On page 273 of her memoir, Angela Merkel admits she made a mistake.
Ms. Merkel, the former German chancellor who left office in 2021 after 16 years in power, recalls a blunder from the early days of her political career, when she was the opposition leader to Chancellor Gerhard Schröder. In a 2003 guest essay for The Washington Post, she attacked him for criticizing the impending American invasion of Iraq: “Schröder doesn’t speak for all Germans,” the headline ran.
Strangely, the mistake Ms. Merkel acknowledges is not her support for the Iraq war, even though she now thinks the invasion was wrong. The error was one not of judgment but of manners. “It wasn’t right,” she writes in her book, “to attack my own chief of government head-on in the international sphere.” Domestic differences should not be dealt with “on foreign soil.”
This reserved approach is typical of Ms. Merkel’s 700-page “Freedom: Memoirs 1954-2021,” which is released worldwide on Tuesday. Readers will find quite a few passages in which she concedes minor mistakes or regrets trivial side effects of big decisions, which themselves go unexamined. On what now look like her major failings — such as overwhelming the welfare system with her refugee policy or not stemming the rise of the far right — there is either evasion or equivocation.
After three years away, Ms. Merkel is stepping back onto the world stage. But she isn’t ready to say “sorry.”
Ms. Merkel, once heralded as the most powerful woman in the world, was one of Germany’s most popular politicians. But her reputation has suffered in recent years. Germans increasingly view her four terms as an era of missed opportunities and grave mistakes, as they face crumbling infrastructure with woefully slow trains and internet connections, an economy dangerously dependent on China, an underfunded army and a society divided by high levels of immigration and the rise of right-wing populism. The war in Ukraine has cast Ms. Merkel’s relaxed approach to Russia in a very bad light.
The book — which Ms. Merkel wrote alongside her long-term chief of staff, Beate Baumann — was a chance to make amends. Let’s just say it does not deliver. Rather than set the record straight or explain her actions, let alone offer new insights or fresh arguments, the former chancellor focuses on small, seemingly irrelevant things.
Ms. Merkel laments, for example, comparing the escape of small doses of radiation from nuclear containers to spilling baking powder for a cake — an off-the-cuff remark she made in 1996. Yet there’s no word of regret about her hasty call as chancellor in 2011 to abolish nuclear energy after a meltdown in Japan’s Fukushima power plant. It was a costly decision, exposing Germans to high energy costs that have only risen since the country weaned itself off its dependence on Russian oil and gas — another topic on which Ms. Merkel has no misgivings.
When I interviewed Ms. Merkel a couple of weeks ago in her Berlin home office, she seemed upbeat. Proudly presenting us with a freshly printed copy of her book and reminiscing about how she wrote it on a computer without an internet connection, she was ready to tell her story in her own words. But she didn’t really seem to care what the world would make of it.
Despite feeling scapegoated for the Russian invasion of Ukraine — “It’s not just a feeling; it’s reality” — Ms. Merkel maintained that her decision to block a membership action plan for Ukraine to join NATO in 2008 was the right one. It might have taken Ukraine years to slip under the shield of NATO, time in which Vladimir Putin “would certainly have done something,” she said. “And what would happen then? Would military action by NATO member states have been conceivable in 2008?” she asked. “Those were my considerations.”
As a politician, Ms. Merkel was an administrator with a tendency to lose herself in detail, not a visionary or a reformer. As a writer, she stays faithful to that style. Halfway through the book, for example, she illustrates the duties of a chancellor by presenting a register of the major institutions with which she had to meet “in the simplest way possible: alphabetically.” The list ranges from the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation to the German trade association for horticulture. It’s not exactly gripping.
But even though the 400 pages about her time in office often feel dutiful, the book really does have something to offer: a candid self-portrait of someone who for decades has seemed impossibly reserved. We learn how Ms. Merkel’s parents, a pastor and a housewife, shielded her from the socialist dictatorship in East Germany and prevented their three children from becoming “bitter and jaded.” And how, as a young, brilliant scientist, Ms. Merkel’s deep frustration with sustaining the dilapidated East German system with her research contributed to her first marriage falling apart.
There are oddly entertaining passages, too, in which she describes how a personal stylist finally “managed to make my hair into a hairdo” and how she loved a dish of smoked pork with kale so much that she forced it on guests to the chancellery “over and over again.” Women may find the account of her power struggles inspiring and the many incidents of microaggression or humiliation from Helmut Kohl, Mr. Putin and her male competitors in the Christian Democratic Party sadly familiar. There are moments when, Ms. Merkel writes, she “swallowed” her anger, fought the urge “to burst into tears” or desperately told herself to “stay calm.”
Eventually, she overcame her opponents with patience and cunning but never with personal attacks or intrigue. Even though many Germans, especially journalists, were exasperated by her dull speeches and seeming allergy to motivational messages, these weaknesses now look far from the worst. In fact, the reticence that characterizes the book — the refusal to point fingers or settle scores — is exemplary of the way Ms. Merkel conducted herself in politics. She was a quiet, effective leader, not given to anger or aggression.
The timing for the book couldn’t be better. With the return to power of Donald Trump, whom Ms. Merkel simply calls “a challenge for the world,” her modest and incorruptible style will be a great loss. And with the German government collapsed and its former coalition partners at one another’s throats, the public might forgive the failures of their former leader who needs just one word to sum up the current situation: “Men!”
Ms. Merkel, after all, was someone who would not get up from the negotiating table until a compromise had been forged, who calmly felt her way through the many crises of her chancellorship, never promising easy solutions to complex problems. She certainly made mistakes. Yet for more than a decade and a half, she projected stability and authority, modeling a form of political leadership that has all but disappeared. It’s not just Germans who might miss her.
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