Freedom

January 15, 2025
Finding herself in the free world. It wasn't long ago that, in the eyes of many, the de facto leader of the Western world was--irony of ironies--a graduate of Karl Marx University. That institution has since reclaimed its original name, Leipzig University, and that leader is now retired. Angela Merkel has certainly earned the right to chronicle, over more than 700 incident-rich pages, her improbable journey from East German Ph.D. quantum chemist to Germany's first female chancellor, a position she held from 2005 to 2021. The book's title isn't hyperbolic: Growing up in the spy-steeped German Democratic Republic, Merkel witnessed how her parents were "on thin ice," forever wary of speaking their minds. The collapse of the GDR inspired Merkel, lighthearted and intellectually curious by nature, to use her new freedom. In 1989 she walked into a political party office and offered to help. "See those boxes back there?" she was told. "Could you unpack them?" From there it was a steady rise to the top, by way of the Bundestag (the parliament) and cabinet ministries. Merkel's prose may be as graceful as her mother's boxy and basic Trabant car, but her spare sentences have their own power, reflecting her rational approach to politics when, having to deal with the "self-righteousness" of Vladimir Putin and the selfishness of Donald Trump, she was the adult in the room. "Never explain, never complain," she writes, citing the axiom linked to the British royal family. Merkel's longtime adviser Beate Baumann helped write the memoir--the female partnership is itself rare--and the voice is confident but humble, and not without heart, as the author recounts a time of prosperity and tumult. The book is as no-nonsense, and often as comforting, as the sausages and potato salad that Merkel dined on to celebrate becoming chancellor--the same modest fare that she ate 16 years later to mark her retirement. A rigorous and sober assessment of a groundbreaking career.

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February 21, 2025

Merkel was touted as the most powerful woman in the world from 2005 to 2021, when she served as chancellor of the Federal Republic of Germany. In her memoir, the scholar of quantum chemistry narrates in a dispassionate voice her remarkable rise and reign as Germany's first woman chancellor. Although born in Hamburg in West Germany, she lived her first 35 years in communist East Germany, where her father, a Lutheran minister, was assigned a pastorate. She describes a lighthearted youth gradually learning the limits and strictures of a closed socialist state. Her focus falls mostly on her life after Germany's reunification in October 1990. She tells of her first political steps, working for and becoming a party spokesperson for a Democratic Awakening, and then being elected to the German federal parliament. Ever rising, she names people she encountered on her way to the top; once the memoir reaches the apex of Merkel's power, it recounts the challenging decisions of leadership and her interactions with other world leaders. VERDICT Merkel's easy prose offers an appealing read with instructive political and social analysis and commentary, replete with engaging insights into not only the woman herself but also major political developments and personalities of the early 21st century.--Thomas J. Davis

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