In a rare interview, the former German chancellor tells Decca Aitkenhead how her ‘certain ambition for power’ kept her in the top job for 16 years.
When Angela Merkel steps into the room, the sensation I experience feels a lot like the one that people used to report after meeting Queen Elizabeth II. The diminutive 70-year-old cuts a timeless figure, disorientatingly familiar, and her demeanour is low-wattage - but the impact is electrifying. It’s as if living history has just walked through the door.
Crossing the floor of the photo studio in an old Berlin warehouse, she carries herself with a self-contained air of stillness. To a casual observer who spent the last 35 years in a coma, Merkel might look like someone’s unassuming grandmother. To literally no one would the men stationed at each entrance look like a former world leader’s bodyguards. Middle-aged, one skinny and lank-haired, the other paunchy and dishevelled, both wearing jeans, her security detail look like they’ve fallen out of an East German pub in the 1980s.
And yet everything about Merkel’s presence is a study in the exercise of power and control, made all the more formidably impressive for its subtlety. Even her greeting - a level gaze, a steady handshake - feels intimidating. At the end, after she has left, the photographer’s assistant and I exclaim simultaneously: “It’s like she can see everything.” When she looks at you, you feel as if you are being scanned by a human x-ray machine.
In the preceding weeks the former chancellor’s team has vetoed almost every pose or look the photographic team has suggested, and has allowed just 15 minutes for the shoot. The photographer hasn’t been able to sleep the night before for nerves. Clocking her anxiety, Merkel calms her with a kindly smile, but when it’s suggested that she tries a new pose for a close-up — face gently resting against a raised palm — she says quietly but firmly: “I don’t want to do that.”
She smiles again when the photographer plays two of the songs Merkel chose for her leaving ceremony in 2021 - Für mich soll’s rote Rosen regnen (“It should rain red roses for me”) and Du hast den Farbfilm vergessen (“You forgot the colour film”), which was an early hit in East Germany’s pop charts for Nina Hagen, the pre-eminent punk artist. When a third, unfamiliar song - This Bitter Earth by Dinah Washington - comes on, Merkel murmurs: “Play the other two again?” She keeps pausing the shoot to come behind the camera and study the images on the photographer’s laptop screen: “Not bad.” The scrutiny conveys an impression not of vanity but of vigilant attention to detail. Ten minutes into the shoot her gaze turns from the camera to meet mine and, with a twinkle, she faintly raises her eyebrows as if to say, “This is surely long enough for a picture.”
She speaks excellent English during the shoot, but for the interview has requested a translator, with whom she has worked before. “Mrs Merkel speaks in perfect sentences,” she whispers while we watch. “Most people don’t - they begin and then break off and start again. But with her, everything is said precisely.” When I warn the publicist that 30 minutes won’t allow time for the interview to evolve organically, so my questions may feel abruptly staccato, she says that’s how Mrs Merkel prefers it. (It is always Mrs Merkel, never Angela.) The former chancellor abhors unpunctuality. There is no possibility of overrunning our allotted time; the call sheet specifies her departure time as 11.47am.
Merkel was even more meticulous in the timing of her departure from the world stage. After 16 years in office, serving four successive terms, she says “enough was enough”. Timing, she once said, is “an incredibly important thing in politics. You have to choose your moment. It’s what makes the difference between success and failure.” When she stood down in 2021, her political career was considered the most successful in modern times.
In 2005 the leader of the right-of-centre Christian Democratic Union (CDU) party had outfoxed all of her noisier male rivals to become Germany’s first female chancellor. She oversaw national economic prosperity, co-led the international response to the 2007-09 global banking crisis, almost single-handedly steered Greece through its 2010 debt crisis, opened Germany’s borders to refugees during the Syrian civil war and acted as the West’s go-between with Russia following Vladimir Putin’s annexation of Crimea in 2014. Not for nothing was she known as the unofficial leader of Europe and the most powerful woman in the world.
Three years later, her legacy is being re-evaluated less favourably. Germany’s government has collapsed after the chancellor, Olaf Scholz, unexpectedly sacked his finance minister earlier this month, its far right is on the rise and its stagnant economy is lurching into crisis, dangerously tied to trade with China and rocked by soaring energy costs following overdependence on Russian gas. Donald Trump’s election has fortified Putin and exposed Germany’s military vulnerability, with the Ukraine war on its doorstep. All across Europe, anti-immigrant and antidemocratic populism is growing - and many blame Merkel.
Now into the debate comes her memoir - Freedom - more than 700 pages long, and most of them entirely unapologetic. “I have done,” she says coolly, “to the best of my abilities what was important for me.”
Merkel was chancellor of a unified Germany for so long that it’s easy to forget her first 35 years were lived behind the Iron Curtain in East Germany. The full significance of that half of her life didn’t even register with Merkel herself, she says, until she wrote her memoir.
“In 1989, when the wall came down, I immediately went into politics and I just started doing so many things and I had no time at all to think about my life in the GDR [German Democratic Republic],” she says. “With this process of writing, I had to reflect on what kind of person I was during the dictatorship. What did my parents give me? What did I learn? I was not one of the very courageous people, like the activists who confronted the state directly. But I was not one of those who were always really following the line of the socialist state. And evaluating this position again, that was really interesting.”
Six weeks after Angela Kasner’s birth in Hamburg in 1954, the family moved to the GDR - a nation only five years old - where her father, a Protestant pastor, was posted to a church in Quitzow. Three years later he was put in charge of a rural seminary in Templin, 80km north of Berlin, where she lived until she left for university in Leipzig. To be a pastor’s daughter in a communist country invited suspicion, and from a young age she learnt from her parents to exercise discretion and caution. “Life in East Germany was lived constantly on the edge,” she writes. “You might wake up in the morning without a care in the world, but if you overstepped a political boundary everything could change in seconds, putting your whole existence at risk.”
When the Berlin Wall went up in 1961, more or less overnight, family life changed dramatically. There would be no more visits to and from family in the west; even phone conversations with school friends had to be conducted carefully, on the assumption that the Stasi were listening. She had to learn Russian but applied to study physics at university “because it was a science, and even the GDR couldn’t twist scientific facts”, she writes. “Two plus two was still four. It meant I could talk about all the new things I was learning without having to censor myself.”
On graduation in 1978 she joined the quantum chemistry department of the Academy of Sciences in East Berlin, where she took her PhD, and was still working there when the wall came down in 1989. By the end of that year she had joined a small new party, Democratic Awakening, was elected branch spokesperson and became a full-time politician only weeks later with her appointment as national spokesperson. Within months the party merged with the CDU, the western branch of which was led by the chancellor, Helmut Kohl. In January 1991, following Germany’s reunification, he appointed her minister for women and youth in the government of the new Federal Republic of Germany, in which she served until the CDU lost power in 1998.
Many of the qualities that served her so well in politics can be traced back to life in the GDR, the most obvious being caution and discretion. In her twenties, when the Stasi tried to recruit her as an informant, she followed her mother’s advice and told them she was far too indiscreet to be a spy, which could not have been further from the truth. The scientific training she was driven into taught her the methodical logic to which many admirers attribute her strategic success. Her distrust of extremes, belief in steering a middle course and faith in humanity’s capacity to integrate and unite may all owe their origins to the first half of her life.
Being forced to learn Russian as a child also proved helpful in her working relationship with Putin - though that didn’t stop him bringing his black labrador along to their 2007 meeting in Sochi. He knew perfectly well that she was scared to death of dogs, and “I could tell from Putin’s facial expressions,” she writes, “that he was enjoying the situation.” Merkel gritted her teeth and said nothing, she goes on, “adhering instead, as I’ve often done throughout my life, to the British maxim associated with their royal family: ‘Never explain, never complain.’ ”
This question may sound strange, I say, but has any part of her felt lucky to have grown up in the GDR?
“For some readers it might be surprising, but the title of the part about my family is A Happy Childhood. And I was really happy. The system didn’t break me because I had good parents. And maybe also my personal characteristics were positive. I grew up in nature. But I would not say I was lucky to have grown up in the GDR. Under the circumstances I was really lucky and I had a happy life. But I would not recommend every person to grow up in a dictatorship,” she says wryly. “We are glad to leave that part of history behind.”
It is hard not to feel that the era of Merkel’s understated, depersonalised politics is now also behind us. Born in the shadow of memories of Nazi Germany, she always disdained any hint of political showmanship or demagoguery and was even wary of Barack Obama at first, distrustful of his rhetorical flair. Her speeches, one biographer wrote, were “aggressively dull”, and her privacy was guarded with a steely discipline unimaginable today.
She and her second husband, Joachim Sauer, 75, a professor of quantum chemistry, never moved into the chancellor’s official residence in Berlin. They met when she was 30 and already divorced from her first husband, Ulrich Merkel, a fellow physics student whom she married when she was 23. Sauer’s first marriage, from which he has two sons, was also all but over. After living together for many years, in 1998 they married in a private ceremony with no guests. One biography quotes Merkel saying in 1990, “Having a child would require me to give up politics,” and she never did; when I ask about that choice, all she will say is: “That’s how it happened and I am happy with it, I am satisfied.”
Germany’s first couple continue to this day to live in their modest rent-controlled East Berlin flat. When she was chancellor, as now, they would escape at weekends to a plain little cottage in the countryside in Uckermark, once described by a friend as feeling “unfinished” and built before the wall came down, “when you had to scrounge for every piece of wood in the east”. Merkel liked to do her own grocery shopping and even her signature look - trousers and a blazer - only came about by accident when, early in her political career, she broke her leg and couldn’t get around on crutches in a dress.
Anyone hoping to learn all about her private life from her memoir will be disappointed. Of her first husband all she writes is that one morning, three years after marrying, she left their apartment with “a suitcase in my hand”, and the following year they were divorced. Her second husband is as fiercely private as she; nicknamed “the Phantom of the Opera” by the German press for his love of opera and loathing of publicity, he didn’t even attend her 2005 inauguration as chancellor.
Merkel has no social media accounts; in fact, not once in her book do the words “social media” appear. When I ask if Elon Musk is a force for good online, she gives the stock EU view: “It’s very important that the state and politics maintain sovereignty and power over communication options,” but adds with a troubled expression, “We have to learn a lot about this. The technological developments are so fast.”
We are meeting two days after the US presidential vote. Nobody will be surprised to read her say in the book that “I wish with all my heart that Kamala Harris defeats her competitor”, but it still feels startling to see her candid preference for the outcome of a foreign election, albeit written prior to the vote. “That is the freedom I have now,” she points out, with a dry smile. “But the election result was clear. And that is democracy.”
She confines her thoughts about Trump’s first term to just a few pages of her book, where she reveals that she scolded herself for prompting him to shake hands with her for the cameras when they met in 2017, realising a moment too late that his rudeness was deliberate. “He wanted to create conversation fodder through his behaviour,” she writes, while she was acting “as though I were having a discussion with someone completely normal”. She concluded from her Washington visit: “There could be no cooperative work for an interconnected world with Trump.”
What is her advice to world leaders who will now have to work with him again? She hesitates. “Yes, well, I think advice from ex-politicians on the sidelines is always a bit difficult. I can only tell you that in my experience the best thing is to be authentic, to express the thoughts that I express everywhere, and express them towards the American president as well. And also to hear his arguments.”
She did agree with him on one issue. “There was a point that I have to accept: he said that our expenditure for defence was not enough.” Merkel herself had argued for this, but failed to persuade coalition partners. “But, otherwise, just stay firm. You don’t have to be especially friendly, but you don’t have to be especially harsh. Just be however you are as a person. You have to make the best of the situation. And especially don’t be afraid. Don’t be afraid.”
Ukrainians have good grounds to be afraid, I suggest. I wasn’t sure from her book that Merkel particularly liked their president, Volodymyr Zelensky, but she looks puzzled when I ask. “This is a question that you would ask [about] personal friends. I respect him. I really respect what he has done and achieved since Putin attacked Ukraine, because in the first few hours after the attack many people would have fled and left the country to its fate, and he didn’t do that. I think that was the most important step that gave Ukraine the hope and the possibility to emerge from this war, this terrible war, as an independent country.”
Does that possibility still exist? “This is our objective, and in this respect I support what the current German government and the European Union are doing. But,” she adds pointedly, “I believe that at a certain moment, and the responsible people today have to determine that moment, we will need conversations. There will not be a solution that is only military.”
Merkel’s faith - and expertise - in political conversation is limitless. In her first week as chancellor she joked to her aide that it was a good job no one had told her about the number of meetings she would have to attend, as it was “ridiculous”, but her mastery of consensus-building became legendary. She is proud of the EU’s success in negotiating a Brexit settlement. “We tell the world how to solve conflicts peacefully, and then somebody wants to leave the EU and we have conflicts. They will not believe us any more if we don’t even achieve these things among friends.” On her chancellery desk used to sit a Plexiglass cube engraved with the words “There is strength in calm”.
Yet, only the day before we meet, Germany’s coalition government, led by her successor, Scholz of the Social Democratic Party, collapsed, plunging the country into a long winter of uncertainty. With war now raging in the Middle East and Ukraine, and Trump in the White House, does she fear that those who say we are now in prewar times are right? “I hope they are not.”
For Merkel, the beginning of the end came in August 2015, with the Syrian refugee crisis. “There was a before, and an after,” she says. To the world’s amazement, the chancellor abandoned a lifetime of polling public opinion and consulting allies to reach a consensus before announcing a policy, and threw open Germany’s borders to a million refugees from the Middle East. Supporters across the world rejoiced; thousands of Germans greeted the refugees at railway stations; and Time magazine named her person of the year. Others were mystified, though, and public enthusiasm quickly soured. “To allow one million strangers in is to endanger German civilisation,” Henry Kissinger reportedly warned Merkel. “I had no choice,” she replied.
She has never regretted the decision. Part of her motivation for writing the memoir was to explain her reasons, and essentially they were very simple: “I felt that our values were put to the test.” What riled her most was the insinuation by German critics that only someone who grew up in the GDR could have made such a decision; someone, as she writes, “who does not understand our values”. The suggestion that she was somehow not German was offensive — but the possibility that she felt a particular empathy for those fleeing tyranny for freedom might be fair.
The decision marked the turning point in her popularity with her electorate. The Alternative for Germany (AfD), a far right party formed in 2013, seized its opportunity and has been both fomenting populist anger and rising inexorably in the polls ever since.
Was the resurgence of the far right a price worth paying for her humanitarian impulse? Her immigration policy, she points out crisply, was not its only fuel. “You cannot stick to the agenda of those who are against democracy,” she goes on. “You have to go your own path, and I hope of course that the AfD becomes weaker again. But betraying my own values just for fear of a rise of the AfD? I think that was not right.”
Merkel readily admits to the failure of her efforts to combat climate change, which date right back to 1995, when, as German environment minister, she hosted the very first Conference of the Parties (Cop 1) in Berlin. “Are we humans truly willing and able,” she writes, “to take necessary, timely decisions for our survival? To date, there is no evidence for this.” But she stands by her approach, so I ask if she has been hurt by the criticism of her legacy.
“No. I think this is legitimate in a pluralist society. We are living in very complicated and difficult times, so it’s obvious for people to ask how much is Mrs Merkel to blame. We are a free country, I can live with this diversity.” Given her robust defence of her record in the book, I’m not convinced she feels as relaxed about it as she wishes to appear. What headlines about the book does she expect? “I don’t expect anything. I wrote it to the best of my abilities and faith, and I would be happy if people liked reading it. And the rest is freedom of speech.”
I get no impression that she will relish being back in the headlines, whatever they say. She keeps in touch privately with Obama and Emmanuel Macron, and talks on the telephone sometimes with Jean-Claude Juncker, the former president of the European Commission, but has withdrawn entirely from public life and won’t comment on the collapse of the German government. Many of her friends work in the arts, and theatre, opera, literature and classical music now absorb her time.
“Of course, when I follow certain developments today I think, ‘What would I have done in that situation?’ But I am relieved now to not have this power any more and also to not have this responsibility any more, so I can just enjoy a Saturday without worries. And if things happen, other people are responsible. That’s a great relief. I am very lucky to have had this responsibility - and now I’m also happy to have left it behind.”
The great mystery of Merkel is how someone apparently so unexcited by personal power nonetheless won and maintained it for 16 years. Her mentor, Chancellor Kohl, was once asked what motivates her and replied: “Power, power, power.” Yet she writes that on the day she became chancellor she felt “happy and proud” - and that’s it. There is not another word about her triumph. Nobody, I say, would manage their national football team if they weren’t excited by the game itself.
“I think we should talk about what is power. For me, power is the possibility to influence things, to create things, to turn my ideas into laws, so of course I wanted this power. And I would not have stayed in politics for 35 years if I had been in the opposition all the time. In the opposition you can also develop a lot of ideas. But a lot of these ideas will end up in the dustbin, and I was really wanting to influence things. So I had a certain ambition for power.”
As we say goodbye, I tell her how many people asked me to beg her to return to political life. Looking not displeased, she says: “No.”
Freedom: Memoirs 1954-2021 by Angela Merkel is published on December 10 (Pan Macmillan).
Written by: Decca Aitkenhead
© The Times of London