The odyssey of German chancellor Angela Merkel

The mystery surrounding Merkel is deep; she may be the most private public figure in the world. Yet study her life and career we must if we are to understand our era. Her phenomenal achievements in navigating Germany and Europe through rolling crises—from the global financial meltdown to the arrival of one million Middle Eastern refugees, the rise of the alt-right, the Trump presidency, China’s ascendancy and, of course, COVID—mean that men and women aspiring to leadership in any field would do well to learn from Angela Merkel’s subtle formula for success.

In this excerpt, I explore how Merkel overcame liabilities as a triple outsider—a scientist, a woman, and an East German—to ascend to the chancellery, where she’d hold on for power for sixteen long years.

Here, we see her in her early days as a politician in Bonn, the capital of a newly unified Germany, as she observes and learns from her elders—including her most important mentor, Chancellor Helmut Kohl. Underestimated by Kohl and by most others, she is already in her years as Minister for Woman and Youth a canny and strategic politician, even as she is reinventing herself. As a pastor’s daughter growing up in atheist, communist East Germany, she learned not to call attention to herself, a skill that would serve her well in her quiet but relentless ascent.

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As Germany’s youngest minister in history at the age of just 36—and a woman from the East, to boot—Merkel knew that all eyes were on her. But even for someone as avid to learn new ways as Merkel, the passage from East to West Germany was sometimes rough.

Angela was particularly shocked at the attention focused on her appearance. In East Germany, there were few outlets for vanity. “Fashion” was not really on offer in the Peoples’ Department stores, which generally featured two new styles of coats per season. The population may have been shabby, but they were uniformly so. Suddenly Angela’s unfashionable hair- cuts, flat shoes, and shapeless coats were all scrutinized. The only other East German in Kohl’s Cabinet, Paul Krüger, the new minister of research and technology, recalled, “I had noticed Angela at political events and was struck by how little she cared about her appearance. That was striking. And yet she had presence. It’s hard to explain this, but from the outset, I had the feeling that she was different. She had an authority.” Mehr sein als schein— to be more than to be seen to be—was one of Angela’s Lutheran edicts; now that was being challenged by the demands of her new profession, which put a premium on appearance. De Maizière and, later, Helmut Kohl, pleaded with their female assistants (and, in Kohl’s case, his wife) to work on Merkel’s nonexistent fashion sense. “Angela dressed like a student in those days: sandals, baggy pants,” de Maizière recalled. Before their first official trip to Moscow, he asked his office manager, “Please talk to Dr. Merkel. I can’t travel with her if she looks like that.” When Merkel showed up in a new outfit for the trip, he attempted to encourage her, saying, “Wow! You look great, Angela!” Instead of seeming pleased by the compliment, “She turned beet red. The entire situation was very embarrassing for her.” The challenges of the situation were summed up in a lame joke that made the rounds back in the 1990s:

“What does Merkel do with her old clothes?”

“She wears them.”

 “For a man, it’s no problem at all to wear a dark-blue suit a hundred days in a row,” Merkel grumbled. “But if I wear the same jacket four times, I receive letters from citizens. . . . I once had a photographer lying under the table to take a picture of my crooked heels.” But, as always, she adapted. Merkel made her appearance a nonstory by building a wardrobe that was her equivalent of a man’s dark suit: a closetful of boxy, colorful jackets designed by a reputable Hamburg fashion house, comfortable black pants, and black flats. Eventually she even accepted the daily intervention of a hair stylist as part of the price of doing her job. Her old friend Michael Schindhelm recalled his surprise at once seeing Merkel wearing a dirndl—the frilly, full-skirted Bavarian folk costume—at the Salzburg Music Festival. “Angela, that’s the first time I’ve ever seen you in a dress!” he exclaimed, to Merkel’s visible discomfort.

Nevertheless, when British diplomat Paul Lever complimented her on the glamorous evening gown she wore to the Oslo Opera House, saying, “Madame Chancellor, you look great!” Merkel seemed pleased, and went into some detail regarding the dress and its designer. However, the media’s excited coverage of her departure from her predictable “uniform” discouraged her from ever wearing the dress again.

Merkel also struggled with other aspects of public presentation; what to do with her hands when she stood at a lectern, for instance. She under- stood that her fidgeting sent the wrong message. After trial and error, she landed on the “Merkel rhombus”: fingertips pressed together in what has since become her signature. (Years later, her party would use the emoticon in political campaigns, along with the slogan “Germany’s future in good hands.”)

Despite such awkwardness, there was a widespread feeling in Bonn in the nineties that the young woman from the East was rising too fast—in- deed, a Cabinet post within a year of entering politics was unusual, to say the least. Chancellor Kohl had begun treating her as a protégé, which disturbed others in his circle as well as those in the CDU who regarded her as an unwelcome and unqualified interloper from the East who had not earned her political stripes. Who would stop her was a topic of after-hours conversations in the capital’s political watering holes. Merkel was oblivious to the fact that twelve promising young men in her party had created a “working group” from which women (a rare species in the CDU hierarchy) were excluded. Called the Andes Pact, the men—all from rich, industrial German Länder (states)—pledged to support one another’s rise, a pointed reminder that women were unwelcome in the party’s higher echelons.

Wise enough to build her own base independent of powerful male patrons, she campaigned for and won a seat in the Bundestag, the German federal parliament (though not a requirement for a cabinet position, most ministers are members of the Bundestag), representing the formerly East German region of Mecklenburg Vorpommern. The path had been cleared for her by Gunther Krause, a prominent local politician who also fell from grace as a result of his Stasi connections. Though Merkel wasn’t from the rugged Baltic region, while campaigning, she gamely knocked back shots of the local schnapps with fishermen and won support with her simple affect and youthful optimism. As a campaigner, she did not patronize or pretend to have all the answers, but mostly listened, sympathized, and expressed herself in her characteristic plain style, convincing locals that she was one of them. They reelected her their representative in every federal election since 1990.

Merkel may not have been aware of a secret network of CDU men seeking to outshine her and may have appeared to be the wide-eyed innocent, but she was increasingly alert to the danger. “[I]f someone rises faster than normal, greed and envy soon rear their heads,” she noted in 1991. “You are under close scrutiny, and every little mistake will be registered and followed by a sharp reaction.” She resented the idea that Kohl gave her special treatment and bridled at the frequent references to her as his Mädchen, or young lady. “I find it annoying, to put it mildly. Our relationship . . . is not characterized by continuous goodwill. Kohl carefully and critically observes my work,” she insisted.

She did admit, however, that it was the German chancellor who launched her on the world stage by taking her to America in 1991, where he introduced Merkel to her hero Ronald Reagan. (By then, sadly, the former president was much diminished by Alzheimer’s disease.) Her first time in the White House, then occupied by George H. W. Bush, “there was a look of wonderment on her face when she shook hands with the president in the Cabinet Room,” recalled Robert Kimmitt, the US ambassador to Germany at the time.

On that trip, Kohl asked Merkel how he was regarded by East Germans. Not willing to be “inauthentic”—a sin by her lights—Merkel resisted the easy appeal of flattery. She admitted that, after years of propaganda, they generally saw him as a cartoonish figure—depicted as a pear-shaped capitalist with Uncle Sam propping him up.* Authenticity was more important to her than stroking needy egos. She wasn’t much good at faking emotions, nor interested in learning how.

She was interested, however, in doing the opposite: it was during those sometimes rocky early years that Merkel mastered steely composure. On a trip to Israel in the spring of 1991, she was all but ignored by her hosts, who assumed she was a ministerial assistant. Some in the media reported on her tears of frustration. “I have to be tougher,” she acknowledged to Herlinde Koelbl at the time.

If the trip to Israel started with tears, Merkel recalled how differently it ended, with a visit to a monastery on the Sea of Galilee:

*There was nothing subtle about Kremlin-inspired propaganda: my Budapest kindergarten teacher taught me an untranslatable Hungarian ditty, which I can still recite, depicting U.S. president Dwight Eisenhower as a human time bomb ready to explode.

“We stood overlooking the countryside with its hills. We saw the ground where the Sea of Galilee is located. Then a monk said, ‘This is where Jesus came down the hill, and, at this lake, Jesus met Peter, the fisherman. . . . And a bit farther, he fed the five thousand, and then he had the experience with the storm.’ I am familiar with the Bible and with what happened at the Sea of Galilee. But to hear someone simply assert that this is what happened, right here, was something quite startling.”

Searching for grounding amid disorienting change, Merkel found inspiration at the Sea of Galilee. “I am not always clear and sure in my faith. I sometimes have doubts,” she admitted, unusual for a politician. But there, by the Sea of Galilee, in a monastery where Benedictine brothers worked with youth with disabilities, she found the monk she was speaking with “had a source of strength in his difficult work that I envied.”

As chancellor, Merkel would return many times to Israel, making the still-fraught topic of the German-Jewish relationship one of the core issues of her administration—and one of the foundations of modern Germany. But on this first trip, it was inner strength she sought. In the space of two years, the ground had shifted beneath her. She had transformed herself—as her country had been transformed. Now her ambition needed a stronger anchor. Her private faith, and the Bible, would steady her sometimes rocky path.

Germany, the heavily armed frontier between East and West, had long stood at the epicenter of America’s effort to avert nuclear Armageddon. In the 1990s, under Chancellor Kohl, the country enjoyed a breathing spell after years of high tension. With unification achieved, Germany felt safe as part of a network of postwar institutions that bound it to the United States and, beginning in 1993, to the new European Union. The Atlantic alliance enjoyed its peak years, embodied by the warm friendship between Helmut Kohl and Bill Clinton—two men of remarkably similar gifts and vulnerabilities. Kohl’s goal was the merger of East and West Germany into a single nation—in more than name. When Clinton and Kohl walked together through the Brandenburg Gate from West to East Berlin on a cloud- less day in July 1994, it seemed the perfect finale to the high drama of the last fifty years: the Berlin Airlift in 1948, when the United States airlifted food, water, and medicine to the desperate citizens of the besieged city in response to a Soviet blockade; the building of the wall, and the confrontation between American and Soviet tanks at Checkpoint Charlie in 1961; President Kennedy’s “Ich bin ein Berliner” address in 1963; and Ronald Reagan’s plea “Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall!” in June 1987. Under Kohl, Germany became Europe’s largest country and soon the Continent’s economic powerhouse.

Angela Merkel, the most prominent East German in Kohl’s government, was part of the chancellor’s plan to merge the two parts into a whole. Stefan Kornelius, the author of an early political biography of Merkel, noted that Kohl treated her as “a kind of trophy” of German unification. What the garrulous and normally shrewd Kohl did not calculate was that his “trophy” had plans and ambitions of her own and was willing to bide her time to realize them.

As minister for women and youth, Merkel broke no ground, but she proved a supple, nonideological politician able to compromise on controversial matters. For instance, regarding abortion, she opposed legalizing it, but was in favor of decriminalizing it. She often kept her own rather conservative views to herself and basically punted on the issue.

With Merkel having demonstrated her capacity for hard word, loyalty, and discretion, Kohl soon offered her the more prestigious environment portfolio in 1994. Instead of an immediate, enthusiastic “Yes!” for this obvious promotion, Angela once again requested time to think it over. For several weeks, she kept the news to herself—a departure from Bonn’s general political custom of self-promotion. Kohl wondered if she was actually even interested. But Merkel was merely attempting to get a feel for what lay ahead

for her in such a high-profile position. Championing the government’s relatively new environmental protection policies in the industrial powerhouse of Europe was far from a “quota Frau” responsibility.

Merkel had long been determined not to be pigeonholed into any fixed identity: neither Ossi nor Wessi (as Germans from the West are known). She also resisted the “Frau” label, as she felt that aspect of her identity was self-evident. In May 1993 she found a way to make clear that she was fundamentally, if quietly, a feminist. In a book review of Susan Faludi’s Backlash: The Undeclared War Against American Women for a mainstream German woman’s journal, she wrote:

As long as women aren’t represented in leadership positions, in the media, in political parties, in interest groups, in business, as long as they don’t belong to the ranks of top fashion designers, and top chefs, role models for women will be determined by men. . . . What are my chances of getting married if I’m in a leadership position? What are my chances of having a miscarriage? How will my children suffer if I try to combine career and family? These questions are discussed time and again using negative examples that discourage women. It’s the attempt by men to keep positions they currently occupy. . . . In my opinion, equality means the equal right for women to shape their own lives.

There is nothing ambiguous about this: Angela Merkel was a feminist. Nevertheless, she would face criticism over the years from those who felt she was insufficiently committed to the advancement of women—that she was too low-key in her advocacy. Though she bristles at sexist humor, she would not embarrass the joke teller in public. “I give him an angry look, and, later, when we are alone, I’ll tell him that was not okay,” she once said, explaining her strategy. She insisted that her most powerful weapon against sexism was achieving success in her own life, as a spur for others to follow.

Her approach to leadership—in this and other areas—does not lean heavily on the bully pulpit.

From The Chancellor: The Remarkable Odyssey of Angela Merkel by Kati Marton. Copyright © 2021 by Kati Marton. Reprinted by permission of Simon & Schuster, Inc.