Angela Merkel: The Authorized Biography

Name: Angela Merkel: The Authorized Biography
Author: Stefan Kornelius
ISBN: 1846883180

by Stefan Kornelius

The book was published in 2013, so around the time of her third election. It’s a so-called authorized biography. It’s not especially critical. It also has a focus on foreign policy, which is maybe not surprising because Kornelius works for Süddeutsche Zeitung , a Munich-based newspaper, as their chief foreign affairs commentator. This goes back to what we were saying before about the importance of understanding Merkel’s origins in East Germany. There’s a lot of that in the Kornelius book. He suggests that Merkel, as somebody who grew up in the GDR, was always sceptical of the way that power was exercised there, but she was not by temperament a revolutionary. She went into the natural sciences. As she has observed herself, the GDR regime might be able to do all sorts of things, but it wasn’t able to tamper with natural law. So that was perhaps a suitable thing for somebody with Merkel’s temperament to go into. She was fascinated, like many people from that part of the world and of her generation, by America, more so than the rest of Europe. I think that this actually comes through when you look at the way that she’s conducted herself as an EU decision-maker. She knows that Germany cannot flourish if Europe doesn’t flourish, but she does not have that sentimental attachment to the idea of European unity that you see in lots of other German politicians, like Helmut Kohl, who came from the Rhineland, or Armin Laschet, who had hoped to succeed Angela Merkel as the candidate for her party in the last election, though failed dismally. These politicians had a very sentimental commitment to the idea of European unity, and in particular to the relationship with France. “Whenever she met Putin, she could speak Russian” This stuff is more or less entirely absent from Merkel’s approach to Europe. She gave an important speech to the College of Europe in Bruges, during or maybe just after the eurozone crisis. It’s pretty much the closest that you can get to any sort of Merkel theory of Europe. The key part of it was when she explained that she was very sceptical about what’s called the ‘community method’, which means decision-making vested in supranational institutions like the European Commission and the European Parliament. She’s much more interested in a theory of European power where decision making is vested in the leaders of national governments, none of them more important than the Chancellor of Germany. Actually, this has been a much more accurate description of the way that the decisions have been taken at a European level for the last 10 years. The action has all been at the European Council, which is where the national leaders sit, rather than the Commission, which is much weaker than it used to be. This book does a fairly good job of explaining the context, helping you understand why Merkel’s approach to Europe has been much more business-like and down-to-earth than it’s been with some other senior German politicians and chancellors. The attachment to America has been much stronger. You also have a little bit in the book about her interesting relationship with Russia and the Russian language. When she was a schoolgirl in the GDR, she won a prize for being something like the third-best Russian speaker in East Germany. It’s one of the interesting things about her that whenever she met Putin, she could speak Russian. He, of course, was a KGB agent in Dresden and was able to speak German. There is a certain sentimentality too, not about the Russian regime—I think she came to distrust Putin quite violently, particularly after the Ukraine crisis in 2014—but to Russia and the Russian language, that is very, very common in the former GDR, particularly amongst people of an older generation. This shows up in opinion polls all the time. You find this attachment to Russi, in the states of the former GDR, which is not present in West Germany. Some of that is brought out in Kornelius’s book as well.

Recommended by

Tom Nuttall

"The book was published in 2013, so around the time of her third election. It’s a so-called authorized biography. It’s not especially critical. It also has a focus on foreign policy, which is maybe not surprising because Kornelius works for Süddeutsche Zeitung , a Munich-based newspaper, as their chief foreign affairs commentator. This goes back to what we were saying before about the importance of understanding Merkel’s origins in East Germany. There’s a lot of that in the Kornelius book. He suggests that Merkel, as somebody who grew up in the GDR, was always sceptical of the way that power was exercised there, but she was not by temperament a revolutionary. She went into the natural sciences. As she has observed herself, the GDR regime might be able to do all sorts of things, but it wasn’t able to tamper with natural law. So that was perhaps a suitable thing for somebody with Merkel’s temperament to go into. She was fascinated, like many people from that part of the world and of her generation, by America, more so than the rest of Europe. I think that this actually comes through when you look at the way that she’s conducted herself as an EU decision-maker. She knows that Germany cannot flourish if Europe doesn’t flourish, but she does not have that sentimental attachment to the idea of European unity that you see in lots of other German politicians, like Helmut Kohl, who came from the Rhineland, or Armin Laschet, who had hoped to succeed Angela Merkel as the candidate for her party in the last election, though failed dismally. These politicians had a very sentimental commitment to the idea of European unity, and in particular to the relationship with France. “Whenever she met Putin, she could speak Russian” This stuff is more or less entirely absent from Merkel’s approach to Europe. She gave an important speech to the College of Europe in Bruges, during or maybe just after the eurozone crisis. It’s pretty much the closest that you can get to any sort of Merkel theory of Europe. The key part of it was when she explained that she was very sceptical about what’s called the ‘community method’, which means decision-making vested in supranational institutions like the European Commission and the European Parliament. She’s much more interested in a theory of European power where decision making is vested in the leaders of national governments, none of them more important than the Chancellor of Germany. Actually, this has been a much more accurate description of the way that the decisions have been taken at a European level for the last 10 years. The action has all been at the European Council, which is where the national leaders sit, rather than the Commission, which is much weaker than it used to be. This book does a fairly good job of explaining the context, helping you understand why Merkel’s approach to Europe has been much more business-like and down-to-earth than it’s been with some other senior German politicians and chancellors. The attachment to America has been much stronger. You also have a little bit in the book about her interesting relationship with Russia and the Russian language. When she was a schoolgirl in the GDR, she won a prize for being something like the third-best Russian speaker in East Germany. It’s one of the interesting things about her that whenever she met Putin, she could speak Russian. He, of course, was a KGB agent in Dresden and was able to speak German. There is a certain sentimentality too, not about the Russian regime—I think she came to distrust Putin quite violently, particularly after the Ukraine crisis in 2014—but to Russia and the Russian language, that is very, very common in the former GDR, particularly amongst people of an older generation. This shows up in opinion polls all the time. You find this attachment to Russi, in the states of the former GDR, which is not present in West Germany. Some of that is brought out in Kornelius’s book as well."

Angela Merkel · fivebooks.com