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.
