After 31 years in politics - 16 of them as Germany's leader - Angela Merkel's successor finally took over the country last week.
It ended quite a swan song for Merkel, who announced in 2018 that she would stand down this year.
Raised in East Germany, she entered politics during reunification and was the country's first female Chancellor, quickly gaining a reputation for being a source of stability in a crisis.
Photo: Supplied
While a popular politician, she bucked the trend of personality politics and populism. As author and journalist Kati Marton puts it: "After several decades, Germans are not tired of her image, her voice, her looming persona - because Merkel does not loom."
Marton joined Kathryn to talk about her new biography: The Chancellor: The Remarkable Odyssey of Angela Merkel.
Merkel is famously private about her personal life and Marton admits it was sometimes a challenge to uncover things about her life.
“I’m an old-school journalist, I don’t stay at home in my pyjamas and surf the web. I went to every place that she ever spent time in and talked to people who she knew every step of the way up her remarkable ascent on the political ladder to the point where she became the chancellor of the world.
“It was, I don’t mind telling you that, the Everest of biographies because she is the most private public figure in the world, I would say. That can be really traced to her early days as a citizen of the Stasi state of East Germany.”
Marton explains that it was common for people to be informed on to the state police even by those closest to them in the former East Germany.
“She learned to be very suspicious and those are qualities that have really served her well in politics because she was always underestimated because she never let on that she was actually a ferociously determined, ambitious person. It was easy to write her off as a fairly unthreatening, kind of drab person.
She first became ‘fixated’ on Merkel when, in 2015, unlike almost every other head of state in Europe, Merkel didn’t put up walls but instead allowed 1 million Middle Eastern refugees to settle in Germany.
“Those million refugees have mostly been integrated and assimilated into German society and she has many legacies but that’s the one that will historically her prime legacy and the one that most appealed to me.”
Marton explains that she herself was a refugee when she was a child after her journalist parents were arrested by the communist Hungarian authorities.
Merkel was the daughter of a strict and austere Lutheran minister and Marton says she never quite gained his approval.
“Her parents never voted for her, which I found astonishing. It was a tough moral background and all those years that she spent in this sleepy hamlet in East Germany were years when she was really cultivating herself and her inner self.
“She read a great deal and acquired this sense of quiet self-confidence which really served her well when she was dealing with some of the worst demagogues in recent history, notably Vladimir Putin and Donald Trump among others, who could not shake her quiet self and sense that hubris is really a male weakness.”
Putin himself was a spy posted in East Germany at the time the communist state began to crumble around him and Merkel and that set up an interesting dynamic for the pair.
“It’s a fascinating divergence between two people who are products of the same foundation. They were both raised in the totalitarian Soviet empire but came out with different conclusions about that empire. For Putin, the greatest tragedy of the 20th century is the collapse of the Soviet empire. For Merkel, the collapse of Moscow was the beginning of her second chance.
“The irony is that they have been locked for three decades in this dysfunctional marriage where they had to get along because Germany cannot ignore the great Russian bear and Russian being dependent on the German economic and financial engine. They have spent more hours in each other’s company than I wager she has spent with her husband.
Marton says both Merkel and Putin speak each other’s languages and have come to a relatively good working relationship.
“They know exactly who the other is and have a perfect understanding of each other. He has more respect for her than for any other head of state because he understands that he can’t fool her they way he could fool Trump, for example, and many others.
“He put her through her paces beginning with the KGB ice staring contest where she did not blink and, even more brutally, unleashed his dog knowing that Merkel had twice been bitten as a child and is afraid of dogs. He unleashed his dog who went sniffing around her, to the horror of her staff, but she did not flinch.”
Merkel reveres the United States, Marton says, and what it represents and enjoyed good relationships with George Bush and Barack Obama. The election of Trump, then, came as a bit of a blow to the chancellor.
“She was very shocked, first by Trump’s election which she attributed to the Byzantine electoral college, and then on January 6 last year the storming of the Capitol. That was a big blow for her. As a result, she realises now that Trump may be gone, but Trumpism is alive.
“She’s spent the last two years speaking to anyone who will listen and preaching about the fragility of democracies and the need to protect and safeguard democracies.”
As for Merkel’s life after the chancellorship, Marton believes she’ll begin with a richly deserved break.
“She will savour her newfound freedom. She was not free living in a totalitarian state for 35 years and certainly not free in these 16 years as chancellor so I think this will be quite a treat for her.”
However, she thinks Merkel won’t stay away from public life forever.
“I would wager we will be seeing Merkel again in the future. She is relatively young, in pretty good health, and has so much to offer.”
