St. Martin’s Press
We may receive an affiliate commission for anything you purchase through this article.
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 leading a nation reunited after the fall of the Berlin Wall.
Read an excerpt below, and Don’t miss Mark Phillips’ interview with Angela Merkel on “CBS Sunday Morning” on December 1!
“Freedom: Memoirs 1954-2021” by Angela Merkel
Would you rather listen? Audible currently has a 30-day free trial available.
Prologue
This book tells a story that will not happen again, because the state in which I lived for thirty-five years ceased to exist in 1990. If it had been submitted to a publishing house as a work of fiction, it would have been rejected. someone said to me in early 2022, a few weeks after I resigned as Chancellor. He was familiar with these kinds of issues and was happy that I had decided to write this book precisely because of the story. A story that is as unlikely as it is true. It became clear to me: telling this story, setting out the lines, finding the common thread through it, identifying leitmotifs, can 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. At that time, on the night of September 4 to 5, I had decided not to send away the refugees who arrived from Hungary at the German-Austrian border. I experienced that decision, and especially its consequences, as a cut-off in my chancellorship. There was a before and an after. That was the moment when, one day, when I was no longer Chancellor, I wanted to describe the sequence of events, the reasons for my decision, my understanding of Europe and its associated globalization in a form that only a book would make possible. I didn’t want to leave the further description and interpretation to other people alone.
But I was still in the office. The 2017 Bundestag elections followed, along with my fourth term in office. Over the past two years, managing the COVID-19 pandemic has been the dominant theme. As I have said publicly on several occasions, the pandemic has placed enormous demands on democracy, at national, European and global levels. This has also prompted me to broaden my view and not only write about refugee policy. If I was going to do it at all, I had to do it right, I told myself, and if I did, I would do it with Beate Baumann. She has been advising me since 1992 and is an eyewitness.
I resigned from office on December 8, 2021. After sixteen years I left office, as I said in my honor at the Military Tattoo of the Bundeswehr a few days earlier, with joy in my heart. By the end, I had actually been longing for that moment. Enough was enough. Now it was time to take a break and rest for a few months, to leave the hectic world of politics behind, to slowly and carefully start a new life in the spring, still a public life, but no active political life. the right rhythm for public performances – and write this book. That was the plan.
Then came the Russian attack on Ukraine on February 24, 2022.
It was immediately clear that writing this book as if nothing had happened was absolutely out of the question. The war in Yugoslavia in the early 1990s had already shaken Europe to its core. But the Russian attack on Ukraine posed a greater threat. It was a violation of international law that shattered the European peace that had prevailed since the Second World War and which was based on the preservation of the territorial integrity and sovereignty of states. A deep 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 until 1990 in a dictatorship and the second since 1990 in a democracy. When the first readers hold this book in their hands, the two halves are more or less the same length. But in fact these are of course not two lives. In fact, they form one life, and the second part cannot be understood without the first.
How could it happen that a woman, after spending the first thirty-five years of her life in the GDR, could take over the most powerful office in the Federal Republic of Germany and hold it for sixteen years? And that she left without having to resign or be voted out during a term of office? What was it like growing up in East Germany as the child of a preacher, and studying and working under the conditions of a dictatorship? What was it like to experience the collapse of a state? And to suddenly be free? That’s the story I want to tell.
Of course my story is very subjective. At the same time, I strive for honest self-reflection. Today I will acknowledge 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 expected or could have expected to appear on these pages will do so. I ask for your understanding for this. My goal is to identify some points of interest with which I try to tame the enormous mass of material, and help people understand how politics works, what principles and mechanisms there are – and what guided me.
Politics is not witchcraft. Politics is made by people, people with their influences, their experiences, vanities, weaknesses, strengths, desires, dreams, beliefs, values and interests. People who have to fight for majorities in a democracy if they want to make things happen.
We can do this –We will buy that. Throughout my entire political career, no sentence has been thrown back at me with as much venom as this one. No sentence was more polarizing. However, for me it was a very ordinary sentence. It expressed an attitude. Call it trust in God, prudence, or simply the determination to solve problems, to deal with setbacks, to get over the lows and to 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’s how I put it during my summer press conference on August 31, 2015. That’s how I did politics. It’s how I live. That is how this book came about. With this attitude, which is also learned, everything is possible, because not only politics contributes to it; every individual person has a role 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.
Order the book here:
“Freedom: Memoirs 1954-2021” by Angela Merkel
Buy local from Bookstore.org
For more information:
