6 The New York Reviewthere is a recurring pattern where
people begin to deal recklessly
with [political] structures when
the generations that created those
structures are no longer alive.What Merkel remembers is not
World War II but its long epilogue in
the cold war. Her father, Horst Kasner,
a stern and idealistic Lutheran pastor,
moved his family to the East just after
she was born, settling in the small town
of Templin, fifty miles north of Berlin,
in 1954. It seems important, though,
that Merkel’s memories included a pre–
Berlin Wall Germany. She was seven
when the GDR sealed its borders—her
parents had taken it for granted that
they could travel freely to and from
the West. One of the political “struc-
tures” she would therefore never take
for granted was the freedom of move-
ment created by the EU. This was why,
for example, she immediately under-
stood (and was repelled by) the impli-
cations of the possible reimposition of
a hard border on the island of Ireland
after Brexit. The British found it hard
to grasp why she took this question so
seriously, but, she explained, “For 34
years I lived behind the Iron Curtain
so I know only too well what it means
once borders vanish, once walls fall.”
No doubt this memory also played
into Merkel’s boldest and most radical
decision: the opening in 2015 of Ger-
many’s borders to a million refugees
from the Syrian war. She knew that the
policy was highly controversial and that
it left Germany more divided than at any
time since the wall fell. But she point-
edly reminded her compatriots that she
herself was one of those who had beenexcluded from the freedoms and oppor-
tunities of Western Europe: “I was part
of the group that wanted to be let in.”Merkel is surely the last- ever de facto
leader of the EU to have looked from
the outside, and with longing, at liberal
democracy. Fair elections, freedom of
expression, independent courts, indi-
vidual rights—for her these were never
mundane realities. She also had to dis-
cover for herself, in her thirties, the
basic facts of recent European history,
which in her youth had been shaped by
the GDR’s official narratives of heroic
antifascist resistance, playing down,
most notably, the centrality of the
Shoah in Nazism.
These absences were not, moreover,
just external influences on her. Merkel’s
entire personality is that of a survivor
(rather than a dissident) in a totalitar-
ian state: careful, nonconfrontational,
watchful. Her gift for political com-
promise was that of a girl who learned
how to function simultaneously as a
loyal believer in her father’s Lutheran
Church (an awkward presence in an
atheist state) and as a member of the
official Communist youth movement.
Living in a country with perhaps the
most thorough system of official sur-
veillance ever created in Europe, she
learned to have an inner life, a secret
self that she almost never betrayed,
even when she had one of the most pub-
lic jobs in the world.
Marton recalls Merkel’s press con-
ference after her first swearing- in as
chancellor. Judy Dempsey of the Inter-
national Herald Tribune asked her
a very American question: “MadamChancellor, how do you feel?” It was
the last question Merkel would ever an-
swer publicly. She mumbled, “Well, yes,
well, under the circumstances... ” and
trailed off. How Merkel feels has always
been her own business. Marton quotes
her saying, “I have tried to maintain
spaces where I can be happy or sad with-
out explanation to the public.” In that
commencement address at Harvard in
2019, she touched on the relationship
between political repression and the rich
interior life that would make her, as a
politician, so enigmatic and so resilient:However, there was one thing
which [the Berlin Wall] couldn’t
do during all of those years: it
couldn’t impose limits on my own
inner thoughts. My personality,
my imagination, my dreams and
desires—prohibitions or coercion
couldn’t limit any of that.It is deliciously contrary that she
avoided becoming an informer for the
Stasi by posing as a silly blabbermouth.
She recalled, “My parents always told
me to tell Stasi officers that I was a
chatterbox and simply couldn’t keep
my mouth shut. I also told the agents I
couldn’t keep being an informant secret
from my husband.” In fact, Merkel’s
great skill as a political operator was
her extraordinary ability to keep her
mouth shut. Her practice, as she told
the Harvard graduates, was not to al-
ways “act on our first impulses, even
when there is pressure to make a snap
decision, but instead take a moment to
stop, be still, think, pause.” Her char-
acteristic mode in high- level meetings
and in wider debates about policy was
strategic taciturnity. She would wait
for others—usually voluble men with
very high levels of self- esteem—to talk
themselves out before swooping in with
her own conclusion. As Marton puts
it, her “power move” was “letting an
alpha male keep talking and waiting
patiently as he self- destructs.”In A Portrait of the Artist as a Young
Man, James Joyce’s alter ego Stephen
Dedalus speaks of “the only arms I
allow myself to use—silence, exile, and
cunning.” These were Merkel’s weap-
ons too. She kept quiet while others
expatiated. She entered the Western
world as an immigrant among “foreign
company,” with all the alertness and
self- control of the émigré. And she de-
ployed the cold cunning of the supreme
political opportunist. This was learned,
no doubt, in the GDR, where she de-
veloped the habit of steely calculation
in order to avoid the dangers of being
either an informer or a dissident.
Certainly by the time she entered
public life, in the immediate aftermath
of the fall of the wall, Merkel had a
knack for cool political patricide. Lo-
thar de Maizière, the first and last dem-
ocratically elected prime minister of
the GDR, brought her into high- level
politics by making her deputy spokes-
person for his government. It was he
who recommended Merkel to Kohl,
who was then looking for an East Ger-
man woman to fill the “soft” position
of minister for women and youth in the
federal government of the newly united
state. These were, as de Maizière wryly
noted, “two subjects Angela really did
not care about at all,” but the position
nonetheless made her, at thirty- six,
the youngest minister in German his-tory. Yet when de Maizière was falsely
accused of having been a Stasi infor-
mant, Merkel did nothing to help her
mentor. And in 1998, when Kohl was
caught up in a scandal concerning ille-
gal donations to his campaigns, it was
Merkel who acted as his political assas-
sin. Kohl had patronizingly referred to
his protégée as his Mädchen—girl. He
learned the hard way that she was a girl
with a razor up her sleeve.
The mastery of these weapons made
Merkel the most formidable demo-
cratic politician in Europe and allowed
her to accumulate the authority with
which she held the EU together. She
also, however, had a weakness that
threatened to pull it apart. Merkel al-
ways saw herself as a scientist. She re-
marked once that she chose to study
physics “because even East Germany
wasn’t capable of suspending basic
arithmetic and the rules of nature.”
Breaking problems down into their
basic arithmetic was her habitual way
of doing politics. Insofar as there was
anything that might be called Merkel-
ism, it was a revival of Benthamite utili-
tarianism. The quintessential claim she
would make about any policy option
she chose was that “the advantages out-
weigh the disadvantages.”But this self- image as a hardheaded
pragmatist, concerned only with the
pursuit of the best available outcomes,
obscured the importance of her heri-
tage as the daughter of a Lutheran pas-
tor. At one of the crucial moments of
contemporary European history, she
behaved essentially as a religious mor-
alist. Part of the problem was that she
never seemed to understand this about
herself.
It is, in retrospect, deeply ironic that
Merkel was at her most narrowly prag-
matic in dealing with Putin and at her
most punitive in her approach toward
fellow citizens of EU democracies.
With Russia, even after its annexation
of Crimea in 2014, she was all business,
to the extent of believing that depend-
ing on Putin for Germany’s supplies of
natural gas was just a commonsense
calculation of mutual economic inter-
ests. Yet in the crisis of the eurozone
following the great banking crash of
2008, Merkel treated an economic and
political problem as if it were a test of
moral righteousness. She threw her
weight behind a division of the EU into
good creditors (Germany and the other
Northern European nations) and bad
debtors (the so- called PIIGS: Portu-
gal, Italy, Ireland, Greece, and Spain).
Marton usefully reminds us that in
German, the word for debt—Schuld—
is the same as that for guilt. Those
countries whose banks had borrowed
recklessly were guilty; those (like, of
course, Germany) whose banks had
lent recklessly were innocent. And the
sinners must be punished—ordinary
citizens of the debtor nations should
be made to suffer so they would learn a
lesson they would never forget.
This way of defining the crisis suited
Germany, but it had nasty conse-
quences for Merkel’s larger ambition
to unify Europe. The imposition of
drastic austerity measures prolonged
and deepened the economic recession.
Merkel, meanwhile, did very little to
counter the impression that Germany
was taking charge and dictating terms.
Irish fans at the 2012 European soccer
championship carried a flag that said,HORTUS
ALCHEMICUS
SIX MIRRORS
BY
MARIANNA KENNEDY
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