4 The New York ReviewThe Chancellor :
The Remarkable Odyssey
of Angela Merkel
by Kati Marton.
Simon and Schuster,
344 pp., $30.In 1989, as the Berlin Wall
was breached and the polit-
ical order of Europe was up-
ended, two obscure people
in their mid- thirties watched
it happen from inside an im-
ploding Communist state,
the German Democratic Re-
public. In Dresden, Vladi-
mir Putin, an agent of the
KGB, burned secret files in
a furnace at the intelligence
agency’s headquarters. He
most probably observed the
chancellor of the other Ger-
many, Helmut Kohl, sweep
into Dresden and address
an enthusiastic crowd about
the unity of the German na-
tion. Putin knew the end was
nigh.
Just 120 miles away in East
Berlin, Angela Merkel, a dis-
illusioned and rather bored
quantum chemist, joined
a good- natured crowd of
her fellow easterners surg-
ing across the Bornholmer
Bridge into West Berlin. She
looked around for a while and met some
of the native westerners. But she did not
overdo the celebrations. “I had to get
up early the next morning,” she later
explained. “And this much foreign com-
pany was enough for the time being.”
While Putin saw these events as cata-
clysm ic, Merkel a l ready seemed to have
the strangely phlegmatic attitude to-
ward grand ideas of history that would
characterize her sixteen- year reign as
chancellor of the united Germany.
In the dissolution of the GDR, both
Putin and Merkel lost a kind of home.
Putin’s wife, Lyudmilla, recalled, “We
had the horrible feeling that the coun-
try that had almost become our home
would soon cease to exist.” Except for
the first weeks of her life in her birth-
place, Hamburg, Merkel had spent all
of her thirty- five years in the GDR.
Both, too, experienced the overthrow
of a presiding pantheon: the gods of
Marxism- Leninism.
In Putin’s case, the violent after effects
of that psychological shock remain all
too obvious. It is striking, though, that
Merkel told her friend the film director
Volker Schlöndorff that he and other
westerners would never quite under-
stand those like her who had grown up
behind the wall: “We can learn to be
like you. But you can never figure us
out. Because our master”—she used the
German word Lehr meister, which also
connotes a teacher or instructor—“is
dead.” The dead master, the disappear-
ing homeland, the need to start again
in a new polity (post- Soviet Russia for
Putin, the new united Germany for
Merkel)—the leaders had a great deal
in common. (They could speak to each
other freely, because she spoke Russian
and he German.)
Both, too, gained from these shared
experiences a sense of the fragility of
states, the existential vulnerability thatlies beneath their claims to perma-
nence. Putin has used this knowledge
for dark purposes, deploying all the
tools he possesses—from disinfor-
mation and subversion to crude mili-
tary force—to destabilize or destroy
those countries he sees as apostates
or enemies. Merkel, however, came to
embody the opposite impulse. Her as-
tonishing rise from awkward outsider
who saw even other Germans as “for-
eign company” to national and global
leadership suggested that a radical
disturbance in the established order of
things might lead not just to dissolution
but to the creation of hitherto unimag-
inable democratic possibilities.Even as that hope now recedes rap-
idly into the past, there is something
magical in the way a young woman
who had never had a meaningful vote,
who had no political experience and no
rhetorical skills, could, scarcely more
than a year after the fall of the wall,
be a full member of the federal cabi-
net governing the European Union’s
most powerful state. Her ascent to
long- term power was no less improb-
able than Putin’s, but it seemed, at
least for a while, to give a much more
optimistic meaning to the events that
allowed one of them to dominate Eu-
rope in the East, the other in the West.
While he emerged from the collapse of
the old Eastern bloc with a Hobbesian
vision of disorder as a state of decline
held in check only by the strong hand
of a ruthless leader, she was by far the
most spectacular example of the way
the collapse of an old regime might
create a much more benign sense of
opportunity.
In 2019 Merkel told graduating stu-
dents in a commencement address at
Harvard, “Anything that seems to beset in stone or inalterable can indeed
change.” This, for her, was a wonder-
ful thing. For Putin, it most certainly
was not. His assault on Ukraine is in
the name of an imaginary fixed and
unchanging Russianness: in his view,
what seems to have changed can, by
the exercise of unilateral power, be re-
stored to what it used to be.
These very different ways of under-
standing the experiences that shaped
them both may be why Putin always
seemed to be more anxious about
Merkel than any other world leader.
He plays childish power games with
visiting presidents and prime minis-
ters—most recently seating French
president Emmanuel Macron and then
Merkel’s successor, Olaf Scholz, at the
far end of an absurdly long table. But
with Merkel, the games were more se-
rious and more personal. In 2007, at
a meeting between them in Sochi, he
made sure that his big black Labra-
dor was free to approach and sniff at
Merkel, who was known to be fright-
ened of dogs. She was indeed visibly
scared.
Yet she surely also realized that this
stunt was a backhanded compliment.
Putin had taken the trouble to think
about her as a person, deploying his
KGB training to imagine what might
make her vulnerable to coercion. The
trick did not work, because Merkel
had a remarkable gift for not taking
things personally, and also a woman’s
skepticism about male display. “I un-
derstand why he has to do this—to
prove he’s a man,” she told a group
of reporters. “He’s afraid of his own
weakness. Russia has nothing, no suc-
cessful politics or economy. All they
have is this.”
It does not seem too much of a stretch,
then, to see Putin’s ratcheting up of
his long war on Ukraine as anotherbackhanded compliment to
Merkel. She announced in
October 2018 that she would
not seek another term in of-
fice, setting in train a long
farewell that surely loomed
large in Putin’s mind. The
buildup to his invasion of
Ukraine began in November
2021, just as her chancel-
lorship was winding down.
The timing was probably
not accidental. What better
moment to test the nerve of
Western Europe, and of the
wider NATO alliance, than
that at which it was losing its
Lehrmeisterin, the quiet au-
thority figure who had come
to seem, in a world of dem-
agogues and dictators trying
to prove their manhood, an
increasingly indispensible
marker of reassurance and
stability? Putin decided to
send a sharp probe into the
highly uncertain territory
of post- Merkel Europe. In
this, at least, his instinct
seems right: Western Europe
really is a different place
without Merkel, and no one
is yet quite certain what it
looks like. More than those
of any other individual, her
strengths and weaknesses,
her achievements and failures, have
made it what it is.The Chancellor, Kati Marton’s ele-
gant, concise, and accessible biogra-
phy of Merkel, is a portrait not just of
a person but of a kind of centrist and
consensual politics that once seemed
drab but now has the fascination of an
almost extinct species. Merkel made a
kind of decency that could be viewed as
dull feel almost exotic. Once, it might
have seemed in postwar Europe that
careful, patient, managerial politicians
who wanted nothing more or less than
to make things work as well as possible
without threatening existing structures
were a dime a dozen. Now the fear that
hangs over Western and Central Eu-
rope is that Merkel was the last of that
tribe. She has departed in a cloud not
of glory but of anxiety. Putin made sure
that Merkel’s era would recede into the
past with dizzying rapidity.
In a valedictory interview with the
Frankfurter Allgemeine Sonntagszei-
tung published at the end of October,
Merkel expressed her own dread that
something big might be coming to an
end. She did so, typically, without talking
about herself. Her thoughts were framed
more abstractly, but she did suggest that
Europe might be at a dangerous moment
precisely because of a generational shift
in leadership and what it implies for the
workings of collective memory:We have to take care now not to
enter a historical phase in which
important lessons from history
fade away. We have to remind our-
selves that the multilateral world
order was created as a lesson from
the Second World War. There will
be ever fewer people left who have
lived through that period. In historyThe Last of Her Kind
Fintan O’TooleGerman chancellor Angela Merkel and Russian president Vladimir Putin meeting with journalists
at Putin’s house in Sochi, Russia, January 2007. Putin summoned his dog Konni into the room
since Merkel was known to be afraid of dogs.Dmitry Astakhov/AFP/Getty ImagesO'Toole 04 09 .indd 4 3 / 10 / 22 3 : 39 PM