German chancellor angela merkel biography for kids

Angela Merkel served as chancellor of Germany for four consecutive four-year terms, from 2005 to 2021. Only Helmut Kohl had a longer stint at the helm of a democratic Deutschland—and he was in power for a mere 10 days more than Mutti Merkel (“Mother Merkel”), as the country’s first female chancellor came to be known. The nickname, conceived by her detractors as a somewhat sexist put-down, was embraced by her own supporters as an accolade in recognition of the stability and prudence that were the stocks-in-trade of this unflashy pastor’s daughter who was raised in communist East Germany.

And so it should come as no surprise that her memoir, “Freedom,” is an achingly earnest account of her own extraordinary life, the excitement toned down at every opportunity by the dictates of her profound Protestant modesty. The book was written with Beate Baumann, her fiercely protective chief of staff, and the publisher deployed no fewer than eight translators to render it into English.

“Freedom” is, for large stretches, a serious snooze. It might well be retitled “Boredom.” Ms. Merkel has an unerring eye for the humdrum. As a “rustic child” in Brandenburg she “thought nothing of eating unwashed carrots in the nursery.” As a teenager she fell into a lake after drinking “a substantial quantity” of kirsch and “had to go home dripping wet.” Of her debut campaign at age 36 for election to Germany’s federal Parliament, she offers this vignette from her encounter with fishermen in Western Pomerania: “It was the first time I’d ever held a turbot in my hands and felt its distinctive stone-like bumps.” While recounting her interactions with German soccer stars, she tells us that she’s “fascinated by the mix of physical skill and player intelligence that this team sport demands.”

Her book is the polar opposite of Boris Johnson’s “Unleashed.” The former British prime minister’s memoir, published one month before Ms. Merkel’s, was gaudy and self-aggrandizing, entertaining almost with a vengeance. It could be said, in Ms. Merkel’s defense, that she’s too dignified to be entertaining and that she’d rather die than turn herself into a circus-act.

But her tightly buttoned style ensures that readers must go on an Easter-egg hunt for candor and novel disclosures. This is no easy task—the book runs longer than 700 pages—but a diligent search yields some rewards. Ms. Merkel reveals that Vladimir Putin showed up 45 minutes late for a gathering of heads of government at a G-8 summit she was hosting in Germany because he was—he said—drinking a crate of his favorite German beer in his room. “He seemed to enjoy being the center of attention by behaving like that.” In Sochi, Russia, Mr. Putin brought Koni, his black Labrador, to a bilateral meeting with Ms. Merkel, who is known to be petrified of dogs. “Was it a little demonstration of power?” she asks. “I could tell from Putin’s facial expressions that he was enjoying the situation.” Elsewhere, she writes that Mr. Putin told her “a bare-faced lie” when he denied that the armed men who’d taken control of Crimea in 2014 were Russian soldiers.

While Ms. Merkel is effusive in her admiration for both George W. Bush and Barack Obama, she makes it plain that she didn’t care for Donald Trump. She would, she says, “have been delighted” to see Hillary Clinton win in 2016. And since her book went to press before the 2024 election, she writes that “I wish with all my heart that Kamala Harris . . . defeats her competitor and becomes president.” Mr. Trump “assessed everything from the perspective of the real-estate developer he had been before entering politics,” Ms. Merkel says. “For him, all countries were in competition, and the success of one meant the failure of another. He didn’t believe that cooperation could increase prosperity for everyone.”

There are flashes of frankness on big global questions. After the Brexit referendum in 2016, she writes, she was “tormented by whether I should have made even more concessions toward the UK to make it possible for them to remain” in the European Union. During talks in 2010 for the financial salvation of spendthrift Greece—it was essentially bailed out by Germany—she describes as “unbelievable” the inability of the Greeks to behave like fiscal grown-ups.

Still, it’s deeply disappointing to read her on the subject of the Nord Stream pipelines, which delivered Russian gas to Germany and which she championed throughout her tenure in office. She writes that after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine “I was accused more forcefully than ever of having led Germany into an irresponsible dependency on Russian gas,” but she passes the buck by saying that the contracts for the first pipeline—Nord Stream 1—were signed by her predecessor, Gerhard Schröder. In truth, the pipeline was constructed and became operational on her watch; and she approved the contracts for Nord Stream 2, a second pipeline that would have made Germany yet more of an energy-vassal of Mr. Putin, even after the Russian annexation of Crimea.

Ms. Merkel justifies Nord Stream 2—whose launch was rightly nixed in February 2022 by her successor, Olaf Scholz—as essential to keeping Germany’s energy costs down. She reaches, also, for a green alibi. Ever since Germany’s definitive “withdrawal from nuclear energy”—which Ms. Merkel herself oversaw in 2011—“natural gas served as a fossil-fuel bridge technology to reach climate targets until renewable energy was able to take over completely.” Even if it meant locking Germany into a deal with the devil, one made, ironically, by a pastor’s daughter.

Mr. Varadarajan, a Journal contributor, is a fellow at the American Enterprise Institute and at NYU Law School’s Classical Liberal Institute.