. Fairy tales are where you find them, but any number seem to begin in the dark German woods where Angela Merkel spent her childhood. The girl who would grow up to be called the most powerful woman in the world came of age in a glade dappled by the northern sun and shadowed by tall pines. Her family’s house stood three stories, and the steep rake of its tile roof held an attic window in the shape of a half-open eye. Strangers walked on the paths below, passing residents who often moved at curious gaits. Cries of anguish were sometimes heard.
To adults, Waldhof was home to the Lutheran seminary run by Merkel’s father, an isolated compound—“forest court” in English—that hosted students and other short-term visitors while also functioning as a home and workplace for mentally disabled adults. But to a child of 3, Angela’s age when her family arrived, it was a world unto itself, and would remain so until she went to school in the adjoining town of Templin. There, she came to realize that, like the 17 million other residents of East Germany, she actually was living within the walls of a fortress. Merkel remained a captive for the first 35 years of her life, biding her time. As an adult, she lived in East Berlin, riding an elevated train beside the barricade whose 1961 construction she recalled as the first political memory of her life.
When it fell in 1989, she gathered the qualities cultivated as a necessity in the East—patience, blandness, intellectual rigor and an inconspicuous but ferocious drive—and changed not only her life but the course of history. The year 2015 marked the start of Merkel’s 10th year as Chancellor of a united Germany and the de facto leader of the European Union, the most prosperous joint venture on the planet. By year’s end, she had steered the enterprise through not one but two existential crises, either of which could have meant the end of the union that has kept peace on the continent for seven decades. The first was thrust upon her—the slow-rolling crisis over the euro, the currency shared by 19 nations, all of which were endangered by the default of a single member, Greece.
Its resolution came at the signature plodding pace that so tries the patience of Germans that they have made it a verb: Merkeling. The second was a thunderclap. In late summer, Merkel’s government threw open Germany’s doors to a pressing throng of refugees and migrants; a total of 1 million asylum seekers are expected in the country by the end of December. It was an audacious act that, in a single motion, threatened both to redeem Europe and endanger it, testing the resilience of an alliance formed to avoid repeating the kind of violence tearing asunder the Middle East by working together. That arrangement had worked well enough that it raised an existential question of its own, now being asked by the richest country in Europe: What does it mean to live well? Merkel had her answer: “In many regions war and terror prevail.
States disintegrate. For many years we have read about this. We have heard about it. We have seen it on TV. But we had not yet sufficiently understood that what happens in Aleppo and Mosul can affect Essen or Stuttgart. We have to face that now.” For her, the refugee decision was a galvanizing moment in a career that was until then defined by caution and avoidance of anything resembling drama.
Dissertation Angela Merkel Pdf Merger
Analysts called it a jarring departure from form. But it may also have been inevitable, given how Angela Merkel feels about walls.
What was not inevitable but merely astounding was that the most generous, openhearted gesture of recent history blossomed from Germany, the country that within living memory (and beyond, as long as there’s a History Channel) blew apart the European continent, and then the world, by taking to gruesome extremes all the forces its Chancellor strives to hold in check: nationalism, nativism, self-righteousness, reversion to arms. No one in Europe has held office longer—or to greater effect—in a world defined by steadily receding barriers.
That, after all, is the story of the E.U. And the story of globalization, both terms as colorless as the corridor of a Brussels office building. The worlds Merkel has mastered carry not a hint of the forces that have shaped Europe’s history, the primal sort a child senses, listening to a story, safe in bed. As an adolescent, Merkel both lived inside her head and exulted in the outdoors. Physically clumsy, she avoided sports but camped with friends, all while excelling at school. As she got older, she explored as much of the world as a citizen of the Soviet bloc was permitted.
The system’s limits on wanderlust rendered Merkel, waiflike in her youth, with her face pressed up against the glass of a warm shop window. She journeyed to Bulgaria and stared over the border toward the forbidden hillsides of Greece. She watched, as almost everyone in the GDR did, television stations beamed from West Germany, and dreamed of visiting California. Merkel understood that she would not be permitted to go there until she was 60, the age at which East Germany trusted its citizens to travel to the West. Yet she began to plan for it. Patience was a lesson of life in the East, as was realism.
“You know I grew up in the GDR,” Merkel told a security conference in Munich in February, where she was peppered with demands that Russian President Vladimir Putin’s incursion into Ukraine be answered with military force rather than the economic pressure Merkel had spearheaded. “As a 7-year-old child, I saw the Wall being erected. No one—although it was a stark violation of international law—believed at the time that one ought to intervene militarily in order to protect citizens of the GDR and whole Eastern bloc of the consequences of that, namely to live in lack of freedom for many, many years. And I don’t actually mind. Because I understand this, because it was a realistic assessment that this would not lead to success.” Merkel plays the long game, in other words. For a career, she shrewdly chose a path in the field that communists worshipped instead of God: science. She studied physics at Leipzig University and married another scientist, Ulrich Merkel.
She ended the marriage after five years but kept his name, even after marrying her current husband, Joachim Sauer, a quantum chemist, after years spent living together. More than that, she retained the disciplines of scientific inquiry learned on the way to a Ph.D. In quantum chemistry—intellectual diligence and a quest for the most reliable data. In combination with her natural, seemingly endless curiosity, the result was an inquisitiveness rare for a politician. Merkel also retained the survival instincts honed in a country where any citizen might prove to be a Stasi informant—the GDR’s security agency had 274,000 agents—and the discretion intended to mask beliefs that emerged only when it was safe. But they did emerge.
“We’ve always had this experience that things take long, but I’m 100% convinced that our principles will in the end prevail,” she told the audience in Munich. “No one knew how the Cold War would end at the time, but it did end. This is within our living experience I’m surprised at how fainthearted we sometimes are, and how quickly we lose courage.” The day the Berlin Wall came down, Nov. 9, 1989, Merkel was about to have her regular Thursday-night sauna with a friend. A creature of habit, she kept to her routine, finishing her sweat before venturing with the crowds into West Berlin. She stopped in an apartment, talked to the people there and had a beer.
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The label on it was unfamiliar. Then she went back across no-man’s-land and changed her life.
She was 35 years old. No obvious natural boundary separates Austria from Germany. The snowy mountains of Bavaria look an awful lot like the snowy mountains of Austria, and the two-lane highway from Kiefersfelden, in one country, to Kufstein, in the other, is a smoother transition than from Maryland to Pennsylvania—not even the road surface changes. You almost have to ask a local to know what country you’re in. This uncertainty counts as one of the great triumphs of the modern age. In the past 70 years, supreme efforts have been made to erase national boundaries in Europe or at least render them harmless. This effort is known as the European Union, which includes 28 countries and, it must be said, is reliably boring.
But that’s the whole idea. For thousands of years, the Continent generated not white papers but wars too numerous to mention—especially to Americans, who know them only from textbooks and strain to recall them only until the written test. “Europe’s Wars, 1648–1789: A Selection” takes up two pages in Appendix III of Norman Davies’ Europe: A History.
Ulrich Merkel
But everyone knows World War II, the cataclysm that still defines Germany for many, not least because the Nazis are a staple of global popular culture as a stand-in for unqualified evil. That war claimed at least 50 million lives worldwide, most of them civilians, and produced a raft of international institutions—from the United Nations to the International Monetary Fund—aimed at preventing anything like it from happening again. The one that ultimately mattered most was thought up by the countries with the bloodiest records: the postwar leaders of France and Germany began the European Coal and Steel Community, which grew even blander as it expanded. By the time it was called the European Union, in 1991, the supranational organization had been washed of all color.
Countries surrendered elements of sovereignty to it in exchange for access to shared markets and an overarching identity as European, their citizens able to move among 26 countries without showing a passport and among 19 without having to change money. Founded on a series of interlocking treaties, the E.U. Exists, a cynic could say, largely as an endless series of meetings and nearly endless regulations. On the other hand, none of its members has raised more than a voice against another for seven decades—a modern record. In 2012, the E.U. Was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. The gold medal was accepted by three officials, none of whom actually ran the union.
By then, that responsibility had fallen, more or less, to Merkel. To a large extent, the job came with the territory. Merkel was Chancellor of Germany, and Germany was the most populous and prosperous member in a union that had become a lucrative club. As globalization rewarded scale and standardization, E.U. Membership became a ticket to prosperity, especially for members of the former East bloc.
German manufacturers, working in concert with labor outsourced to its poorer neighbors, built an export economy that remains the healthiest in Europe and the fourth largest in the world. But Merkel was made for the job. The E.U.’s mission of removing barriers and spreading democracy was her mission too. And the plodding, patient style she brought from the laboratory meshed with the E.U. Mandate encouraging decision by consensus. She appeared to be the perfect person to navigate the euro crisis, which began in 2010 and reached equilibrium this year. By then, she was being caricatured with Hitler’s mustache, and Germans had coined the word Merkeling.
Ulrich Baumgarten—U. Baumgarten via Getty Images A Scientist First Merkel earned a Ph.D. In quantum chemistry before entering politics; here she holds a beaker of water while serving as Environment Minister in the 1990s The problem was Greece. The country that gave the world democracy was supplying it with headaches. Athens was broke and carried debts it could never hope to pay.
If the country still had its own currency, it might at least dilute the problem by printing more of it. But like 18 other E.U. Countries, Greece had exchanged its money, the drachma, for the euro—and the only way to pay its debts was by asking its neighbors for more euros. Merkel stood by the cash register, with her lessons from East Germany. There the collapse of the Wall had been swiftly followed by the collapse of the economy, an event as traumatic as the breach had been euphoric, but experienced only by the Ossies, as East Germans were called. What’s more, the trigger had been a common currency: the abrupt introduction of the West German deutsche mark to the East shuttered factories, putting millions out of work, including Merkel. “I come from a country in which I experienced economic collapse,” Merkel reminded reporters in 2012.
If Greece’s debt was not reduced “sustainably and with a view to the long term, Europe simply will no longer be the prosperous continent that the world listens to and that gets people’s attention.” What got people’s attention during the saga of Greece—and Portugal, and Ireland, and briefly Italy, but first and last, Greece—was Merkel’s stern mien. Go kart sticker-kit template. She wasn’t the only Northerner preaching austerity to the sunny Mediterranean nations that spent money they did not have. But it was Merkel who became the face of the European banker, caricatured here as a dominatrix, there as a storm trooper. The crisis went on for years, and Merkel’s image grew as entrenched as her position: rescue only if Greece ended its spendthrift ways. It wasn’t entirely Athens’ fault; the euro had a deeper problem that dated from its birth: the currency bound nations together economically without a parallel political apparatus, a problem Merkel diagnosed and set out to eventually solve through lengthy treaty renegotiations. But the immediate political problem was the civic culture of Greece, where the rich avoided taxes and governments spent lavishly. Greeks rioted, a government fell.
But in the end, the leaders who hoped to defy Merkel’s E.U. Had no choice but to back down. It was either face expulsion from the euro zone or swallow austerity measures that gutted pensions and public services. The saga cemented Merkel’s status as leader of Europe, if a chilly one.
Merkel watched along with everyone else on the planet. She knew Keleti station—Hungary was one of the few places she was permitted to travel as a citizen of the GDR. “In East Germany,” she told TIME in an interview six years ago, “we always ran into boundaries before we were able to discover our own personal boundaries.” Austria’s Chancellor phoned. His tone was urgent. The first weekend in September passed in a flurry of calls and logistics. Finally, an arrangement was struck to usher the refugees through Vienna, where they boarded trains for Germany.
When they lurched into Munich’s central station, hundreds of Germans greeted them with cheers, flowers and diapers. Welcome, the signs read. “Thank you, Germany!” the refugees chanted. The scene was transcendent, almost too good to be true.
Many say it was. “The country was simply carried away with this,” Kornelius recalls in his Munich office. “People were drunk with how good they were.” Three months later, Germans are still nursing a buzz. But as the refugees keep coming—nearly a million so far, with no end in sight—they’re also wondering what got into them, and into Mutti.
“This crisis really shows a new Merkel,” her biographer says. “You’ve never seen the soft side of Merkel until now.” The Chancellor has not spoken publicly about the decision to admit the refugees, and her office, citing the press of events that flowed from it, declined interview requests from TIME. But the source of the action—certain to be her legacy, for good or ill—is more apparent than where it will lead.
Those who know her say it followed logically from the sight of Hungarian border guards holding back refugees at gunpoint in order to build a fence topped with razor wire. Granado espada private server. “She has one principle—an emotional belief, I think—as one who in her younger years was not able to travel around the world,” says Wissmann. “She does not want to see people surrounded by walls. I think she has an instinctive reaction if someone asks for a wall. I know her well. If you ask me what is her main principle belief, it’s around this issue: Let us be free. From the station of a person, up to the free-trade pact of a nation.” That’s not what she told little Reem, of course.
But if good public policy balances head and heart, one of the minor marvels of the refugee crisis was that it forced Merkel’s decisionmaking process—usually so heavily guarded—into the public realm. Her prudent “We can’t take you all” message on television was balanced against all the times she had urged Germans in the months before to lay out the welcome mat. Refugees were the centerpiece of Merkel’s 2015 New Year’s address: “Many literally escaped death.
It goes without saying that we will help them and take in people who seek refuge with us.” As their numbers increased over the summer, she visited refugee shelters inside Germany, posing with smiling migrants for selfies uploaded immediately on social media, where would-be migrants discussed whether now was the time to go, and where. “She opened the door for our needs,” says Israa Ibrahim, 25, and seven months pregnant, as she prepared to board a bus bound for Bavaria. “She can feel in her heart how tired we are.”.
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