Freedom, Memoirs 1954-2021
Angela Merkel, Macmillan, £35

FONDLY referred to as “Mutti” (Mummy) by many Germans, Angela Merkel spent an unprecedented four terms as Chancellor of the Federal Republic of Germany, from 2005-21. She was the first woman to hold this office. Unlike so many of her former compatriots from the GDR, who were unceremoniously dismissed from their posts after unification, she was the great exception and rose to become the most powerful politician in united Germany.

This is her account of those momentous years, but if any reader is looking for revelations or sensational exposures, they will be sorely disappointed. Her memoir is a rather pedestrian chronological narrative of events in which she was involved, from the early days of unification, through the Kohl scandal (in which it was revealed that he had accepted millions of Deutsche Marks in secret donations from an arms manufacturer), the global financial crash and Greek economic crisis to the pandemic. During her retelling she gives us over-much detail, often only of probable interest to German readers.

The first 100 pages are dedicated to her childhood and youth in the GDR. 

As a baby she was taken by her parents, who lived in Hamburg, to live in the Uckermark, a rural part of East Germany, north of Berlin, where she still lives today in retirement. This section is also unnecessarily detailed, and her lack of narrative skill doesn’t help in holding the reader’s interest. Apart from giving her family’s background history and letting us know that her father was a Protestant pastor, one gains scant insight into the daily life of the family. It is very much a litany of how awful it was living under a “dictatorship.”

She doesn’t explain, for instance, what motivated her father to choose the unusual route of leaving the West to live in the GDR, when many others were moving in the opposite direction. He was clearly a progressive figure and known locally as “Red Kasner” (Kasner was their family surname), but she doesn’t explain why he had this sobriquet. Despite her father’s clear sympathy for the socialist project, she became a fierce critic.

Although having spent the first 35 years of her life in the GDR, Merkel never felt herself a citizen. She underscores this when she tells us that, in 1974 when the GDR football team was drawn against the Federal Republic in the World Cup and playing in Hamburg, Merkel was rooting not for the GDR team but for the Federal Republic. To her chagrin the GDR won 1-0.

The early post-war years in East Germany were harsh, and with the Cold War daily threatening to become a hot one, the political climate was tense and often critical. In their handling of these tensions and with a population that only recently had lived in thrall to the Nazis, mistakes were made by the GDR government. 

Life was not made easy for those belonging to the church which had, traditionally, been a vehement opponent of socialism and often functioned as a fifth column. Despite all the drawbacks, however, Merkel – clearly a very bright girl – appeared to enjoy a happy childhood and made good headway, going on to high school, then university, where she acquired a PhD in physics.

Her schooling and experience in the GDR clearly socialised her and informed her political acumen and psychology. It also endowed her with an implicit belief that women in society are the equal of men, which was less the case in West Germany, where the woman’s role was to a large extent still seen as that of housewife. 

Her training as a physicist in the GDR helped determine her very pragmatic approach to politics. She was always conciliatory, not devious, dogmatic, or aggressive, and lacked an overblown ego — she dealt with facts and the real world. She is someone who doesn’t reflect much, and you feel she has little interest in, or appreciation of history and is concerned only with the here and now. She lacks a real vision, viewing the FRG as the apogee of freedom and democracy and referring to the GDR only as “the dictatorship.” The German so-called “social market economic system” is for her the supreme expression of freedom.

She embarked on her political career shortly before unification, becoming active in the dissident group Demokratischer Aufbruch (Democratic Awakening) which, on unification, fused with the Christian Democratic Union (CDU). 

Merkel was appointed deputy spokesperson of the last pre-unification GDR government. In federal elections in 1990, the first to be held following unification, she was elected to the Bundestag, and went on to play an active role during the process of privatising the GDR economy by the Trust Agency which was given the task of overseeing this. Over 8,000 businesses with four million employees were placed in the hands of this Agency. 

It had dire consequences for GDR workers, something Merkel admits in her memoirs. When the West German vulture capitalists descended on the GDR, asset-stripping and making thousands jobless, she expresses her sympathy but sees it as necessary if eastern Germany were to survive in a competitive market. However, she places the blame for the collapse of East German industry wholly on the GDR government. 

She writes sympathetically but the terrible human cost fails to shake her confidence in capitalism. She doesn’t explain that it was Kohl who pushed for the rapid introduction of currency parity between the GDR and West German Mark, thus making GDR industry uncompetitive overnight, and Kohl did this with the full knowledge that it would be disastrous for East Germans. She asserts that: “Their competitiveness [GDR businesses], already feeble, had been dramatically worsened still further by the 1:1 Ostmark to Deutsche Mark exchange rate. You could say that this is all incredibly unjust, but that’s the legacy of ‘real socialism’.”  

This is even though she told the Trust Agency chief Rohwedder (later assassinated under mysterious circumstances) that “the stories from citizens and managers on the ground [former GDR citizens] had sometimes left me speechless... do you have any idea of the kind of people who are working for your Trust Agency? They’re young and smart, you might even say arrogant, twenty-somethings who have probably just finished their legal studies and present themselves as people who have gorged on wisdom. They have everything except an understanding of how people actually work!” 

In 2000, in a speech to the party faithful during her bid to become general secretary of the party, she wooed them with a starry-eyed vision: “I want a CDU that will develop the ethics of social capitalism within a globalised context. I want a CDU that can reconcile the economy and humanity even within this new context.” This contextualises her outlook.

In her epilogue she explains rather lamely the book’s title: “If we want to live in freedom, we must defend our democracy... we can do that if we work together. If we commit ourselves together. Everyone for themselves, and all of us in it together. Because freedom cannot only exist for the individual, freedom must apply to everyone.” Perhaps adequate for a sermon to a Sunday school class, but hardly a profound valedictory statement for a politician of stature.