Back Cover Blurb for The Chancellor: The Remarkable Odyssey of Angela Merkel by Kati Marton:
The definitive biography of German Chancellor Angela Merkel, detailing the remarkable rise and political brilliance of the most powerful — and elusive — woman in the world.
The Chancellor is at once a riveting political biography and an intimate human story of a complete outsider — a research chemist and pastor’s daughter raised in Soviet-controlled East Germany — who rose to become the unofficial leader of the West.
“In her experience, language cannot be trusted. Words are weapons to be deployed cautiously.”
― Kati Marton, The Chancellor: The Remarkable Odyssey of Angela Merkel
Before I read this book, I knew a few things about Angela Merkel. I knew she had been a physicist before she became a politician, that she seemed friendly to the US, and that she had served as Chancellor for a long time, much of my adult life. I also vaguely knew that she had accepted a bunch of immigrants, because it is hard to miss if you live here, and that here she is considered relatively conservative, but I find her difficult to map onto my understanding of the US political spectrum, to the extent that the US still has a political spectrum.
In this book, I learned so much more color and depth to my understanding for Angela Merkel. This biography starts by sharing that she was a preacher’s kid (I had no idea), and that she had grown up in the largely and officially secular east Germany (this sounded vaguely familiar, but had not really considered its implications). But while this book returns to these themes repeatedly, it only mentions in passing that it is likely that neither of her parents ever voted for her. I personally found to be a deeper insight.
I knew she had worked as a physicist before politics, but I had not really grasped how relatively quick her political assent was. It had not occurred to me how much it coincided with reunification. And I had not realized how much growing up in the East had shaped her. For example, she studied physics in college, “because even East Germany wasn’t capable of suspending basic arithmetic and the rules of nature.” Some people say that Merkel is private to the point of paranoia, but she grew up in an East German environment where she was denied an academic position possibly because she refused to become an informant and when the wall fell she found out that while a she was working as a professional scientist, she was regularly reported on by a friend that was an informant. She experienced Holocaust misinformation first hand, and this is part of what made her open to accepting a bunch of Syrian refugees when no one else would. She had unique insight into Putin because they lived and worked in East Germany behind the Iron Curtain at the same time.
I find it somewhat amusing that she got mostly along with both the Bushes and Obama (from opposite parties in the US), as all of the American political spectrum is squeezed into the conservative end of German politics. I found it fascinating that she chose to serve one final term partially because she believed democracy to be fragile to the populist personalities that she wanted to counterbalance.
I learned that the Fukushima nuclear disaster was the incident that turned this trained physicist from nuclear power because it was safe only in a world without accidents. For the most part, I appreciate how she handled the COVID crisis. I admire her stamina.
I like that she works hard and then goes home and cooks dinner and listens to music and hangs out with people who are not politicians. I like that she is pragmatic, but also looks for opportunities to move the world forward when there is an opening. She is brave without bluster. She has been a formidable leader for most of my adult life and I’m glad I took the time to learn more and reflect on one of the guardians who kept her corner of the world safe and running smoothly for nearly 2 decades. She will be missed. I wonder what the world stage will be like without her.