What the title of Merkel’s ebook means | EUROtoday

Für ihre ärgsten Kritiker ist vermutlich schon der Titel eine Provokation: „Freiheit“. Wer auf ostdeutschen Marktplätzen „Merkel muss weg“ skandierte, wer in der eigenen Partei ihre angeblich zu staatsfixierte Wirtschafts- und Sozialpolitik beklagte, wer ihre Corona-Politik kritisierte oder gar in verschwörungstheoretischer Manier mutmaßte, die frühere DDR-Bürgerin sei gleichsam der verlängerte Arm Erich Honeckers in der unglücklich vereinten Republik: Für diese sehr unterschiedlichen, gleichwohl minoritären Gruppen verkörperte Angela Merkel das exakte Gegenmodell dessen, was sie sich als Unfreiheit herbeidefinierten – in der Annahme, Freiheit bedeute das Fehlen von Widerspruch zu der jeweils eigenen Position.

Für andere wiederum mochte das Wort auf dem Schutzumschlag einen allzu offensichtlichen Sinn ergeben. Schließlich beschreibt Merkel in ihren soeben veröffentlichten Memoiren den Weg der ostdeutschen Pfarrerstochter aus den Bedrängnissen der Diktatur in die nicht immer von Zumutungen freie Welt des liberalen Westens, daneben auch die Emanzipation einer Frau in einer politischen Welt, deren machistische Züge sie selbst anfangs unterschätzte.

Aus dem Dunkel ins Licht: Sosehr sie sich selbst gegen diese Schwarz-Weiß-Perspektive auf den kleineren deutschen Staat wehrt, so sehr wird sie auf ihrer bevorstehenden Welttournee von diesem Bild zehren. Das gilt vor allem für die Vereinigten Staaten von Amerika, wo sie das Buch am Montag mit Barack Obama vorstellen wird, ihrem Kollegen im politischen Ruhestand – jenem Obama, der ihr vor 13 Jahren im Rosengarten des Weißen Hauses aufgrund exakt dieser Lebensgeschichte die „Freiheitsmedaille“ verlieh.

But each views underestimate the numerous significance that the idea of freedom has for his or her private and political biography or, higher: their very private model of this idea. Merkel’s persona, her choices and, above all, the course of her political profession can’t be defined in any respect with out looking at her understanding of autonomy, which is deeply rooted in her East German socialization and influences her choices not solely as Chancellor, however at the same time as an creator and administrator of the personal legacy.

This had many constructive, however particularly not too long ago additionally some unfavourable results, as a result of the subjective striving for freedom may have unfree penalties at sure factors. In this, however solely on this extremely summary context, when a way of freedom threatens to show into defiance, parallels to the worldview of their bitterest opponents might even emerge.

In order to keep away from any misunderstandings and to keep away from accusations, Merkel is presently emphasizing at each alternative that she was not a resistance fighter within the GDR. Nobody who’s even midway accustomed to her biography would have stated that. Nevertheless, she lived at an internal distance from the regime and tried to claim her private autonomy.

This was already evident in her choice to check physics, as a result of even state socialism couldn’t override the legal guidelines of nature, as she by no means tires of explaining. But it was additionally evident in aesthetic life. “I suffered from the fact that everything from the tablecloth to the curtains was ugly,” she as soon as complained. “People always just thought, where are you going to get the next Vietnamese raffia mat?”

This character of internal resistance lived on. The physicist, who brewed filterless Turkish espresso throughout breaks in her area of interest on the Academy of Sciences and lived in outdated flats between the Berlin districts of Mitte and Prenzlauer Berg, had a stable aversion to the kind of conformist who most well-liked the entire consolation of prefabricated buildings. One wouldn’t be mistaken in assuming that she later acknowledged precisely this kind in a single or different of her opponents in her personal get together, the CDU, in a recurring, if not political and programmatic sense.

Conversely, this life-style linked them with members of the West German different motion, the later Greens. However, Merkel differed from them in her constructive view of capitalism, which was not solely primarily based on skepticism in the direction of state socialism, but additionally out of a spirit of resistance in the direction of her personal father, who even after German reunification continued to provide fiery speeches towards the excesses of market religion .

The protection of her personal freedom remained Merkel’s motivation after she switched to skilled politics, which she lastly achieved when she joined Helmut Kohl’s cupboard initially of 1991. In her ebook she describes moments of lack of freedom not solely within the GDR, but additionally in German politics as an entire. When the primary all-German ladies’s minister spoke about Abortion Paragraph 218 at a joint assembly of the Union events within the early Nineteen Nineties, she was struck by a painful stiff neck that solely resolved after lengthy durations of physiotherapy.

“It is a great advantage from the GDR era that people learned to remain silent. “That was one of the survival strategies,” she had said on an earlier occasion, not without adding, with a view to her experiences in German politics as a whole: “It still is.” Even in the West, people have to make compromises every day “between their beliefs and what everyday life demands”.

However, her ability to compromise also had its limits when it came to personal autonomy. Not just because she was good at making a neutral face, but bad at actually pretending. But above all because for them, defending their own freedom area meant above all not allowing themselves to be defeated, especially not by the type of West German men who did not take them seriously. If you like, this was actually the driving force behind her political career. She repeatedly found herself in situations in which the alternative to advancement would have been a passive victim role, which she wanted to avoid at all costs.

This basically began on the evening of the People’s Chamber election in the spring of 1990, when she saved herself for the post of deputy government spokeswoman after the debacle of her democratic departure, it continued in the narrow nomination as a Bundestag candidate and finally in the effort to secure herself in office not to let the Minister for Women and the Environment get her down. This pattern was most clearly evident at the most important fork in the road of her career, the CDU donations affair and the subsequent rise to party leadership. At the book launch in the Deutsches Theater, she described her motivation for holding out in the post and also striving to run for chancellor with the short sentence: “You won’t let yourself be pushed aside that easily.”

No sooner had she left her internal party rivals behind than the fight for freedom moved her onto the international stage, to summit meetings of the European Union or the major Western industrial nations. Here, too, she persevered with amazing will, just to avoid leaving the field as a loser in the dead of the night. External pressure, which has remained a constant to this day, always created counter pressure for her. The long-time CSU chairman Horst Seehofer was particularly mistaken in this, believing that he could achieve a change in their migration policy simply by driving them into a corner. She works on him more in her memoirs than on any other domestic political opponent.

In the late years of her reign, her desire for autonomy focused primarily on leaving office freely and self-determined. Being voted out or losing the parliamentary majority is no shame in a democracy, as was shown by the late career of the world explainer Helmut Schmidt. However, such an option did not exist in Merkel’s political worldview, and she also shows her pride in having achieved the goal despite various challenges in the book entitled “Freedom”.

However, the time for self-assertion is not over when you leave office. No matter how much Merkel celebrates herself on her international book tour, they are not pure “feel-good dates,” as she carelessly once said, because of the debate about her Russia policy abroad and the backlog of reforms at home. And she reacts with familiar patterns.

Admitting any errors simply because she is pressured to take action would contradict her want for freedom, particularly in her function as a political pensioner. On the opposite, the mechanism of stress and counter-pressure turns into obvious once more. The indisputable fact that Merkel has often appeared unfree within the debates of the previous two and a half years could also be defined by her idea of freedom.