrivals were either employed or in job training programs. All newcomers were required to learn German, attend schools if they were of school age, and could not choose their place to settle in Germany. Merkel was determined to avoid the dense concentrations of immigrants that ring cities in France and Great Britain.”
“The fact that one million refugees had been allowed into Germany was, of course, the headline of 2015. However, an equally startling figure received far less media attention: an estimated six million to seven million Germans helped them.”
“Even in the aftermath of the Cologne attacks, 90 percent of Germans favored granting refuge to those fleeing war — a tribute not only to the new, democratic, and tolerant Germany but also to its leader of more than a decade. Yet when it came to her larger dream of European solidarity in the face of what she called its gravest crisis since the Second World War, that vision remained elusive. By 2020, as the brutal Syrian war ground on, the EU still had not forged a unified policy toward the migration crisis.
Had even a few of the other twenty-six EU countries joined Germany, the matter could have been resolved long ago. Lebanon, with a population of less than 5 million, provides refuge to 1.5 million Syrians — the same number that entered Europe in 2015. The EU’s population is 550 million. Even if every last person in Syria sought refuge there, they would make up just 0.03 percent of the population of the EU.”
“The summer’s storms had not yet passed. That same month, rogue elements in the Turkish military launched a coup against Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s government. The Turkish president barely escaped arrest, and, using his cell phone, directed his supporters to launch a counterattack in the streets of Istanbul and Ankara. With air force jets strafing from the skies, the rebels were crushed within hours. Counterrevolution followed revolution: Erdogan ordered the arrest of thirty-seven thousand, while a hundred thousand others who had been deemed “collaborators” were fired from their jobs. Independent media were virtually eliminated in the aftermath of the failed coup.”
“Despite the fact that her mother was an active member of the local Social Democratic Party in Templin and never voted for her daughter, the two had been very close.”
“East Germany does not have a string of dead cities or Appalachia’s poverty. But when people in the East compare themselves to those in the West, they feel they are losers. It is more than a perception problem. Thirty years after unification, which has benefitted the East immensely, it still lags behind the West in income, employment, and optimism. People in the East, with a population of sixteen million, compared to sixty-seven million in the West, earn 86 percent of what their West German counterparts make, and there are no major companies headquartered in the East. The 2015 arrival of roughly one million mostly Middle Eastern refugees tipped resentment of the West into something more toxic. For all these reasons, the AfD found fertile ground for its message of hate and exclusion among the discontented in the East.
The fact that some of the more prosperous regions in the East voted for the AfD underscores that their choice was not simply a case of “It’s the economy, stupid.” It was also fueled by the East’s need to be acknowledged for its contributions to German society as more than the West’s needy relatives, and for having suffered for fifty years under the Stasi regime. One of theirs was the most powerful woman in the world, and what had she done for them?”
“Thanks to the Marshall Plan, the US program that provided $15 billion to finance its rebuilding, West Germany got an early start after the devastation of World War II and was flourishing by the 1970s. But in East Germany, the Soviets not only imposed a dictatorship modelled after their own, but also stripped its wealth and left the region in ruins even hauling railroad tracks back to Russia with them.”
“Speaking at a November 2018 celebration of a hundred years of women’s suffrage in Germany, she said, “Today nobody laughs anymore when a young girl says she wants to become a minister or even chancellor one day. Some people,” she added, pausing for comic effect, “even wonder if a man would be fit for that job.” Smiling at her own cheekiness, Merkel let the waves of laughter wash over her.”
“Unlike facilities in many parts of the developed world, German hospitals never reached the crisis point. From the outset, fifty thousand people were tested each day, allowing officials to effectively trace the movements of those who were infected. Because of this, Germany suffered only one-third the death count seen in France.”
“Merkel’s fifteen years of insisting on a tight budget now paid off. Germany went into the health crisis with a surplus, and when its chancellor called for a lockdown, payments to families, tax cuts, and business loans amounted to four times that of the United States’ rescue package, without the need to take on debt. Kurzarbeit (short-term work), a hundred-year-old state system that pays companies to keep workers on their payroll through crises, was quickly scaled up. As a result, Germany expected only a 6 percent drop in GDP, compared to France’s loss of 10 percent to 13 percent.”
“In September 2020 a Pew Research Center survey found Angela Merkel to be the world’s most trusted leader, regardless of gender. This, then, may be her vaunting accolade: putting beyond all doubt the capacities of a woman in charge. A great deal of what she was able to achieve was not done in spite of her being a woman but because she was one. Again and again, she was able to park her ego in pursuit of her desired outcome. Negotiating is an arduous, patience-trying process — unsuitable work for those seeking immediate attention and credit. Most politicians desperately seek both, and most, it must be said, are male. Attention and credit were the least of the rewards Angela Merkel sought. Outcome was her singular goal.”
