Underneath you find a review by the Cambridge historian Christopher Clark of Angela Merkel's autobiography (Merkel, the emeritus German Chancellor). Her book is titled "Freedom," which came out a few month ago. Most of the reviews were fairly so-so. We at Freedom Fries (our name is rooted in the Iraq War controversy of 2003) read a lot of reviews but never got from them an idea what Merkel had to say (fairly typical, we'd say, of our times). This is the first review that has to say something, beyond the cliché. Here it is. Enjoy.
Christopher Clark in The London Review of Books.
Freedom: Memoirs 1954-2021
by Angela Merkel with with Beate Baumann, translated by Alice Tetley-Paul. Macmillan, 709 pp., £35, November 2024, 978 1 0350 2075 1
Angela Merkel was 35 when the country in which she had established herself as a research scientist ceased to exist. Once that happened, the transition was instantaneous: her career in science ended and her career in politics began. For nearly half of the period that has elapsed since that moment in 1990 – 16 out of 34 years – Merkel was at the apex of the German state. She worked with four American presidents, four French presidents, two Chinese presidents, two Russian presidents and five British prime ministers. Merkel’s low-key, unflappable persona makes it easy to overlook how extraordinary her story is. A life composed of such unlike elements has never been possible before and will never be so again, at least in Europe. Only in a reunified Korea might there one day be a parallel.
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| Angela Merkel |
A resonant encounter occurs at the point in Freedom, Merkel’s memoir, where the story passes from her first life into her second. At the beginning of November 1990, she had just been preselected as the Christian Democratic Union candidate for Stralsund-Rügen-Grimmen on the coast of the Baltic Sea. The GDR had ceased to exist a month before; the first elections of the newly unified Germany were a month away. As she toured her prospective constituency, she met with fishermen in a little town called Lobbe on the island of Rügen. She sat with them in their hut amid bottles, rubbish and equipment, making hesitant conversation but also enjoying their ‘sociable silence’. It was a complicated moment: the fishermen, hardy men of the Baltic coast, knew it was unlikely that their industry would survive the restructuring ahead. Most of them eventually went out of business. To them, Merkel writes, European fisheries policy seemed ‘a monstrous bureaucratic machine impervious to their concerns’. But at the heart of her recollection of this scene, we find the sentence: ‘It was the first time I had ever held a turbot in my hands and felt its distinctive stone-like bumps.’
Merkel brings to her encounter with the turbot the eye (and thumbs) of a scientist. Yet there is more to it than that, because on the shores of the German Baltic, the turbot is more than a fish. The garrulous central protagonist of Günter Grass’s meandering epic The Flounder (Der Butt) is not in fact a flounder, but a turbot (Steinbutt), distinguishable from the other flatfish, as Ralph Manheim’s translation of 1978 puts it, by ‘the bony, pebble-like bumps under his skin’. For the novel’s narrator, the encounter with the turbot is a moment of becoming: ‘His talking to me like that gave me a sense of importance. Of significance. Of inner growth. Self-awareness was born. I began to take myself seriously.’ The turbot, who speaks the spare dialect of the Baltic coast, ‘a language of few words, a wretched stammering that [names] only the strictly necessary’, begins his passage through Grass’s book as a spokesfish for patriarchal social order, but in the final chapters becomes an eloquent witness to the rising power of women. In that scene in the fishermen’s hut, charged with change and uncertainty, the turbot’s stony bumps are the hardest and surest thing: a fitting point of departure.
It would have been so easy, in a memoir like this one, to write the first life as a kind of drab waiting room for the second, in the manner of those conversion narratives that imagine life as a transit from perdition to redemption. Merkel does something quite different. She makes no bones about the difference between life under the regime of ‘real socialism’ and life in the liberal capitalist West. But it also becomes clear that she enjoyed considerable personal freedom in the GDR. The early chapters evoke a childhood with wide horizons: playing in the woods and meadows without inhibitions, swimming, hiking and having adventures. Her parents, she writes, did ‘everything they could to create safe, protected spaces for me and my siblings’. And around them was a network of other families, benevolent guardians of her youth, a world enlivened by open-ended conversation and ‘inexhaustible intellectual stimulation’.
As the daughter of a Protestant pastor in bucolic Templin, Merkel grew up in an environment that was emotionally detached from the political structures of East German society. But the life of the Protestant churches in the GDR was the working arrangement of a ‘church in socialism’, founded on a pragmatic willingness to use the instruments available, to seek self-realisation within the constraints imposed by the system. Her father, who had transferred from Hamburg to take up a post in the eastern church, joined the state-controlled Federation of Evangelical Pastors. He and his wife were dutiful servants of their parishioners, but also members of an elite. The Protestantism Merkel grew up with had more to do with the Lebensklugheit – practical wisdom – prized by the social reformist wing of 18th-century German Lutheranism than with ideals of apostolic renunciation and withdrawal.
Like her siblings and peers, Merkel knew from an early age that the rules governing speech and behaviour were different outside her own network (though she didn’t always get it right). She understood that as children from church families, she and her siblings faced official discrimination. She chose quantum chemistry because its inner logic was immune to the political manipulations of the regime. Her father had told her what to do if she were ever approached by the Stasi: ‘All you have to do is say that you wouldn’t be able to keep it to yourself.’ She applied this advice when, as a student in Leipzig, she was approached by two Stasi operatives. Having listened to them set out the reasons she should consider working for them as an informant, she replied: ‘You know, I have been deeply affected by what we’ve discussed here. I’ll have to tell my husband right away ... I’m a communicative person, and I always have to tell other people what’s on my mind.’ That was the end of the contact. What is interesting about these early chapters is the absence of fear. She does not deny that there were victims of the regime. But her world was not the one imagined by the West German filmmaker Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck in The Lives of Others. Her relationship with the power of the regime was always – and perhaps this was true for many people in the GDR – oblique, ironic. The state, she says, had never managed to take from her ‘something that allowed me to live, to sense, to feel: a degree of light-heartedness’.
Merkel was never tempted by the vision of a reformed GDR that animated parts of the civil rights movement in the last years of the communist regime: ‘One thing was beyond doubt for me: East Germany’s structure could not be reformed from within. It was like a cardigan: if you fasten the first button incorrectly, you always need to start all over again to be able to do it up properly. And the GDR’s first button was fastened incorrectly. That was my firm belief.’ In 1989-90, she oriented herself instinctively towards the fullest possible alignment with the West. The small liberal-conservative group she joined late in 1989, Democratic Awakening, soon merged with the Alliance for Germany, an electoral coalition of centre-right parties led by the GDR wing of the Christian Democratic Union, the party of the West German chancellor, Helmut Kohl.
Merkel never mourned the vanished state, but she understood that its loss left ‘a roaring void’ in many of its former citizens. She accepted the case for a far-reaching privatisation of the East German economy, but she was appalled at how the process unfolded in practice. The young male Westerners charged with carrying it out were ‘arrogant twenty-somethings’ who had everything ‘except an understanding of how people actually work’. Rather than integrating East Germans into the privatisation process, they struck deals with ‘young West German bankers ... just like themselves’. She saw in her constituency how West Germans gobbled up the best seaside properties on the island of Rügen, how the Stralsund shipyards were ruined by unscrupulous Western management, and how citizens lost their property under opaque regulations that always tended to favour Western claimants. Most interesting of all, she saw and experienced how difficult it soon became for East Germans, even those as successful as she was, to speak openly about life in the GDR. West Germans – especially in the media – seemed determined to misunderstand or misconstrue every reference to the past. Even thirty years after the event, she writes, ‘my life in the GDR clearly served at best as a lasting scandal ... The fact that it was part of our common history and future in reunified Germany seemed to be beyond many people’s imagination.’
After unification came a vertiginous rise through the political ranks. Helmut Kohl, the chief architect of German unification, saw her potential immediately: here was a clever, discreet East German woman with a squeaky clean family background and no record of collaboration with the East German regime – exactly the kind of person the government of the new Germany needed. Kohl appointed her minister for women and youth. Four years later, when he made her minister for the environment, nature conservation and nuclear safety, she became the first woman in the CDU ever to hold a ministry outside the field of women and family. During these years, Kohl routinely referred to her as ‘mein Mädchen’. It sounds belittling, and it was; in this case the condescension that still came naturally to male politicians of Kohl’s generation was affectionate. And Merkel’s instinctive reserve and quiet manner suggested that she might be easy to control.
‘Lasst Euch nicht verwenden’ (‘Don’t let yourselves be used’) said the posters held aloft by the protesters on the streets of Rostock and East Berlin in 1989. Merkel was useful to a government that was striving to make unification a political and emotional reality. But she always succeeded in extracting more value from her appointments than those who hoped to harness her to their own objectives. As minister of the environment, Merkel convened the first UN Climate Change Conference in Berlin in 1995. Benefiting from the advice of more experienced hands, she ran the conference through a system of ‘friends of the chair’ who mediated between her and groups of delegations ordered by region or by interest. With its jumble of state and non-state representations, she recalls, the conference resembled ‘an anthill – you know there’s a structure somewhere inside, but it’s not visible’; only once the negotiations were underway did the ‘internal structure’ reveal itself. This was rewarding work. Unlike so many of her colleagues, she was on top of the climate science underlying the policy debate. It was the beginning of a commitment to climate change mitigation that has persisted.
Then the game changed: in the federal elections of 1998, the CDU and its leader, Kohl, were defeated by the gifted and dynamic Social Democrat Gerhard Schröder. The party was still digesting the meaning of this defeat when it was engulfed in a campaign finance scandal in which Kohl was centrally implicated. Such was his personal authority – he had been in power for sixteen years – that few in the party dared to challenge him. But Merkel did. In a mordant opinion piece for the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, she urged the party to break with its old ‘war horse’. The party opted to do just that and on 10 April 2000, the CDU elected her as the first female party leader in German history. Kohl never forgave her. ‘I brought my assassin close to me,’ he later recalled, overlooking the gross errors of judgment by which he had precipitated his downfall. ‘I put the snake on my own arm.’
Leading the charge against Kohl was a high-risk enterprise. It could have gone horribly wrong. But Merkel’s instinct and timing proved to be sound and, perhaps more important, the sincerity of the stance she had taken was beyond doubt. This decision placed her on the path to the chancellorship after the narrow CDU victory of 2005. Her arrival at the summit of German and European politics coincided with the period when the good economic weather she inherited from her predecessor was disrupted by the global financial and Eurozone crises, and the world entered the epoch of chaotic polycrisis we find ourselves in today.
The chancellor of the Federal Republic has traditionally been the decision-maker-in-chief of German politics, with responsibility for setting the general orientation of policy (Richtlinienkompetenz), and Merkel’s memoir is especially revealing about what this meant for her. When the 19th-century chancellor Bismarck wanted to capture the decisional role of his office (which came with an abundance of power denied to his democratic successors) he reached in two quite different directions. In moments of philosophical resignation, he described himself as a helmsman borne ceaselessly forward on the river of time, capable of making small alterations to the direction of his craft but powerless to reverse the current. When he wanted to foreground the activist, interventionist dimension of his role, he imagined himself as a chess player, whose task was to rally his forces and to dominate the board. Merkel’s account of deliberation and decision-making is more embedded and immersive than either of these metaphors would allow. When she moved into her new office in the Chancellery, she noted with approval that the architects had placed it on the same level as the floor of the plenary chamber of the parliament building opposite. ‘I was in the hands of these elected representatives. As a directly elected member of the German Bundestag, I was also one of them.’ By contrast with her predecessor, Schröder, and his chief of staff, whose offices were elsewhere, Merkel and her office manager (Beate Baumann, co-author of the memoir) worked in close proximity to the rest of her staff: ‘We were close enough to speak to one another quickly and easily without having to leave a suite of rooms ... The doors between these offices were kept open whenever possible, and we all thrived on communication with one another.’
The same quality of embeddedness and immersion can be observed in her accounts of the great decisional conjunctures in her career as chancellor. Merkel was at the centre of the process by which Europe’s leaders hammered out, over many arduous months, a response to the crisis that threatened first to bankrupt Greece and then to consume the Eurozone economy. She was among those who pressed for a solution that would pair emergency relief measures with a stringent (and politically costly) programme of structural reforms in the worst-afflicted Eurozone member states. This was a controversial stance, and she was caricatured in the Greek, Italian, Spanish and even parts of the British press as a Hitleresque ogre pounding Europe in the name of German dominance. But there were no stand-alone decisions: Merkel worked closely with a group of like-minded states (the most important among them Finland and the Netherlands), insisting that the negotiating parties honour the rules of the Lisbon Treaty, the no-bailout provisions of which stipulated that every government should take responsibility for repaying its own debts. She pushed this way and that as the opportunities arose, trying to move the process in the direction she preferred, but never breaking ranks with her colleagues. In this respect, she was less a helmswoman or chess player than a rugby forward at the heart of the scrum.
In Merkel’s account of her decision to open Germany’s borders to refugees amassing in Hungary and the Balkans in the autumn of 2015, the emphasis is not on bold initiatives but on the accumulation of causal pressures. Hundreds of people had drowned when a boat carrying refugees from Libya to Italy capsized in April that year. By the early summer, it was clear that the Dublin Regulations agreed in 1990 and 2003 for distributing asylum applicants across states in the Schengen Area had in effect broken down – simple fidelity to the existing rules was no longer an option. Projected applicant numbers for Germany alone surged from 400,000 in May to 800,000 in August. Then came an urgent call from the Austrian chancellor Werner Faymann for help in receiving a large number of refugees making their way on foot along the highway from Budapest towards the Hungarian-Austrian border. ‘I sensed,’ Merkel writes, ‘that the time to make a decision had come. Unless Europe wanted ... dead bodies on the highway, something had to happen.’ After hurried consultations with President Frank-Walter Steinmeier and legal checks to ascertain her constitutional right to act, she announced that Germany’s ‘fundamental right to asylum’ had ‘no upper limit’ and urged her fellow Germans to welcome the needy of the 21st century. ‘We will manage it,’ she declared, in words that would be celebrated and vilified over the following years. It was a decision that would burden her during the rest of her term in office. And yet, as the phrase ‘something had to happen’ suggests, the decision, as Merkel recalls it, did not spring fully formed from the forehead of the political leader; it arrived as a kind of necessity.
Is this a form of evasion, as some critics have claimed, a bid to downsize decisions to the point where they can no longer be commuted into personal responsibility? Or does it reflect a view of the political process that corresponds with a particular temperament and outlook? In her first life, Merkel was a theoretical scientist, not an experimentalist. Where experimentalists intervene proactively in the process of knowledge-production by creating and monitoring controlled scenarios, theoretical physicists (including quantum chemists of her type) are focused on the discerning of patterns in rigorously tabulated data. Merkel would bring these habits and skills to her life in politics.
All political leaders face complexity, but the setting in which German chancellors tackle their workload is especially challenging. The federal structure of the German state (composed since 1990 of sixteen Länder) has always complicated the business of government and it continues to do so today, as Merkel’s repeated clashes with the Bavarian state supremo Horst Seehofer revealed. As new parties proliferate, Germany’s multi-party system is becoming harder to manage. The political landscape is more fluid and unpredictable than it was in the years of Konrad Adenauer, Willy Brandt, Helmut Schmidt or Helmut Kohl. The EU Lisbon Treaty, which was signed in 2007 and came into effect in 2009, streamlined the European Commission and established the principle of majority voting in order to make the vastly expanded EU structure manageable. But it also reinforced the paramountcy of the national governments, creating an environment in which policy would be made less by supranational institutions than by intergovernmental bargain. There is no equivalent in the world’s other states to the intricacies of Europe’s unfinished federalism.
Complexity gives rise to dependence: there are problems one simply cannot solve on one’s own. And in politics the answers are usually not ‘solutions’ in a mathematical sense, but provisional outcomes generated by processes of competitive tendering and distributed cognition, in which a plurality of stakeholders and experts interact under conditions more or less pressurised by the threat of systemic breakdown. Merkel’s memoirs register this deepening of complexity as a central feature of contemporary political life, and they are an interesting study in the challenges it poses for decision-makers. The refocusing of attention takes us a long way from the actionist narrative of Margaret Thatcher, whose memoir The Downing Street Years (1993) documents countless acts of individual will (‘I was chiefly concerned,’ ‘I did not share the common view,’ ‘I was right’) and whose central protagonist frequently ridicules or dismisses the poor advice offered by colleagues (especially if it comes from the Foreign Office). Absent, too, is the visceral antagonism towards political enemies that drives Thatcher’s story (and even more so Liz Truss’s recent Ten Years to Save the West, in which the prime minister’s sworn enemies include most of the members of her own party). Merkel vehemently rejects the notion that the fundamental distinction in politics is between friend and foe. She expresses her puzzlement at the belief that ‘Social Democrats and Greens per se must be attacked from morning to night.’ Her memoirs are full of fruitful collaborations with individual Liberals, Social Democrats and Greens. ‘Can politics,’ she asks, ‘bring joy to anyone if there are no real bogeymen to rail against?’ She was and is firmly convinced that the answer is ‘yes’.
Merkel’s account of her life on the international stage documents a subtle distancing from the United States. She supported America in its invasion of Iraq in 2003, against Schröder. She even took the unusual step of publishing an article in the Washington Post criticising his policy. (The article appeared, embarrassingly, under the title ‘Schroeder doesn’t speak for all Germans.’) But she later regretted her indiscretion, both on the grounds that it was improper to deal with a domestic difference of opinion ‘on foreign soil’, and because she came to believe that the Iraq War really was an error based on ‘mistaken beliefs’ and ‘falsified’ evidence. In 2011, she instructed her ambassador to abstain from voting for or against the 2011 intervention in Libya, led by the US, Britain and France, a move that ruffled feathers in Washington. She remains convinced, in the light of the parlous state of Libya today and its role as an embarkation point for illegal migration, that she was right and the intervening allies wrong. In other domains, too, there was friction. Obama, whom she liked, was disappointing on climate-change mitigation. The two leaders were closely aligned in their understanding of global warming as ‘one of the greatest threats to humanity’, but she soon had to realise that ‘even Obama’s government’ would never accept legally binding fossil fuel emissions targets.
Then came Trump. Even before he entered the White House, Trump fired repeated rhetorical broadsides at Merkel, accusing her of ‘destroying’ her country by admitting too many refugees, complaining that she spent too little on defence and that the popularity of German cars in the US was down to dumping prices and manipulations of the euro-dollar exchange rate. At their first meeting in Washington in March 2017, Trump refused to shake hands with his guest at a meeting with the press, even after the journalists present had asked him to.
Instead of stoically enduring the scene, I whispered to him that we should shake hands ... As soon as the words left my mouth, I shook my head at myself. How could I forget that Trump knew precisely what he was doing ... He wanted to create conversation fodder through his behaviour, while I had acted as though I were having a discussion with someone completely normal.
From the chaotic conversations that followed, Merkel inferred that ‘there would be no co-operative work for an interconnected world with Trump.’ He assessed everything, she writes, ‘as the real-estate developer he had been before entering politics. Each piece of property can only be allocated once. If he didn’t get one, someone else would. That’s how he saw the world. For him, all countries were in competition, and the success of one meant the failure of another.’ On 1 June 2017, Trump announced that the US would be withdrawing entirely from participation in the Paris Agreement on climate change. The G20 summit in Hamburg, which opened the following month, having failed for the first time to find a common position on climate policy, merely noted that while nineteen of the participating states supported the Paris Agreement, one did not.
President Biden was an infinitely more congenial colleague, but 2021, the first year of his presidency and the last of her chancellorship, was overshadowed by the helter-skelter withdrawal from Afghanistan. That was Trump’s decision, not Biden’s. What exasperated Merkel about it was not the withdrawal as such, but the fact that it was negotiated directly with the Taliban and planned without any consultation of allied states, or even of the elected Afghan government, a manner of proceeding that ‘laid bare the power dynamics of the situation for everyone’.
In light of the Russian invasion of Ukraine, it is unsurprising that attention has focused on Merkel’s policy regarding Putin and Russia. No topic receives more attention in the memoir. At the Munich Security Conference of 10 February 2007, Merkel spoke about the need to seek dialogue with Russia ‘despite our many differences of opinion’. It was Putin’s turn to respond. He opened by rejecting the notion of a ‘unipolar world ... in which there is one master, one sovereign’, and went on to denounce the US, which had ‘overstepped its national boundaries in every way’. Merkel was irritated by the self-righteousness and the hypocrisy, but she also registered some points that did not seem completely absurd – such as Putin’s criticism of the Iraq War and of Nato and the US for their slow progress in updating the Treaty on Conventional Armed Forces in Europe (originally signed in 1990). Putin struck her as a flawed individual, hypersensitive to slights yet always ready to dish them out to others. One could find all of this ‘childish and reprehensible’, she writes, ‘but there Russia was, still on the map.’
As these last words make clear, the problem of Putin and the question of Russia always remained separate in Merkel’s thinking. Merkel excelled in Russian at school and acquired a respect for Russian culture that has never left her. She represented her school in East Germany’s annual Russian language Olympiad, and by the age of fifteen she was the national champion in the language of the occupying power. Her youthful trips to Russia were moments of high excitement and expanding horizons. In 1969, she found that unlike in the GDR, you could get the Beatles on vinyl in Moscow (she promptly bought Yellow Submarine). She met young Russians with outspoken, dissenting opinions. She was astonished to be told by some members of the Komsomol (the Communist Youth League) in Moscow that the division of Germany was unnatural and that it was only a matter of time before the country would be unified again. She was ‘like a sponge’ on these journeys, she writes, ‘absorbing anything that could broaden my horizons beyond East Germany’.
In short, it was not the official Russia that Merkel got to know, but its people, culture and society. The sense of connection stayed with her. In April 2006, during a rushed visit to Tomsk in Siberia, she was entranced by the sight of the River Tom, which is several hundred metres wide by the time it passes through the city. She asked her driver to stop, and the entire delegation got out of their cars. It was the thaw, and huge pieces of ice were floating down the watercourse, creaking and crunching as they went. She felt an urge to sit and join the townsfolk who were watching this magnificent spectacle: ‘I was thinking how I would have liked to take a boat to the mouth of one of the great Siberian rivers – the Ob, the Yenisey, the Lena ... After a few minutes we had to take our leave of the Tom ... and go on to the next meeting.’
This sense of imaginative attachment may help to explain why, even as her stance on Putin became more critical, she continued to push back against those who thought that Russia could be written off and forgotten. She notes disapprovingly that some Central and Eastern Europe countries appeared to have very little appetite for investing in any kind of relationship with Russia, almost as if they wished that ‘their gigantic neighbour would disappear from the map, simply cease to exist.’ Obama’s mocking public references to Russia as a mere ‘regional power’ struck her as unhelpful. This wasn’t just a matter of affinities: it reflected a realist appreciation of the global balance of power. There was, she writes, ‘no wishing [Russia] away geopolitically and there still isn’t, if for no other reason than that it is one of the five permanent, veto-holding members of the UN Security Council’ – alongside the US, France, the UK and China.
At the same time, her attitude to Putin hardened as she got to know him better. The memoir offers in a sequence of glimpses a sharply drawn miniature of the Russian leader: the stunted pseudo-conversations, the endless reciting of ‘humiliations’, the threatening hints and the power-plays: late arrivals for meetings, or the press conference where he brought his black Labrador, Koni, in to sniff at Merkel, even though he and his staff had been warned that she was afraid of dogs. A brief conversation in the car on the way to Tomsk airport in 2006 exposes the tight coils of the autocrat’s thinking:
[Putin] pointed to some areas with typical Russian wooden houses and explained that the people living there didn’t have much money and were therefore very easily misled. In Ukraine, he said, these were exactly the kind of people who had been encouraged to take part in the Orange Revolution in the autumn of 2004 by money given to them by the US government. ‘I will never allow anything like that to happen in Russia,’ Putin said ...
‘But back in East Germany, it wasn’t money from the States that drew us into a peaceful revolution,’ I replied. ‘We wanted it, and it changed our lives for the better. That’s precisely what the people in Ukraine wanted.’
Putin changed the subject.
In her handling of the crisis in relations between Russia and Ukraine, Merkel was concerned to avoid an irreversible rupture. In the spring of 2008, Georgia and Ukraine applied to be put on a Nato fast-track Membership Action Plan. Putin had already made it clear he wouldn’t tolerate it. But President George W. Bush threw his weight behind the bid, even making a flying visit to Kyiv. The EU member states were divided. Merkel opposed it. The MAP was not initiated. In 2011, she abstained from joining in the Libyan intervention that is believed by many to have deepened Putin’s antagonism to the West. The crunch in her relationship with the Russian leader came with the invasion of Crimea and eastern Ukraine at the beginning of 2014. She notes the parodic Crimean ‘referendum’ of 16 March, in which an overwhelming majority of the population supposedly voted for ‘reunification with Russia as federal subjects of the Russian Federation’, a return to the 98.4 per cent election victories she remembered from the GDR. Putin, it seemed to her, was now living in a reality of his own creation. ‘The rule-breaker was setting the terms. He had to be stopped.’
In the difficult years that followed the invasion, Merkel supported the sanctions regime imposed by the EU and the US but remained committed to the diplomatic process. Working through the ‘Normandy Format’, in which the leaders of France and Germany brokered compromises between Russia and Ukraine, she supported the quest for a regional settlement that would meet the needs of both parties. This was arduous work: at the Minsk meeting of 11 February 2015, the leaders and their delegations argued over the peace proposals for seventeen hours non-stop, while tall Belarusian women in waitress uniforms, all the same height and with the same upright posture, entered and exited the room at half-hourly intervals ‘moving in co-ordinated fashion’ and carrying trays bearing glasses of freshly brewed tea. ‘From the most acrimonious battles of words to resigned silence, we went through all imaginable mood fluctuations.’
The implementation of these deals was always patchy. Successive ceasefires were broken (mostly by the Russian-backed separatists). There was strong opposition in the Ukrainian government and parliament to the sections of the agreement that envisaged a kind of federal autonomy for the occupied districts in a future Ukraine. But the process ground on through the following years. At the Paris summit of 9 December 2019, the parties seemed close to a final agreement; on this occasion it was Zelensky who broke ranks. Protesters in Kyiv – supported by his predecessor, Poroshenko – were denouncing the agreement as a capitulation. Responding to the pressure, Zelensky pressed for Ukrainian control of the disputed districts before rather than after the local elections there. It was agreed that the group would meet again in April 2020 to resolve this issue. But by then, of course, the world was a different place.
In one of the most fascinating passages of the memoirs, Merkel reflects on the impact of the Covid pandemic on the Minsk process. Once the virus had spread, there could be no question of further face-to-face meetings. Merkel kept telephoning Putin and Zelensky every two or three months in 2020, but this was no substitute for the in-person meetings of the Normandy Format. On 16 April 2021, another Normandy meeting finally took place, by video link. The toll exacted by the absence of face-to-face contacts was immediately obvious:
For the first time, I got the feeling that Putin had lost interest in the Minsk agreement ... While in Paris, [Zelensky] publicly invited Putin to a further meeting of the Normandy Four. There was no chance of this. Putin was already avoiding all contact due to his fear of Covid infection. Anyone who wanted to speak to him had to self-isolate first. That was not an option for us ... Minsk was dead in the water: of that I was certain.
Reading these passages, I was struck by the 19th-century feel of the narrative. This is a multipolar world, in which states interact in highly unpredictable ways. The EU is present in Merkel’s account only as a legal and constitutional framework. There are no hand-on-heart affirmations of the European idea. Brussels is a place where certain processes happen, but no more than that. On the rare occasions when the Union features as an actor in the narrative, it is usually failing to meet expectations.
‘Being prime minister is a lonely job,’ Margaret Thatcher wrote. ‘It ought to be: you cannot lead from the crowd.’ But if Thatcher was often lonely at home, her vision of the wider world was warmed by allegiance to the US, fondness and admiration for a visionary conservative president, the sense of a common cause among the ‘free nations’ and confidence that the Cold War ended with unconditional victory for America and its Western friends. By contrast, Merkel’s German political world is sociable and crowded, but her portrait of the international scenery is strikingly bleak, a world of narcissistic and unreliable political ‘friends’, capricious enemies and selfish bystanders, a world in which nothing seems to cohere. It is an outlook that resonates lugubriously with the uncertainties of the present. The book may come to be read as a reflection on our pathway out of one world order into another.
As often happens with political memoirs, the reviews have tended to focus on the legacy rather than the book itself. Merkel has been taken to task for failing to reverse Germany’s deepening addiction to Russian gas, leaving the Greeks in the lurch, stimulating a far-right backlash with her open-border policy, tolerating the illiberalism of Hungary’s Viktor Orbán, failing to confront and face down Putin, over-investing in Germany’s economic relationship with China and generally failing to prepare her country for the storms ahead. Above all, she has been criticised for refusing to take responsibility for her many supposed errors. Some of these accusations ascribe to her a power to shape events that she never possessed, or understate the constraints on her freedom of action; others are saturated with hindsight, measure her against an idealised model of clairvoyant statesmanship, or blame her for phenomena (such as the rise of the far right) that have also occurred in other countries. The political memoir is not a genre known for its propensity for self-critique, but this one is more self-critical than the average. My hunch is that most of the charges will come to seem less substantial as a fuller picture emerges of what has been happening over the last two decades and Merkel ceases to be a lightning rod for the frustrations and anxieties that accumulated everywhere during her time in office. Merkel will not be remembered for the landmark solutions she found to the great problems of our time, because for the most part the crises she tackled have not been solved, by her or anybody else. Critics have spoken of Merkel as getrieben, ‘pushed by circumstance’, a politician who was always reacting and never proposing. But ours has been an era of cascading, interlocking crises that transcend national and regional boundaries, placing all decision-makers under unprecedented pressure.
Those, on the other hand, who praise Merkel will remember how she kept fragile structures together, when others were bent on disrupting them. They will remember how she kept the conversations going with recalcitrant foreign leaders and always made the case for pragmatic multilateralism and co-operation. They will remember how she answered the bullies and blusterers of her time with firm and well-judged words. They will remember the sobriety and reserve of her comportment in office, the way she remained silent while others filled the airwaves with distracting noise. Above all, they will remember a politician who showed the world how power can be wielded without vanity.
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