‘Out of the Question’

From 2005 to 2021, Angela Merkel was the dominant political figure in one of the world’s greatest economic powers, the most important anchor of the European Union and a touchstone of liberal democracy. Her tenure as chancellor witnessed some of the most consequential events of the post-war period, from the financial crisis of 2008 to the Eurozone crisis in the early 2010s, to the migration crisis of the middle of that decade, to the COVID-19 pandemic that shattered lives and destabilized politics across the world. As German chancellor, Merkel had both a rare vantage point during these epochal events and, arguably, more power to shape responses to them than any European politician, with unmatched economic, rhetorical, and administrative resources at her disposal. 

Yet, by the end of her memoir, this towering figure of German and European politics seems to have been more an observer of these events than an architect of them; the reader is often reminded, in variations on a theme, that certain options were simply ‘out of the question’. Too often, it is as if she, her party and her country had little control over arrangements that they themselves were instrumental in devising, such as the arbitrary and deflationary fiscal constraints within the Eurozone and the absence of collective fiscal and debt instruments that could have helped in its 2010 crisis. Rather than focusing on her country’s power to shape the course of events, the reader is time and again reminded of ostensibly immutable constraints. I was left wondering about the memoir’s title: just what kind of freedom is at issue here, and why does Merkel seem to have so little of it?

The book’s long arc really comprises two books and perhaps should have been published as such. The first, which traces Merkel’s young adulthood as a budding physicist and her early political career after the fall of the Berlin Wall, depicts a smart, resourceful figure grappling with the often Kafkaesque practices of an authoritarian state and the blinkered perspectives of the architects of reunification. Here, Merkel often demonstrates wisdom and grit, as during her early involvement with the Democratic Awakening (DA) Party and her navigation through rooms with many sharp (mostly male) elbows to become a CDU Bundestag candidate. As a witness to the depravity of the East German state and the obtuseness of the West German authorities, Merkel’s is a clear, moral voice. One particularly striking moment comes in the run-up to the first all-German elections in late 1990, when Merkel upbraids a top official at the Treuhandanstalt, a government agency responsible for privatizing bankrupt Eastern firms, for the red tape confronted by entrepreneurs wishing to rehabilitate German companies: ‘If anyone needs a loan for their privatization idea, they just raise hurdles even higher and reach agreement with West German bankers who are just like themselves’ (p. 163). Here, we see a compelling portrait of an early-career politician bearing witness to the high-handed practices of West German officials, which would leave lasting negative social and economic legacies for the country that she later came to govern.

Strangely, this kind of determination seems to wane as Merkel’s power increases, culminating in her long chancellorship that is the subject of the book’s second half. Even as the cornerstones of the post-war order begin to crumble, Merkel often focuses at length on mundane details. For instance, she indulges in a lengthy description of a visit to US President George W. Bush, where we learn much about his ranch (‘641 hectares of hilly terrain’ (p. 346)) and the two leaders’ chummy relationship. Glaringly absent is any mention of the catastrophic Iraq War that was universally deplored by German citizens and left the EU deeply politically fractured. Much the same prosaic tenor colours her invocation of the parable of the frugal ‘Swabian housewife’ during the gathering 2008 global financial crisis, a move that Merkel admits was ‘parochial and trite’. Acknowledging in passing that ‘hundreds of thousands of people were worried about losing their jobs’, she swiftly returns to her regret at having attempted to ‘win [her] colleagues over with that line at party conference’ (p. 379). Merkel fails to question the parable’s core contention: that largesse is dangerous, that debts are non-negotiable, and that governments should not compensate losers, even, apparently, when global economic stability is at stake.

Her uncritical commitment to austerity, which places Merkel squarely in a long German tradition, was to have serious social, political and economic consequences for Germany and for Europe, eventualities that Merkel barely acknowledges. Here, too, rules seem to govern at the expense of more humane and productive alternatives. In her account of the negotiations over a Greek bailout during the 2009–10 Eurozone crisis, for example, we are told that Merkel’s hands were tied by the ‘no bailout clause’ of European Monetary Union: ‘the requirement that every government takes responsibility for repaying its own debts’. Setting aside the fact that Germany was the prime weaver of EMU’s deflationary and fragmented fabric, this rigidity ignores the ample room for interpretation in any such document and, accordingly, for negotiation of the details of its implementation. More grievously, it dismisses concern about Greece’s citizens as weak and muddle-headed, as opposed to the more generous, and arguably wiser, position of the French and José Manuel Barroso, head of the European Commission (whose past commitment to austerity makes his resistance to Merkel’s rigid approach all the more notable). Merkel categorically rebuffs their entreaties, refusing to ‘give out money under any circumstances’ and, by way of explanation, stating flatly that she ‘could not go along with a breach of contract’ implicit in the clause. As they haggle over the terms of a Greek loan tied to punitive ‘budget cuts and structural reforms’, Merkel whines, ‘Everyone here wants something from me’ (pp. 393–94). Though more generous arrangements could have been agreed, Merkel (in conjunction with other Northern European states such as Finland and the Netherlands) toes the line, grudgingly accepting meagre assistance as a ‘last resort’ (p. 398). The art of politics is here reduced to a bloodless and wooden adherence to rules, never mind the economic misery that the agreement would inevitably create in Greece. Contemporary observers could be forgiven a certain measure of Schadenfreude in view of the effects of austerity in Germany, where decades of fiscal strictures and ‘sound money’ have helped place Germany in its most parlous economic circumstances since the 1950s.

And then there is Russia. Here, too, constraint rather than responsibility seems to have been the order of the day. In Merkel’s description of her early Chancellorship, we encounter a passing description of a ‘forum of German and Russian business representatives’, including talks between German and Russian ministers. The meeting ‘focused heavily on the two countries working together on energy. . .. [Here], the previously one-sided flow of raw materials from Russia was due to be safeguarded in the long term with mutual dependencies.’ These remain unspecified, although ‘topics included the construction of the Nord Stream 1 pipeline’ (p. 357). There is no reckoning with the decades of collusive relationships among energy-intensive German export firms, political elites in both the SPD and the CDU, and Russian officials, which provided the backdrop to this forum and of which the pipeline was an important conduit and outgrowth. As Reinard Bingener and Markus Wehner (2023)¹ have recently shown, these relationships had fostered decades of decidedly one-sided German dependence on piped Russian gas and a blinkered view of that country’s bellicose geopolitical aims. Though this pro-Russian apologia was (and remains) most egregious within the SPD, it was also encouraged by Merkel, who consistently emphasized Russia and Germany’s ‘strategic partnership’ and did nothing to remedy Germany’s attendant vulnerabilities, which were brought home with Russia’s 2014 annexation of Crimea. Even when the subsequent brutal Russian invasion of Ukraine and its consequences are discussed, she writes simply that, despite ‘temporary reductions . . . as a display of annoyance from the Kremlin, deliveries of gas and oil were not affected’ (p. 583–85), to Merkel’s apparent relief. This whistling past the graveyard might be tolerable from a mid-level civil servant, but given her stature and the enormous power that she could have exercised over these arrangements, such latitude seems out of place.

What kind of freedom, exactly, does all of this add up to? Aside from the obvious context of East Germans’ throwing off the yoke of dictatorship, it is far from clear what Merkel means or what she achieved in this regard. Germans are now less free in multiple senses than in 2005: less prosperous, more geopolitically vulnerable, less politically stable and less economically competitive. Much the same could be said of the European Union, long one of Germany’s chief raisons-d'être. To be sure, blame for Germany’s current plight cannot be simply laid at Merkel’s door, and many of the problems she confronted had external origins. The chief problem with this book, though, is that everything seems to emanate from outside in Merkel’s telling. Rather than providing an honest, clear-eyed account of her achievements and acknowledgement of her mistakes, Freedom presents the reader with a mosaic of circumstances that too often seem implausibly beyond her control. Perhaps, one day, someone will write a forthright account of the Merkel years. I’ll be looking forward to it.