Freedom by Angela Merkel — a paean to a bygone halcyon age

When Angela Merkel met Donald Trump in 2017, reporters gathered in the Oval Office witnessed the bizarre spectacle of the US president refusing to shake the German chancellor’s hand.

Even after Merkel quietly suggested they do so, for the cameras, Trump ignored her. She instantly regretted saying anything. “I had acted as though I were having a discussion with someone completely normal,” she recalls.

Merkel’s autobiography Freedom can be a tame affair, with little of the dirt-dishing and score-settling one expects from such books. But when it comes to Trump — and Vladimir Putin, the Russian president — she rarely pulls her punches. She writes how Trump kept asking her what Putin was like: he was “clearly fascinated” by the Russian, “captivated by politicians with autocratic and dictatorial traits”.

The Oval Office meeting came with Merkel at the zenith of her fame. Time’s person of the year in 2015, she was routinely hailed as the leader of the free world, Europe’s premier crisis-manager and defender of a liberal order threatened by the new man in the White House.

But since leaving office in 2021, her reputation has taken a beating. Germans increasingly see her 16-year reign as a time when Germany became fatally addicted to Russian gas, neglected its armed forces, underinvested in infrastructure and yoked its economy to a booming China — a strategy that has now backfired in spectacular fashion.

Even her decision to keep Germany’s borders open during the refugee crisis of 2015-16 — widely viewed as heroic at the time — is now seen as reckless. The influx of more than 1mn migrants boosted the far-right Alternative for Germany, as large swaths of the population abandoned mainstream parties. German politics has never been the same since.

Her defence of Nord Stream 2, strongly opposed by Germany’s allies, was a low point of her chancellorship and is a low point of this book

Merkel uses Freedom to defend her legacy. Some of her arguments are convincing, some less so. Some are downright lame.

The overwhelming impression, though, is of a kind of paean to a bygone halcyon age. Merkel personified an older, more civilised style of politics, with its strong belief in collective action and international alliances — a liberal world order tailor-made for Germany’s open, export-driven economy. You wonder if any of that will survive contact with Trump 2.0.

Reading these pages you occasionally wonder at Merkel’s naivete. Did she really think her country’s luck would hold out forever? And if not, why didn’t she prepare Germany for the coming storm?

Freedom starts off well. The story of her childhood, growing up as a Protestant pastor’s daughter in communist East Germany, is told with verve and poignancy. She describes the packages of western goodies her aunt in Hamburg would send the family, with their “delicate scent of good soap or aromatic coffee”. “The East, by contrast, smelled severely of scouring products, floor polish, and turpentine,” she says.

She becomes a research physicist, an experience she likens to being “crammed into a corset”. It all feels like a bit of a dead-end: but then in 1989 the Berlin Wall falls and she reinvents herself as a politician. After the two Germanies unify in 1990 she rises up the ranks of the Christian Democratic Union, is elected its leader in 2000 and five years later becomes Germany’s first female chancellor.

Her helter-skelter rise to power has been exhaustively told by countless biographers. What jumps out of Freedom, however, are Merkel’s highly personal accounts of just how often people underestimated her: and just how insulting that was.

In 2002 she decides not to run for chancellor, making way for a rival conservative, Edmund Stoiber. The move came after months of pressure from CDU politicians, who urged her — “some gently and affectionately, others using the sledgehammer approach” — to give up.

“I found this unspeakable,” she writes, in a rare outburst of rage. Merkel had extricated the party from the “quagmire” of a donations scandal which almost destroyed it. “But apparently that wasn’t enough for the candidacy. [They thought] the little chairwoman from the East isn’t up to the job.”

The book is replete with such bruising encounters. There is former chancellor Gerhard Schröder’s ill-tempered attack on her during a legendary post-election TV debate in 2005 (“I doubt very much that [he] would have acted that way toward a man.”). Then there is the G20 summit in 2011, when Barack Obama and Nicolas Sarkozy pressured her to agree to a “bazooka” that could save the euro (“I fought this tooth and nail and even with tears.”).

But the biggest bully of all is Putin. This is, after all, the man who brought his pet Labrador into a meeting with Merkel in 2007, knowing she was scared of dogs. She describes Putin as someone “constantly on the lookout for signs of disparaging behaviour toward him, and yet always ready to disrespect others,” she writes.

The last straw came in 2014 when Merkel asked the Russian leader whether the “armed men in the green uniforms” taking over Crimea were in fact Russian soldiers, and he denied it. That was a “bare-faced lie; never in our previous conversations had he been so brazen”.

It is all the more surprising, then, that Merkel continued to back the Nord Stream 2 gas pipeline, a pet project of Putin’s that would have increased the Kremlin’s control of European energy. Berlin drove it forward even after Putin annexed Crimea in 2014.

Her defence of Nord Stream 2, strongly opposed by Germany’s allies, was a low point of her chancellorship and is a low point of this book. There was, she insists, no alternative because other options — such as LNG from the Middle East — were just too expensive.

And anyway, she could never have reduced imports of Russian gas before Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022: the resistance from gas consumers in Germany and the EU would have been too great. 

Yet, readers may ask: why didn’t she try anyway? By the time she left office, Russia accounted for 55 per cent of Germany’s gas imports, up from 40.6 per cent when she became chancellor. Considering Putin’s increasingly aggressive imperialism, didn’t she see that as a vulnerability?

It’s baffling that Merkel never admits any mistakes in her handling of Nord Stream 2. But that is typical. Mea culpas are few and far between in Freedom, a book whose self-righteous — and occasionally self-satisfied — tone can occasionally be trying.

Merkel stands by her decision not to close the border during the 2015 refugee crisis. She also defends her tough line during the 2011-12 Eurozone crisis — though she admits it left her reputation “in tatters” in countries like Greece. And she blames the Social Democrats for her failure to meet Nato spending targets on defence.

All memoirs tend to the self-exculpatory. Yet, Freedom is still essential reading for the remarkable nature of the story it tells: of a woman who began life in a communist dictatorship and ended up at the summit of European politics. It’s also a testament to liberal values — tolerance, open borders, free trade, international co-operation — that once seemed self-evident and are now under threat. Trump’s refusal to shake Merkel’s hand was perhaps an omen — and a signpost to the new, chilly, post-Merkel future.

Freedom: Memories 1954-2021 by Angela Merkel with Beate Baumann Macmillan £35/ St Martin’s Press $40, 720 pages

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