Book excerpt: “Freedom: Memoirs 1954-2021” by Angela Merkel

St. Martin’s Press

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In “Freedom: Memoirs 1954-2021” (published by St. Martin’s Press), former German Chancellor Angela Merkel writes about two lives: her early years growing up under a dictatorship in East Germany, and her years as leader of a nation reunited following the fall of the Berlin Wall.

Read an excerpt below, and don’t miss Mark Phillips’ interview with Angela Merkel on “CBS Sunday Morning” December 1!

“Freedom: Memoirs 1954-2021” by Angela Merkel

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Prologue

This book tells a story that will not happen again, because the state I lived in for thirty-five years ceased to exist in 1990. If it had been offered to a publishing house as a work of fiction, it would have been turned down, someone said to me early in 2022, a few weeks after I stepped down from the office of federal chancellor. He was familiar with such issues, and was glad that I had decided to write this book, precisely because of its story. A story that is as unlikely as it is real. It became clear to me: telling this story, drawing out its lines, finding the thread running through it, identifying leitmotifs, could also be important for the future.

For a long time I couldn’t imagine writing such a book. That first changed in 2015, at least a little. Back then, in the night between September 4 and 5, I had decided not to turn away the refugees coming from Hungary at the German-Austrian border. I experienced that decision, and above all its consequences, as a caesura in my chancellorship. There was a before and an after. That was when I undertook to describe, one day when I was no longer chancellor, the sequence of events, the reasons for my decision, my understanding of Europe and globalization bound up with it, in a form that only a book would make possible. I didn’t want to leave the further description and interpretation just to other people.

But I was still in office. The 2017 Bundestag election followed, along with my fourth period of office. In its last two years the containment of the COVID-19 pandemic was the predominant theme. The pandemic, as I said publicly on several occasions, made huge demands on democracy, on a national, European, and global level. This also prompted me to broaden my outlook and not only write about refugee policy. If I was going to do it at all, I had to do it properly, I said to myself, and if I was, then I would do it with Beate Baumann. She has been advising me since 1992, and is an eyewitness.

I stepped down from office on December 8, 2021. After sixteen years I left it, as I said at the Bundeswehr’s Military Tattoo in my honor a few days before, with joy in my heart. By the end I had in fact longed for that moment. Enough was enough. Now it was time to take a break and rest for a few months, leave the frantic world of politics behind me, to begin a new life in the spring, slowly and tentatively, still a public life, but not an active political one, find the right rhythm for public appearances—and write this book. That was the plan.

Then came February 24, 2022, Russia’s attack on Ukraine.

It was immediately clear that writing this book as if nothing had happened was completely out of the question. The war in Yugoslavia at the beginning of the 1990s had already shaken Europe to its core. But the Russian attack on Ukraine was a greater threat. It was a breach of international law that shattered the European peace which had prevailed since the Second World War and was based on the preservation of the territorial integrity and sovereignty of its states. Profound disillusionment followed. I will write about that too. But this is not a book about Russia and Ukraine. That would be a different book.

Instead I would like to write the story of my two lives, the first up to 1990 in a dictatorship and the second since 1990 in a democracy. At the moment when the first readers hold this book in their hands, the two halves are of more or less equal length. But in fact, of course, these are not two lives. In fact they are one life, and the second part cannot be understood without the first.

How did it happen that, after spending the first thirty-five years of her life in the GDR, a woman was able to take over the most powerful office that exists in the Federal Republic of Germany and hold it for sixteen years? And that she left it again without having to step down during a period of office or being voted out? What was it like to grow up in East Germany as the child of a pastor, and study and work under the conditions of a dictatorship? What was it like to experience the collapse of a state? And to be suddenly free? That’s the story I want to tell.

Of course, my account is deeply subjective. At the same time, I have aimed for honest self-reflection. Today, I will identify my misjudgments and defend the things I think I got right. But this is not a complete account of everything that happened. Not everyone who might have expected, or who might have been expected, to appear in these pages will do so. For that I request understanding. My goal is to establish some points of focus with which I attempt to tame the sheer mass of material, and allow people to understand how politics works, what principles and mechanisms there are—and what guided me.

Politics isn’t witchcraft. Politics is made by people, people with their influences, their experiences, vanities, weaknesses, strengths, desires, dreams, convictions, values, and interests. People who need to fight for majorities in a democracy if they want to make things happen.

We can do this—Wir schaffen das. Throughout the whole of my political career, no phrase has been thrown back at me with quite such virulence as this one. No phrase has been so polarizing. For me, however, it was quite an ordinary phrase. It expressed an attitude. Call it trust in God, caution, or simply a determination to solve problems, to deal with setbacks, get over the lows and come up with new ideas. “We can do this, and if something stands in our way it has to be overcome, it has to be worked on.” That was how I put it in my summer press conference on August 31, 2015. That was how I did politics. It’s how I live. It’s also how this book came about. With this attitude, which is also something learned, everything is possible, because it isn’t only politics that contributes to it—every individual person has a part to play.

Angela Merkel
With Beate Baumann
Berlin, August 2024

From “Freedom: Memoirs 1954-2021” by Angela Merkel. Copyright © 2024 by the author and reprinted by permission of St. Martin’s Press.

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