The Chancellor

The Remarkable Odyssey of Angela Merkel

Kati Marton

• Publisher: Simon & Schuster
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781501192647
• Topic: Política y relaciones internacionales
• Subtopic: Biografías políticas

The "captivating" ( The New York Times ), definitive biography of German Chancellor Angela Merkel, detailing the extraordinary rise and political brilliance of the most powerful—and elusive—woman in the world. Angela Merkel has always been an outsider. A pastor's daughter raised in Soviet-controlled East Germany, she spent her twenties working as a research chemist, entering politics only after the fall of the Berlin Wall. And yet within fifteen years, she had become chancellor of Germany and, before long, the unofficial leader of the West.In this "masterpiece of discernment and insight" ( The New York Times Book Review ), acclaimed biographer Kati Marton sets out to pierce the mystery of Merkel's unlikely ascent. With unparalleled access to the chancellor's inner circle and a trove of records only recently come to light, she teases out the unique political genius that had been the secret to Merkel's success. No modern leader so ably confronted Russian aggression, enacted daring social policies, and calmly unified an entire continent in an era when countries are becoming more divided. Again and again, she cleverly outmaneuvered strongmen like Putin and Trump, and weathered surprisingly complicated relationships with allies like Obama and Macron.Famously private, the woman who emerges from this "impressively researched" ( The Wall Street Journal ) account is a role model for anyone interested in gaining and keeping power while staying true to one's moral convictions. At once a "riveting" ( Los Angeles Review of Books ) political biography, an intimate human portrait, and a revelatory look at successful leadership in action, The Chancellor brings forth one of the most extraordinary women of our time.

1 AGAINST THE TIDE

Nothing in life is to be feared. It is only to be understood.”

—Marie Curie (1867–1934)

Pastor Horst Kasner missed the birth of his firstborn child. On that day, July 17, 1954, he was driving a van filled with his family’s furniture to a remote hamlet in East Germany, where he would begin life as the small town’s new minister.

“Only Communists or idiots go east voluntarily,” the West German movers told Kasner. Well over six feet tall, the sharp-featured twenty-eight-year-old was one of the few to answer Hamburg bishop Hans-Otto Wölber’s call to service in the underserved Soviet zone. “I would have travelled anywhere to preach the word of our Lord,” Kasner would later say. He and his wife, Herlind, a twenty-six-year-old English teacher, had married only the year before. Horst had warned the fine-boned, blue-eyed, Danzig-born Herlind Jentzch that his duty to the church would always come first. He kept his word.

Kasner, born Kazmierczak, to a Polish father, but raised in Berlin, was seven years old when Adolf Hitler came to power in 1933. A member of the Nazi Party’s Hitler Youth organization while in high school and recruited into the Nazi armed forces, or Wehrmacht, at age eighteen, he is said to have been captured a year later by the Allies—though the particulars of that chapter of his life are unavailable to researchers, if they exist at all after so many decades. Following his release, Horst studied theology at the prestigious Heidelberg University and then in Hamburg. And that is the sum total of what is in the public record regarding the background of Angela Merkel’s father.

Fortunately, personal interviews tell us more. To this austere, demanding man of God, Angela would never be as important as his faith or his flock. Though she accepted this fact, his oldest daughter was understandably left longing for a more present, more approving father. Kasner was never quite satisfied with his brilliant child—certainly he never explicitly expressed his approval—yet Angela never ceased in her attempt to win his full-hearted support. The connection between her never fully realized desire for her father’s approval and her intense drive for achievement is clear. But perhaps none of Horst Kasner’s actions was more influential on Angela’s early development than his decision to leave West Germany’s relative security to face the dangers and volatility of the Soviet-occupied East.

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Angela Merkel’s birthplace, the once-bustling port city of Hamburg, was a charred, unrecognizable ruin after British and American bombers flattened it in 1943, killing forty thousand people. The Germans coined a new word, Feuersturm (firestorm), to describe the city’s devastation. Yet by the time of Germany’s surrender on May 8, 1945, thousands of desperate survivors—among them newly freed refugees from concentration camps and those fleeing the Soviet Union’s merciless Red Army—were drawn to what remained of Hamburg, crowding into the shells of buildings and makeshift shelters.

By 1954, the year Angela Dorothea Kasner was born in Barmbek Hospital, determined citizens had cleared the worst of the devastation. Streets were passable again, buildings were reconstructed under scaffolding, and life gradually began to resume its former rhythms. The Allies, who had dispatched the bombs a decade earlier, now sent millions in aid to rebuild. Hamburg was on its way to becoming the Federal Republic of Germany’s center of trade, media, and style, gradually reclaiming the status it had held in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries as a free imperial city of the Hanseatic League—a Baltic maritime trade group. Survivors of the Feuersturm again began to envision the possibilities of a decent life. Eager to bury the past under the rubble, crowds packed the dive bars of the St. Pauli’s red-light district, and the city surged with creative energy, including a vibrant concert and theater scene, as well as a lively and irreverent press. Those participating in the revival were as reluctant to recall life during the Third Reich as they were to spare a thought for their once fellow citizens now trapped in the Soviet-occupied East.

For by 1954, it had become clear that the Democratic Republic of Germany was anything but. Founded in 1949, under Soviet military occupation, it was virtually a carbon copy of the other Moscow-run “satellites” (Poland, Hungary, Czechoslovakia, Bulgaria, Romania, and Albania), with effectively only a single legal political party, the Communist Party, in control of civilian and political life. The year before Angela’s birth, East German workers had erupted in revolt. On June 16, 1953, thousands of construction workers laid down their tools and marched down East Berlin’s main thoroughfare, demanding higher pay, better working conditions, and fair elections. In response, East Germany’s Soviet-controlled government declared martial law, killing several hundred protestors and establishing a brutal pattern to be repeated in Hungary in 1956, in Czechoslovakia in 1968, and in Ukraine in 2014.

The government violence and repression turned a steady migration from East to West Germany into a human flood. That year, seven years before the inner German border wall would finally stop the hemorrhaging, 331,000 East Germans abandoned their homes and livelihoods and headed West.

One German family chose to travel in the opposite direction. Two months after her husband left Hamburg for the East, Herlind Kasner, with daughter Angela in a basket, boarded a train for the three-hour journey to Quitzow, in the province of Brandenburg, to join him. The contrast between the reviving bustle of Hamburg and bare-bones life in this small farming town was sobering, even for the ascetic pastor and his wife. Before long, the young family moved to Templin, a small town some ninety miles east, tucked in a region of pristine lakes and pine forests that resembled the backdrop of a German fairy tale. It was here that Angela Kasner took her first steps.

Angela was once asked what image comes to mind when she hears the word Heimat—an untranslatable German word that suggests not only the notion of home but also the place where you feel that you belong. She responded with a verbal sketch of the area around Templin: “a lake, some forests and cows, a boulder here and there… pines, and hay.” There, with very few distractions and the freedom to explore both nature and her own imagination, young Angela Merkel learned to rely on herself. Even today, Merkel maintains that the place where she prefers most to wake up is “at home.” Templin.

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The train from Berlin to Templin winds through many of the bloodiest stations of Germany’s last, troubled century, including Oranienburg, site of one of the first Nazi concentration camps; Sachsenhausen, first a Nazi, then a Soviet concentration camp; and Seelow, where Hitler’s and Russian leader Joseph Stalin’s troops savaged each other until the bitter end of the war. The Cyrillic road signs that still point the way toward Templin are an undeniable reminder of the Soviet army’s occupation. The local soil is still poisoned from weapons testing that was carried out at the nearby former Russian military base. During Angela’s childhood, this surreal calm was shattered several times a day by low-flying Soviet aircraft.

Pulling into Templin, a visitor finds a picturesque town of cobblestone streets and redbrick buildings. This is where Merkel grew up, went to school, and first married—and it remained her mother’s hometown until her death in 2019. When asked about her family’s move in later years, Herlind would explain: “We came as Christians helping other Christians. Some go to Africa. So why could we not go to the other part of our country?” The comparison between East Germany and Africa is revealing, suggesting just how alien the Communist East seemed to those from the West. Herlind paid a high price for their move East: for being a “bourgeois” pastor’s wife, she was barred from teaching. Yet Angela has no recollection of her mother ever lamenting their family’s move to the Soviet-occupied zone. Horst and Herlind Kasner instilled the values of sacrifice and self-discipline in their daughter from the beginning.

When the Kasner family first arrived at Waldhof—“forest court” in English—an isolated compound of approximately thirty buildings belonging to the Lutheran Church—they were too poor even to afford a stroller for infant Angela. A converted crate served as the future chancellor’s crib. “My father had to milk goats, and my mother learned from an old woman how to make nettle soup,” Merkel would recall. Her first memory is of running away from horses galloping through their yard. In those years, “My parents shared a small motorcycle for transport,” she remembered. Later, when Horst Kasner had become an established, state-approved pastor—when it became clear, that is, that he did not challenge the legitimacy of the Communist state—the family was granted two private cars, a rare privilege in a Soviet satellite.^I Many of his fellow churchmen held that he was much too accommodating to a malignant regime. Despite the privileges accorded to Kasner as a result of his prominence in the church, his status, as well as his family’s, was precarious. The country of Martin Luther was, according to a 1994 official report, de-Christianized under Communist Party rule. Learning to maneuver in such murky waters, however, provided the future chancellor useful lessons in political dexterity.

Part of the Waldhof complex consisted of one of East Germany’s most significant seminaries, where Kasner trained clerics. Life there was plain: no frills, no luxuries. Then and now, the parish included a shelter for several hundred children and adults with physical and developmental disabilities, who were taught simple trades. A vital part of the church community, their presence—even at Kasner family celebrations—always seemed normal to Angela.

Surviving neighbors recall Horst Kasner as an intimidating and controversial figure, known well beyond the immediate area. “He was a hard man, who did not strike you as a church man,” recalled Angela’s childhood friend Ulrich Schöneich, a tall, burly, still-youthful man who was once Templin’s mayor. Pastor Kasner may not have been a gentle man of the cloth, but from him Angela learned logical rigor and clarity of argument.

Kasner maintained a demanding regime for Angela. “Everything had to be in perfect order,” she explained in an interview early in her political career. Growing up, she had a difficult time understanding her father’s priorities: “My father was good at approaching people and getting them to talk. What really made me angry as a child was his way of showing so much understanding for everybody else. But if we children did something wrong, his reaction was completely different.” Particularly painful to Merkel was the realization that her beloved father appeared to use work as a reason to stay away from his family duties. “The worst was when he said he would be right back, but then it took hours for him to return,” she recalled. Some days she would wait for him in the street outside their home for “a very long time.”

Fortunately, there were other adults in Merkel’s young life who had time, patience, and the warmth that her chilly father and busy mother often did not provide. “I remember a gardener, a sturdy, older man, who instilled basic trust and great calm in me,” Angela recalled much later.

“I learned all kinds of things from him about practical life. I learned how to identify flowers, or when the cyclamen are in season. From him I learned how to talk to the mentally disabled. With him the atmosphere was warm and trusting, and he allowed me to eat carrots fresh from the ground. This man awakened a connection to the earth and to nature for me.… Today I recognize how important time is; more important than possessions.”

In this unspoiled setting of woods and lakes, Merkel grew to draw comfort from the silence of the countryside. Later, one of her closest aides in the chancellery would refer to Merkel’s rambles in these same woods as her “private think tank.” One of her oldest friends attributes what he calls the “mellow Merkel” to those early days spent far from the stress and clamor of urban life. She still enjoys the quiet, admitting: “All the talking; that is a problem for me sometimes.… It is important for me not to have to say anything and still be together with someone.” Angela Merkel’s comfort with silence would prove helpful in her future as politician and negotiator—when she would deploy it to unsettle adversaries.

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The serene years of Angela Kasner’s early childhood ended abruptly on the morning of August 13, 1961. Two days earlier, her father had sensed that something was amiss. As the family drove home from vacation in Bavaria, the pastor noticed large rolls of barbed wire stacked in a pine forest along the highway as their car crossed from West Germany into East Germany. How odd, Kasner remarked to his wife. Two days later, the Kasners were en route to church when the radio announced the news. Those rolls of barbed wire had been used to cut East Germany off from West Germany—and from the rest of Europe. Thereafter, East Germany would become a prison state. Kasner’s sacrifice for his God and his church suddenly took on another dimension.

“I was seven when I [first] saw my parents completely helpless. They had no idea what to do or say. My mother cried all day,” Merkel recalled. “I wanted to help them, to cheer them up, but it was not possible.” Herlind was realizing she might never be able to visit her family in Hamburg again. At least her husband’s family lived in East Berlin. The Hamburg family was cut off from the Kasners by Europe’s strictest border controls, which henceforth amputated West Germany from the East.

Erecting the roughly seventy-mile Berlin Wall (or the Antifascist Protection Rampart, as it was called officially) and the inner German border wall along the boundary between the two countries was an act of desperation to salvage Communist East Germany. With an open border, up to two thousand East Germans had been leaving for the West each day. Now a concrete barrier four feet wide and thirteen and a half feet tall was topped by barbed wire, while on the ground, land mines, dogs, and guards with automatic weapons made the border between East and West Berlin Europe’s deadliest strip of land. Floodlights after sunset discouraged all but the most determined from flight. Later, Merkel would call the country of her youth a Lager, a word used generally to describe concentration camps.

Within the sanctuary of the Waldhof, however, life for young Angela did not change materially. She had her parents and her younger siblings, Marcus (born in 1957) and Irene (born 1964). And Angela had access to her parents’ wide-ranging collection of books they had brought with them from Hamburg; in a closed-off country, these became the child’s means of escape. Even before adolescence, she had a voracious interest in discovering new worlds contained in books. During the long, dark nights in the spartan Waldhof, Angela devoured the Russian classics, beginning her lifelong affection for Russian culture and language. “Russian is a beautiful language, full of emotion, a bit like music, but also a bit melancholy,” she observed. She would never confuse Russia’s soulful writers and poets—or the Russian people—with their Soviet leaders.

Although Herlind was barred from formal teaching, she taught her daughter serviceable English, which later helped Angela on the global stage. But the Kasners did not have many English books in the house. In East Germany, reading material that was not on the approved Marxist-Leninist list was controlled as carefully as weapons.^II The only English-language publication available to young Angela was the official British Communist Party organ, The Morning Star, which she would grab on trips to Berlin.

In the stillness of the parish house as she read biographies of great European statesmen and scholars, Angela found her role model: Marie Curie, the first woman to win not just one but two Nobel Prizes. There were a number of reasons for the physicist’s appeal. She was born in Poland, as was one of Merkel’s grandfathers. “While she was alive, Poland was divided and occupied by Russia. We also had our experience with Russian occupation,” Merkel noted in an early interview. But what most impressed the girl were the circumstances that led to Curie’s discovering the element radium:

“She made this discovery because she was convinced that she had a good idea.… If you believe in an idea—even if you are alone—if you pursue this idea, and suffer through the highs and lows, you will ultimately reach your goal, if the idea was right.”

Avid for escape and seeking a role model, Angela was fired by Curie’s tenacity and eventual triumph, particularly in a field rife with gender discrimination. “Nothing in life is to be feared, it is only to be understood,” Curie had written, a sentiment which deeply impressed the young Angela.

If Curie’s life in science offered inspiration, so too did the Bible, which was also Angela’s constant childhood companion. Thanks to her father’s Sunday sermons in Templin’s redbrick St. George’s Chapel, the young girl became as familiar with figures from the Old and New Testaments as oth...