"Too Busy Saving the World"
Kati Marton - The Chancellor: The Remarkable Odyssey of Angela Merkel
The Wall Street Journal, October, 24, 2021 (October 25, 2021 issue)
To label Kati Marton’s biography of Angela Merkel a hagiography would not be fair—not entirely. That said, when she writes of the chancellor being “too busy saving the world” to have much time for strolling in the woods, the expression may be less of a rhetorical flourish than it should. “The Chancellor” is an impressively researched but, in many respects, devotional work—the reflection of a worshipful establishment consensus that will eventually seem absurd.
Ms. Merkel is undoubtedly an immensely gifted—and ruthless—politician, but for someone periodically dubbed the “leader of the free world” (a title she disdains), her legacy after 16 years as chancellor of Germany is, actually or potentially, and disconcertingly often, destructive, whether economically, geopolitically, at home or abroad.
Ms. Marton, a writer who has enjoyed unusual access to Ms. Merkel, describes the chancellor’s approach as cautious, low-key, self-effacing, analytical, patient, attentive and, for the most part, incremental. Caution can curdle into procrastination on important issues, however, and coolly detached analysis into cynical electoral calculation. To take one notorious instance, in the wake of the Fukushima disaster in Japan Ms. Merkel reversed her earlier slowdown of the phaseout of Germany’s nuclear power. This about-turn paid off politically but has, much like her attempt to decarbonize Germany’s energy supply, proved an expensive fiasco. Ms. Marton views the decision as an alignment between “Merkel the politician” and “Merkel the moralist.” If so, the moralist’s alignment was, if nothing else, flexible.
Ms. Marton refers to her book as “a human rather than a political portrait.” But in trying to understand this particular human, exploring the political is unavoidable. The author covers a considerable amount of ground in this area concisely, mostly approvingly and too often uncritically. One of Ms. Merkel’s most significant decisions, for instance, may not shed quite the light on the enigmatic chancellor that her biographer clearly expects.
Bien-pensant that she is, Ms. Marton maintains that Merkel’s championing of the admission into Germany of more than a million refugees in 2015 and 2016 means “the country responsible for the Holocaust is now regarded as the world’s moral center.” That opinion would startle Ukrainians and other East Europeans appalled by Ms. Merkel’s acquiescence in the Nord Stream 2 pipeline deal with Russia, a squalid and reckless arrangement that even Ms. Marton admits reveals “a troubling aspect of . . . Merkel’s pragmatism.”
An alternative interpretation of Ms. Merkel’s actions during the refugee crisis is that they were motivated more by narcissism than ethics. Somehow the drama seemed to be all about her, an impression reinforced by the way she ignored the EU’s shared asylum rules and then attempted to bully her European partners into helping sort out the situation she had created. This, in turn, was evidence of the authoritarian streak visible in her encouragement of a harshly restrictive social-media law (unmentioned in this book) and in the way she drove through the EU’s Lisbon Treaty, a piece of chicanery (also unmentioned in “The Chancellor”) designed to circumvent popular opposition to the next stage of European Union integration.
Ms. Merkel’s extraordinary rise from East German physicist to chancellor of a reunited Germany was a triumph, especially as she achieved it within a political party, the Christian Democratic Union, run on remarkably patriarchal grounds, even by the standards of that time and place. Ms. Merkel has generally taken a subtle tack when dealing with the relationship between gender, power and privilege. But Ms. Marton cannot resist analyzing her career from a feminist perspective, and sometimes appears unable to resist resorting to language (“blustering male peacocks”!) marked by a facile misandry. In this context, as occasionally elsewhere, Ms. Marton passes over awkward facts that risk muddying a shiny narrative. And so she praises Ms. Merkel for appointing Ursula von der Leyen to “the most traditionally ‘masculine’ portfolio, the Defense Ministry,” without revealing that Ms. von der Leyen is widely perceived to have made a mess of that job. (Ms. Merkel subsequently assisted her to the presidency ofthe European Commission, a job to which she has already brought her habitual ineptitude.)
Kati Marton does excel, however, when she turns her attention from the political to the “human” account she promised, notably with deftly drawn depictions of Ms. Merkel’s early years, personality and daily working life, depictions made all the more interesting by how little most of the public knows about what makes Ms. Merkel tick. For someone in her position to have guarded her privacy with such success is an astonishing feat. It took, Ms. Marton relates, a constant, almost obsessive effort.
The overall picture that emerges is of someone not only strikingly intelligent, but also an intellectual. She is determined, controlling, highly disciplined, yet less straightlaced than is usually assumed. She was shaped, perhaps above all, by her upbringing in East Germany, where her family moved when she was an infant. Her father, a Lutheran pastor, rubbed along sufficiently well with the regime to have been accepted as a licensed, intriguingly privileged outsider. Ms. Merkel, who was in her 30s when the Berlin Wall fell, seems to have navigated life in a totalitarian system in ways that allowed her to be herself—she retained, for instance, her strong religious faith. I suspect, however, she also honed the toughness, opacity and self-control that were to make her so formidable. When she began her ascent in the CDU, her mentor, the then-chancellor, Helmut Kohl, called Ms. Merkel his “girl.” When he was embroiled in scandal a decade later, she dispatched the “Old Warhorse” to the knacker’s yard.