The opening chapters of Freedom: Memoirs 1954-2021, Angela Merkel’s surprisingly blunt new autobiography, provoke a mild feeling of discomfort.
Not because of any previously unknown personal revelations or special quality of style. Taken at face value, they amount to little more than to a succession of briskly related biographical sketches: the joys and constraints of a lower-middle class German Democratic Republic upbringing with her pastor father, language teacher mother and two siblings, Irena and Marcus; the childish games they would play, their idyllic summertime bike rides and blackberrying trips in the forest around Templin, the small town Brandenburg town where she grew up.
None of this detail is especially interesting on its own. It’s more that it’s impossible to imagine Merkel ever having been a child at all.
Freedom is the sort of book that the global coverage – which will no doubt be ample – will describe as “much anticipated”. With just cause. Angela Merkel has a strong claim to be the most significant European politician of the 21st century so far. Her 2005-21 stint as German chancellor is unparalleled. Few, she reminds us sharply, get to leave office on something approaching their own terms, without defenestration by their rivals or being booted into touch by the electorate.
Post-chancellorship life has not been so smooth. Merkel tells us that “for a long time she couldn’t imagine writing such a book” that told the story of her humble origins and rise to political power. But write she did.
Of the book’s key subjects, two are likely to dominate readers’ attention. First, the monumental 2015 decision not to turn away the hundreds of thousands of refugees coming to Germany from Hungary, a decision with seismic consequences, which Merkel points to as one of the key spurs in beginning to write.
Then, the February 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine, by which time she had already left office. “Writing this book as if nothing happened was entirely out of the question… But this is not a book about Russia and Ukraine. That would be a different book,” she writes. Still, there are plenty of words devoted to an obviously unignorable subject.
What is it then, that Merkel has given us? Truthfully, there is little to stylistically differentiate it from any other mainstream politician’s memoir. Early biographical sketches are followed by the slow formation of influences and the slow tread through the world of social democratic German politics. How engaging these parts are will depend on personal predilection. What makes this account worthwhile is the extraordinary eventfulness of Merkel’s life and career.
Political memoirs rely on the quality of gossip and the illusion of candour. Freedom does not disappoint on either count. For instance: Merkel has faced persistent criticism for being insufficiently hawkish against Russia and Vladimir Putin during her time in office, particularly after the 2014 Russian annexation of Crimea. Why did she, and then French President Nicolas Sarkozy, earlier block Ukrainian and Georgian efforts to set down a concrete “membership action plan” for joining Nato? Well, she writes, the Russian Black Sea Fleet were still stationed in Crimea.
“It was unprecedented for a Nato candidate to be so entangled with Russian military structures… What’s more, only a minority of the Ukrainian population backed Nato membership at the time: the country was profoundly split,” she writes. It would, she adds, have been “illusory” to think this would have quelled Russian aggression. And does anyone really believe such action would have been taken by Putin as anything other than a baiting provocation ?
Merkel is also faintly witty on Trump, a figure “who assessed everything from the perspective of the real-estate developer he had been before he entered politics”. It isn’t difficult to see the comedy in the contrast between the self-avowedly sensible, Western European social democrat and the caricature American isolationist, who praised German companies’ investment in the US while bashing their holdings in Mexico. “He seemed to want to have it all,” Merkel notes with considerable understatement.
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Anyone searching for fresh insight into Merkel’s thoughts on Israel or Palestine will be disappointed. The chapter devoted to the conflict is fairly boilerplate, though she does criticise Netanyahu for paying “occasional lip service to the two-state solution”, while doing nothing to facilitate it. Instead, “by continuing settlement construction, he undermined it completely”.
As for the resurgent German far-right, more moderate forces “convinced that… they can keep it down by appropriating its pet topics and even trying to outdo it in rhetoric without offering any real solutions to existing problems”, are doomed to failure.
Meaningful change, Merkel writes, can only come through a kind of maximum-velocity sincerity and moderation. One that the “electorate will reward”. Such confidence and conviction runs throughout this highly competent, occasionally gripping memoir. Whether one agrees with her conclusions is quite another matter.
