Freedom: Memoirs 1954–2021
by angela merkel
st. martinʼs, 720 pages, $40
German readers have a powerful appetite for doorstop political autobiographies, gossip-filled 600- and 700-page apologias by major statesman and even minor party hacks. Never has such a book been more eagerly awaited than that of Angela Merkel, chancellor of Germany from 2005 to 2021 and arguably the towering female officeholder of the modern age, with Margaret Thatcher and Indira Gandhi as her only competition. Never has such a book suffered from lousier timing, either.
Merkel wowed people in the first years after the Cold War. She was hard to figure out and hard to resist: Born in Hamburg but raised in Soviet-dominated East Germany, the daughter of an activist Christian pastor living under a militantly atheist government, she was a brilliant physicist who, somewhere along the line, had developed a stirringly homey political oratory.
Wholly apolitical until her mid-thirties, Merkel threw herself into politics as soon as the Berlin Wall came down in 1989. Her ideology was neither consistent nor clear. Sixteen years in power (not to mention 720 pages of autobiographical reflection) have done little to make it more so. But she was ideological enough, when she arrived at the head of the old West German Christian Democratic Union, to notice a peculiarity of her new country’s political structure that could be exploited to devastating effect. Namely, in the wake of Hitler, the Christian Democrats (including their Bavarian “sister party” the Christian Social Union) were supposed to protect German conservatism not just by embodying it but also by delimiting it. Any political force to the right of the CDU was under constitutional suspicion of Nazi revanchism.
Merkel saw that if both the culture and the state are protecting a party from criticism on its right, then its logical electoral strategy is to move to the left. Increasingly she took up the policies of her main left-leaning rivals, the Social Democrats and the Greens. 2010: Elimination of military conscription and ongoing cuts to the military budget. 2011: An end to nuclear power. 2014: Establishment of a minimum wage. 2015: The opening of Germany’s borders to Middle Eastern refugees. 2017: Gay marriage, which she anchored in German law despite her personal opposition to it. Merkel’s strategy got her elected four times and made her as beloved of NGOs and corporate elites as her closest political ally, Barack Obama. Once Donald Trump came to power, the newspapers extolled her as Trump’s very antithesis—the “liberal West’s last defender,” even the “leader of the free world.
Her legacy is now contested. At some point this century, Germans drifted into a “triple dependency”—on Russia for energy, on China for export markets, and on America for defense. Since Russia invaded Ukraine in February 2022, Germany has been in outright crisis. Its energy costs are exorbitant, its relations with China are imperiled, and it gets scolded for spending so little on defense. You could blame all of these things on the United States, and some Germans do. But blaming Merkel has proved convenient for German politicians and progressive opinion-makers who not so long ago were praising her. This is unfair: The American-dominated world order to which the whole of Merkel’s chancellorship belonged was ruthlessly competitive and efficient. Snubbing trading partners was not on anyone’s agenda in 2005. But Merkel, alas for her, cannot make her case to that bygone age. Donald Trump’s resounding electoral triumph is another sign that our world has become hostile to her kind of politics, at just the moment when she must make the case for her historical reputation.
Merkel carries many typical East German childhood memories: the omnipresent smell of “scouring agents, floor polish and turpentine,” the taste of sour instant coffee gulped down before school. But Angela Kasner, to use her maiden name, wasn’t a typical East German. Her father was an evangelical pastor, “evangelical” being a German catch-all word for Protestant. East Germany’s religious policy at the time consisted of detonating the country’s most important churches. The fact that Merkel celebrated Christmas and lived on the grounds of a pastoral college that tended to the mentally disabled was cause for suspicion among her teachers. One classmate urged her to let on that her father was a Fahrer (chauffeur) rather than a Pfarrer (pastor).
But Merkel was not a typical East German Christian, either. Her father was a leftist: Red Kasner, they called him. Most Christian parents didn’t let their children join the communist youth groups that were a prerequisite for educational advancement. Kasner was an exception. He offered his children the choice, and Merkel joined. (Though Americans might once have scoffed at such compromises with authoritarianism, the experience of wokeness should make plain that, in Kasner’s shoes, most of them would have done the same.)
Merkel was smart. She was passionate about Russian, a gold-medal winner in language Olympiads who won the honor of competing in Moscow. She found life much freer there, as many East Germans did: She came home with a copy of the Yellow Submarine LP. Decades later, when she met Vladimir Putin, she discovered that his German was even better than her Russian, since “my knowledge of Russian was stuck in the [communist] era, and I wasn’t familiar with democratic political vocabulary.”
East German teachers were trained to discover which kids’ parents were watching Western television by asking leading questions in class. Merkel learned to tell them nothing. She learned that certain subjects were to be discussed only “out in the woods.” She chose a career in which ideology would be less important, though even there it followed her. Physics graduate students were required to study Marxism-Leninism, or “ML.” There were ways of forcing them to take it seriously. One’s overall doctoral honors could not be more than one grade higher than one’s grade for ML. Officially at least, you could not be a great theoretical physicist unless you were a great dialectical materialist.
Merkel was not a dissident. Before the Berlin Wall fell in 1989, she writes, “I had tried to make the best of the situation, always to remain curious and enterprising, to do no one any harm, and to push myself to the limits of my capabilities wherever possible.” This, it turns out, is in line with the idea of freedom that gives its name to this book: “Freedom,” Merkel writes in the closing pages. “For me it means finding out where my own boundaries lie.” There is nothing ignoble about this ideal, which she holds in common with many of her fellow citizens in the twenty-first-century West. But there is nothing heroic about it, either. Merkel seems unable to tell the difference between Give me liberty or give me death and Be all that you can be.
Merkel lucked out when communism ended. She drifted into a group called Democratic Awakening, a splinter party made up largely of Christians uncertain whether they wanted to rally behind West Germany’s Christian Democrat chancellor, Helmut Kohl, or seek a progressive alternative to East German socialism. They never did figure it out. Many were compromised by contacts with the Stasi, East Germany’s domestic secret police. When Democratic Awakening won less than 1 percent in early elections, many of its members simply fell into the CDU. Merkel, the smartest of them, was able to enter Western politics at a high level, at a transformational moment, with no political debts to anyone and no need ever to spell out her political principles. It would be a long time before she worked them out herself.
Voters around the Baltic coast city of Stralsund elected Merkel to the Bundestag, but she was unable to do much for them. Hopes that socialist firms might be integrated into Western ones in an orderly way were dashed. The shipbuilding industry, which had employed eight thousand people in the 1980s, all but collapsed. Merkel’s campaign literature showed her conversing with local fishermen, but most of those people lost their jobs, too. Her ability to stop, slow, or even mitigate this creative destruction was, by her own account, negligible.
Perhaps the greatest gift a politician can have is the capacity for eloquence on both sides of an issue. Merkel had it. As minister for women, she reminded feminists that, by law, German abortion counseling was supposed to advocate for the life of the unborn child. (This was back in the 1990s.) At the same time, she insisted that “this life is to be protected only with the woman, and not against the woman.” Gradually, Merkel picked up the progressive “vibe” of the West. In three of her four governments, the center-left Social Democrats were her coalition partners. She pushed gender quotas in all areas—from partisan candidate lists to corporate boardrooms.
Having been absent from Western European history until 1989, she was easily persuaded of all those metaphors of historical inevitability that defined the worldview of Barack Obama: History had a side—and she was on it. History had an arc—and it bent toward her. One could get the impression, reading this book, that Merkel wasn’t alive before the Berlin Wall came down. That previous generations had been skeptical about women wearing pantsuits strikes her as skurrile, or “weird.” (The word is mistranslated in the English edition as “grim.”) That marital rape was not listed as an offense until 1997 is “hard to imagine.” She apologizes for having failed to use feminized German nouns before it became common to—for having called herself a Physiker rather than a Physikerin early in her East German career, for instance.
Despite her eccentric background, Merkel has the same defining trait as most top-ranking politicians: ruthlessness. In 1999, party leader and ex-chancellor Helmut Kohl, architect of German reunion, was caught up in a campaign-finance scandal involving secret payments made by a former party treasurer. Kohl’s statements about what he had known were not deft. Two years earlier, he would have survived the scandal easily. But Kohl had lost an election to Social Democrat Gerhard Schröder the year before, an election that looked like a passing of the torch to a new, post-unification generation. As long as Kohl clung to the party leadership, he was bottling up the careers of the CDU’s best young politicians. Yet for any of them to stand up to the revered party leader would have been patricide. Whether because she exceeded her colleagues in ambition or because she owed Kohl less, it was Merkel who took him down, in a pitiless article in the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung. Until then, young Friedrich Merz, a leader in the Bundestag, had looked like a better bet to take up Kohl’s mantle—and he was at first happy with the article. “I liked the fact that he too was power-conscious,” Merkel recalls of Merz. “We both wanted to be boss.” But events had shown Merz to be a mere party soldier. Merkel was a killer—a leader. Merz spent Merkel’s sixteen years in power working in investment banking and nurturing a bitter grudge against her. (He went into the February 2025 elections with a good chance of finally becoming chancellor himself.)
Merkel had to feel her way into representing Germany on the world stage. It is an odd thing to craft foreign policy for a country one has been raised to regard as an enemy. Again she got lucky. As CDU leader in 2003, Merkel hammered Social Democratic chancellor Schröder for his opposition to George W. Bush’s Iraq War—even penning a passionate op-ed (now conveniently forgotten) in the Washington Post on the eve of the invasion. She paid no price for her misjudgment. By the time she took power two years later, the calamitous foolhardiness of Bush’s foreign policy was sufficiently evident to preclude any German involvement.
Thereafter, she was more circumspect. Sometimes she was outright visionary. She alone among European leaders dissented from the plan hatched by Barack Obama, British prime minister David Cameron, and French president Nicholas Sarkozy to attack Muammar Gaddafi’s Libya at the height of enthusiasm over the Arab Spring in 2011. That invasion not only resulted in the barbaric murders of Gaddafi and members of his family. It has also destabilized Libya to this day, turning it into a hub for mass migration from sub-Saharan Africa and destabilizing European politics in turn.
In 2008 Merkel and Sarkozy had blocked George Bush’s attempt to muscle Georgia and Ukraine into NATO at a summit in Bucharest. In Freedom, Bush’s incapacity to see strategic matters from other countries’ perspective comes off as almost childlike. Merkel recalled that, a year earlier in Munich, Putin had complained that the international order was under threat because “one state, . . . the United States, has overstepped its national borders in every way. This is visible in the economic, political, cultural, and educational policies it imposes on other nations.” Merkel, hostile to Putin in most matters, thinks that in this he was not wholly wrong.
Germany had been a free rider on American leadership for sixty years by the time Merkel took power. When, later, that leadership grew erratic, Germany lost its balance. Merkel was poorly positioned to see that what was going on in the United States was a matter not just of one oddball leader but of a broad popular revolt against an over-ambitious liberal order. Unlike most Western leaders, Merkel had almost no feel for the United States. Her address to a joint session of Congress in 2009—a string of platitudes about “the land of unlimited opportunity” and the beauty of the Pacific coast—radiated indifference and incuriosity.
Merkel does not find it easy to disguise her feelings about people. She clearly takes Bush for a likeable dunce, eager to gossip and talk about food when she wanted to talk about climate change. Trump she despises and resents. A diplomatic challenge he must have been, but no other European leader has handled him as ineptly as Merkel did. French president Emmanuel Macron, for instance, was able to air policy disagreements energetically while respecting the office of the presidency (understanding that in a republic like the French or American, the people are constitutionally embodied in that office). Merkel couldn’t manage even that. Time and again, she damaged her country’s interests in order to score cheap points in front of her fans. After Trump’s 2016 election victory, she sent him a condescending congratulatory note that promised cooperation so long as the United States managed to respect “democracy, freedom and respect for the law and the dignity of man, independent of origin, skin color, religion, gender, sexual orientation or political views.” Then, days after a meeting with Trump in 2017, she told a rally in Bavaria, “The times when we could fully rely on others are, to a degree, over. I experienced that in the last few days, so I can only say, we Europeans really need to take our fate into our own hands—naturally in friendship with the USA.” It was as much a threat to rupture the Atlantic alliance as anything Trump had said to date. She clearly assumed that neither Trump nor anyone on his staff would notice.
Merkel loved Barack Obama best. It was from him she sought counsel about running for a fourth term, and it is he who gets the most mentions of any foreign politician. His vision of the United States as a progressive project rather than a system of self-government is close to Merkel’s vision of running Europe through the European Union. The highlights of this book are two crises of the 2010s: the currency crisis that arose in Greece in the wake of the finance bust of 2008, and the migration crisis sparked by the Syrian war in the summer of 2015, when hundreds of thousands of refugees converged on Europe. Merkel leveraged her position as leader of Europe’s strongest economy to claim a policy-making prerogative in Europe’s name.
When impoverished Greece revealed that it had massively falsified its accounts in 2010, international bankers stopped lending to it. The country was on the brink of collapse, and so was the currency it shared with more than a dozen other euro states. Merkel was of two minds. She was “pro-European”: She believed in showing solidarity among EU members. In this sense, Germany and other creditworthy nations would need to vouch for the creditworthiness of the EU enterprise as a whole by bailing out Greece. But that is exactly what Germany’s bankers, its statutes, and its Supreme Court forbade. Hanging tough against Greece was not what she wanted. For her the European Union was the sacrosanct institution on which German readmission to the family of civilized nations rested, and the euro was its symbol. She recalls bursting into tears while arguing against the bailout that Obama and Sarkozy were urging her to assent to. “I would be hauled before the Federal Constitutional Court in a flash,” she realized.
It was the apogee of Merkel’s power, even if her course was more constrained than she might have wished. She really did save the euro, for good and ill, and she did so without breaking the law against absconding with German citizens’ money. The compromise she brokered was messy: a set of pan-European loan guarantees amounting to almost a trillion dollars. The solution actually damaged Greece’s economy and turned Merkel into a hate object across southern Europe. People painted Hitler moustaches on her posters. And though it escaped paying an exorbitant price in cash, Germany paid a high price in sovereignty, because it was now responsible for making good on obligations contracted by others. Of course, since World War II, Germany hadn’t had much sovereignty. That fact had never seemed to trouble Germans much. But now, more and more, it did.
The giant wave of migrants that poured into the EU from Syria and elsewhere in the summer and fall of 2015 had a great deal to do with it. Desperate to protect the principle of open borders among EU states, Merkel faced a decision on the night of September 4, 2015, when migrants began moving out of Hungary toward the Austrian border. Merkel and Austrian chancellor Werner Faymann agreed that they would each take half the migrants, rather than subject Europe to borders again. When Merkel calls it “a day that will go down in European history,” she is clearly thinking of her behavior on that day. “For me, we were not dealing with an ‘influx,’” she now recalls, “but rather with people.”
She and her cabinet, especially the Social Democratic part of it, were giddy with the goodness they were radiating. They were drunk on it. Social Democrat leader Sigmar Gabriel wore a button in the Bundestag reading “Refugees Welcome.” Merkel had given a speech centered on the phrase Wir schaffen das—which you might translate as “We can do it,” or “We can manage,” or “We can swing it.” The phrase circled the world, more often to illustrate Merkel’s rashness than her compassion. Here it becomes evident that the desire to influence historians’ interpretation of this episode is a major reason Merkel wrote the book:
If, at that time, someone had told me that “We can do this”—those four commonplace words—would be used to reproach me for weeks, months, and years to come, I would have looked at them in disbelief and said: I beg your pardon? Should I really not say that we can do this because those words could be misconstrued as implying that I want to bring all the world’s refugees to Germany?
The sin was not in what she had done but in what she had failed to do: give a moment’s thought to the survival of her own nation and her own people, which is, of course, her primary constitutional duty. Merkel was no longer the politician who had reminded abortion activists in the early 1990s of the pro-life tenor of Germany’s constitution,or reminded debtor nations in the early 2010s that Germany could not solve the Euro crisis simply by writing a check. The respect for antecedent commitments that had tempered her politics for decades was breaking down.
The result was a cascade of consequences that shook the legitimacy not just of her government but of Germany’s governing system. The borderless world that Merkel had gone to such lengths to defend lasted barely two weeks. Germany reinstituted border checks on September 13—but continued to allow free passage for asylum-seekers. In the months to come, Merkel would negotiate a six-billion-euro deal with Turkish leader Recep Tayyip Erdogan to stop the migrant flow upstream of Europe’s borders. Several days into the New Year, a story broke about hundreds of incidents of sexual molestation on New Year’s Eve by gangs of young migrant men between the cathedral and the train station in the center of Cologne. As disturbing as any aspect of the story was the fact that the public had to wait days to hear it.
This was becoming a pattern. In general, the wider the borders opened, the narrower the range of permissible discussion got. After the Islamist massacres at the Bataclan theater in Paris that November, a writer at Die Welt, reputedly a conservative publication, was fired for having tweeted: “I’ll bet the terror in Paris shifts our own discussion over open borders and the quarter-million undocumented Muslim men in a new, and healthier, direction.” The government soon got in on the act, working with newspaper editors to suppress some of the more heated comments that appeared on news websites after mass border-crossing incidents. Germany then sought the same deal with social media, negotiating with Facebook, Google, and Twitter to ensure that companies conformed their comment policies to German law. The companies well understood that it was not the letter of German law they had to obey, but the spirit of Merkelian progressivism. Merkel’s government had created a system of media collaboration with the state that would spread to other issues and, come Covid, other countries.
By the time of national elections in 2017, the public was pelting her with tomatoes. All kinds of disorganized dissident tendencies cropped up at the end of Merkel’s era—the so-called Wutburger, or “enraged citizens”; the so-called Querdenker, or “non-conformists,” who were particularly prominent during the Covid epidemic. But now there was a force on the scene that was actually organized: The Alternativ für Deutschland, launched by a group of dissident academic economists to protest Merkel’s easygoing EU bailout policy in 2013, had retooled in 2015 to sound the alarm over migration. Berlin’s establishment sought to scare the public away from the AfD by describing its members as rightwing extremists. Some of them lived up to the label. Most did not. In 2017, the AfD barreled into the Bundestag with 94 seats, many of them taken from Merkel’s Christian Democrats, which lost 65. Merkel the “centrist” had brought about the very rightward lurch that people assumed the German constitution had been written to avoid.
“If we now have to start apologizing for showing a friendly face,” a frustrated Merkel said as the consequences of her 2015 invitation to migrants became evident, “then this is not my country.” It was meant as rhetoric, but there was truth to it. In the end, Merkel was a European more than a German. The country she served was “Human Rights.” Or maybe it was “European values.” The problem was that the authority she drew on was not idealistic but explicitly territorial, arising from people who called Germany their home and had no other, and who once had believed that she felt the same.
