Economy and Social Matters

The political scientist Gerd Langguth offers a portrait of Angela Merkel, her political career and her East-West German facets.

Hardly another date has probably the same symbolic significance for the division of Germany as does August 13, 1961: in the early morning hours, workers’ militia, police and army began building the Berlin Wall. The ‘Anti-fascist protection wall’, as it was officially called by the Socialistic Unitary Party of Germany (Sozialistischen Einheitspartei Deutschlands / SED), divided people in east and west, rent families. This was also true of a pastor’s family in the Uckermark region of Brandenburg, more precisely in the town of Templin. On that August 13th Horst Kasner delivered a sermon in his church while his wife Herlind, who came from Hamburg, sat in the pews and wept. It would be 23 years before she was permitted to travel again to the West – to the funeral of her mother. So reports at least Herlind’s daughter Angela, seven years old in 1961, and remarks that the building of the Wall was her ‘first memory of a political event’.

44 years later, the division of Germany is officially history, yet its effects are still noticeable, if only indirectly. For that Angela Dorothea Kasner (her full maiden name), who is today known to the public by the family name of her first husband Ulrich Merkel, is now going down in the annals of the Federal Republic of Germany as the first woman Chancellor. As Chairwomen of the Christian Democratic Union (Christlich-Demokratischen Union / CDU) and leader of the CDU/CSU parliamentary faction, formed together with the CDU’s Bavarian sister party the Christian Social Union (Christlich-Sozialen Union / CSU), she challenged the incumbent head of government Gerhard Schröder (Social Democratic Party of Germany [Sozialdemokratische Partei Deutschlands / SPD]). But what does Angela Merkel stand for politically?

A political pastor’s household

Merkel’s past, shaped by the division of Germany, her East-West German biography, and especially her life as a pastor’s daughter, explain many facets of her personality. Although Angela Dorothea Kasner first saw the light in Hamburg on July 17, 1954, only three weeks later she was brought in a pannier to Quitzow, a village of three hundred souls in the Prignitz region of Brandenburg, in the German Democratic Republic (GDR). There Horst Kasner, after studying theology in Hamburg, took up his first position as pastor, moving three years later to Templin in the Uckermark. At first glance this seems an unusual step, for alone in the first five months of the year of Merkel’s birth a good 180,000 citizens left the socialist ‘Workers’ and Farmers’ State’. Yet in the GDR, where churches were looked upon as a relict of ‘reactionary’ bourgeois society, there was a growing need for pastors, so that quite a few deliberately moved from West to East Germany. In 1958 Kasner became the head of what was known as the ‘Pastoral College’ (Pastoralkolleg) in Templin, a training centre for Protestant clerics and at the same time something like a spiritual centre for his Church. Later, however, he was called ‘Red Kasner’ because he attempted to come to terms with the GDR state and was even a leading member of a ‘brotherhood’ of pastors, the ‘Weißensee Work Group’, who co-operated with the state authorities. This group came under the influence of the State Security Police. Without a doubt, Merkel’s parental home must have been a very political one, for a pastor’s family in the GDR could never be ‘apolitical’.

Better than the others, yet inconspicuous

>According to her own account, and this has been confirmed by her schoolmates, Merkel’s youth was, all in all, a happy one. She noted early, however, that a pastor’s daughter in an atheistic state was judged differently by her schoolmates as well as her by teachers, from the SED petted ‘workers’ children’. In retrospect, this circumstance was by no means a disadvantage. Not least, her mother Herlind gave the young Angela time and again a maxim to take with her to school: a pastor’s daughter must be better than the others, since otherwise she would not be allowed to study at university in the ‘Workers’ State’. Herlind Kasner, a teacher, was herself banned from her profession. This wish to be better than the others was obviously at work in Angela Merkel very early – and at school she was, as a former teacher says, an ‘exception’, an ‘ideal pupil’. In all her subjects (except sport) she achieved extremely good grades, yet at the same time was not looked upon as a ‘grind’. For example, she would let her classmates copy from her work. In type, she was rather inconspicuous, which was connected to another elementary rule which she was taught by her parents: Never draw attention to yourself, never forget yourself. And finally there was yet a third rule, which in a certain way was related to the others and which is still today of advantage to her in politics: Keep your private intellectual world apart from the official world of politics. This rule taught her what is occasionally perceived as ‘bamboozling and hoodwinking’ in politics. Furthermore, from this rule resulted her still obvious aversion to letting people look behind the curtain into her own self, into her private life. This expresses itself in the eloquent speechlessness with which she talks much about herself and nevertheless appears to disclose little.

FDJ years in the GDR

Both during her physics studies at the University of Leipzig and during her time at the Academy of the Sciences in (East) Berlin, Merkel appears to have been hard-working and a good colleague, and has been described as reserved and even bashful, but quite cheerful. She caught the eye of none of her university teachers, fellow students and colleagues as a potential leader, but was (and about this she speaks only with extreme reluctance to this day) at school, university and the Academy not only a simple member of the Free German Youth (Freie Deutsche Jugend / FDJ), the communistic youth organisation of the SED, but also always active in the leadership. The allegation that she was in charge of agitation and propaganda for the FDJ at the Academy of the Sciences Merkel strictly denies, and emphasises on the contrary that she merely procured theatre tickets and organised social events. Membership in the FDJ was assuredly a condition for being allowed to study at the university. However much Merkel was a political conformist in this way, it may also be said that, no later than the expatriation of singer and song-writer Wolf Biermann, she and her circle of friends took a critical posture towards the system in the GDR. This may be seen, for example, in her choice of examiners at the University of Leipzig. But Merkel did nothing serious and actively to challenge the state even in small things, although she claims to have sought the secrecy of the voting booth during elections for the People’s Parliament in the GDR, an act which would have been looked upon as an unmistakable sign of protest and represented a certain test of courage.

Die Wende and Merkel’s rise

Merkel became politically active only at the end of 1989, a few days before Christmas, and so at a time when the state authorities were no longer in a position to threaten reprisals. After having looked in on the social democratic SDP (today the SPD), she joined the broadly-positioned Democratic Awakening (Demokratische Aufbruch / DA) which, together with the CDU and another party then founded in the GDR, campaigned under the name ‘Alliance for Germany’ (Allianz für Deutschland) in the first free (and at the same time last) elections for the People’s Parliament. What followed is a widely known, precipitous political career: Acting Speaker for the last government of the GDR under Lothar de Maizière, parliamentary representative in December 1990, a few weeks later Federal Minister for Women and Youth and then Minister for Environment, later Secretary General, Party and Faction leader of the CDU. Merkel’s article in the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung of December 22, 1999, in which she calls upon her party to emancipate itself from its own Honorary Chairman Kohl, will go down in the history of the CDU. This article is supposed to have completely destroyed the relationship between the former Chancellor and his erstwhile ‘pal’ Wolfgang Schäuble and helped sweep both of them away.

Why Merkel’s rapid rise? To begin with, a character trait should be noted which her parents gave her on life’s way, namely the tenacity with which she stakes everything on realising herself through top performance. Her unconditional will to power, which she has in common with personalities like Kohl and Schröder, is not least the result of the aspiration to be better than all the others. In an interview with the Berliner Zeitung in July 2004, the holder of a degree in physics placed this statement on record: ‘Before, I also wanted power – power over molecules. For me the point is to shape things. That’s what I’m doing now in quite another field’. Merkel, like a whole line of politicians, is a ‘politaholic’ and addicted to the drug ‘power’. Politics seven days a week, 24 hours a day – that is her (presumably sometimes solitary) life.

Generalist without fixed historical commitments

A further important spring of Merkel’s action is her rational approach to challenges. The scientist, ‘independent of ideology’, is, in contrast to the historian Kohl, a generalist with no fixed historical commitments. In the decisive moments of her life, Merkel was invariably able to weigh advantages soberly and rationally, which she herself paraphrases as follows: ‘I am, I think, courageous at the decisive moment. But I need a good deal of start-up time, and I try to take as much as possible into consideration beforehand’. This rationality is also a feature of her political style and her picture of society. She assumes the necessity of an efficient, nearly mechanical, ‘functioning’ of society and easily underestimates the importance of long established experiences and patterns of behaviour which elude sober scientific observation. She is dedicated not to a definite picture of the future but rather to the solution of concrete problems and to criteria of efficiency. In this way she corresponds to the type of the ‘modern’ politician, who has practically nothing to do with the categorical, traditional, value-oriented and occasionally old-maidish way of talking of classical CDU politicians. This estranges parts of the classical clientele of her own party and has sometimes earned her the reputation of being ‘ice cold’ – a stigma, incidentally, that she shares with the former British Prime Minister and ‘Iron Lady’ Margaret Thatcher, who was also educated as a scientist and to whom Merkel is often compared.

Fundamental political posture

Further, Merkel’s convictions are mirror images of life in the GDR, which feed on her experience of ‘really existing’ socialism, its scarcity economy and the decadent ideological cant of Marxist-Leninism. For this reason she thinks in categories of individual freedom and responsibility. She backs not the ‘Rhenish capitalism’ traditional in West Germany, with its gentle demands on the citizens, but the plain reverse of the socialism under which she suffered, drawing therefore on economic liberalism instead of the body of thought based on Catholic social teachings. Thus her economic credo is rather one of a market economy guided by standards of efficiency. Merkel has therefore not blocked in principle the extremely unpopular social and job market reforms pushed by the Red-Green government, particularly what is known as the ‘Hartz IV’ regulations, although she has not refrained from severe criticism. In her opinion, the adopted measures represent only a first, small step in the right direction and fail to go far enough in order to provide a long-term cure for the job market and structural problems of Germany as a site for investment and industry. These demands for resolute changes have occasionally brought her into conflict with her own party supporters, and above all with the CSU.

Merkel’s reverse image of socialism corresponds, moreover, to her positive image of America. Just her socialisation in the GDR and the day-to-day confrontation with the living-conditions under really existing socialism formed in her a positive trans-Atlantic outlook – an outlook, incidentally, held by many citizens of central and eastern European states which found themselves within the Soviet sphere of influence during the Cold War. Merkel can still recall quite well that, without the decisive position taken by the then US President George Bush, Sr., German unity would not have come about, or not have come about so swiftly. This fundamental pro-Americanism manifested itself last in 2002 in her positions on American-Iraqi politics, for which the German media derided her as an ‘American in Germany’. Although contrary to many an imputation she never demanded the deployment of German troops as part of the ‘Coalition of the Willing’, she did give the impression of generally supporting American policy by her strictures on the Red-Green government.

Often underestimated and adaptive

Whether she likes it or not, Angela Merkel’s character and her political style have been shaped by her life in the GDR and this past catches up with her today time and again. In the present campaign for the Chancellorship she has declared herself to be ‘very proud’ that she ‘is perceived as a candidate of unified Germany’, but in truth she appears to many West Germans to be still ‘East German’, whereas many East Germans look upon her as ‘West German’. This disparity of perception is connected with the fact that she never experienced the process of German unification, during which her political career began, as a ‘normal’ citizen but always as one of those ‘who shaped things from above’. Although she has the East German experience of dictatorship, she thinks in the logic of a West German. One of the secrets of Merkel’s success is the fact that her determination and will to power was for a long time underestimated. The general director of the Berlin operas Michael Schindhelm, who was one of Merkel’s colleagues at the Academy of the Sciences, once called her ‘perhaps’ a ‘half sister of Parsifal’: ‘No one knows the woman who has, for fifteen years now, appeared in changing roles in German politics’. One must agree with this, since Merkel fits into no homogenous, clearly placeable picture within the landscape of traditional German politics. For many, it is still astonishing that she has grown up from being ‘Kohl’s girl’ into a ‘powerful political boss’. Schindhelm proposes the interpretation that she runs the dangerous course of man-dominated politics ‘because she knows nothing of the danger and seduction’, thanks to which she ‘passes safely through the dark German political forest’. With this, one cannot agree. Angela Merkel has distinguished herself through a tremendous adaptability. Scarcely another woman in German politics knows as much of its dangers and seduction as she does.

Gerd Langguth: Angela Merkel. dtv, München 2005, 400 pages, € 14,50; ISBN:3423244852