Chapter 10
Apostles (How She Works)
Merkel’s chancellery stands at the heart of the rebuilt German capital, an island of glass and concrete eight times the size of the White House. Constructed on the banks of the River Spree, the vast postmodernist structure occupies a space in the center of Berlin left blank after the war and throughout the subsequent 40 years of division. It is part of a complex of government buildings – parliamentarians’ offices, committee rooms, a canteen, a creche for lawmakers’ children – envisaged as a “ribbon of the federal government” binding the two sides of the city that intersected at the river, forming the East–West border until 1989.
As a statement of intent, the chancellery is anything but subtle. Architects Axel Schultes and Charlotte Frank were influenced by the monumental structures of ancient Egypt;1 one bend in the river opposite the Reichstag building, with a gleaming stone staircase leading down to the water, evokes Thebes or Luxor. Adolf Hitler’s plan for Germania, the future capital of world domination, called for the massive Hall of the People with a 290-meter-high dome and space for 180,000 people to be erected at the site. With reunification and the decision to relocate the seat of government to Berlin, driven by Helmut Kohl and carried out in 1999 during Gerhard Schröder’s chancellorship, came the historic opportunity to build anew the entire center of the city after the devastation of the war. The transfer of government from Bonn posed “an epic design challenge,” at the root of which lay “the painful memories of past regimes,” Michael Z. Wise wrote in Capital Dilemma: Germany’s Search for a New Architecture of Democracy. “Berlin is haunted by its history as font of Prussian militarism, seat of a failed bid at democracy under the Weimar Republic, headquarters of genocidal Nazi rule and the cold-war fault line between East and West.”2 The transition’s beginning wasn’t grandiose. Schröder’s interim office was an old East German government building, complete with stained-glass windows depicting scenes of socialism. One of his first official acts was to join Berlin’s mayor in sampling a cake ringed with marzipan bears, representing the animal on the city’s coat of arms. The chancellery building, opened in 2001, was controversial. “Is it too grandiose and formal?” asked the Architectural Review.3 Merkel’s office describes the building in which she works as representing “openness, democracy and an awareness of history.”
The act of reinstating Berlin as Germany’s capital, moving it 560 kilometers (350 miles) to the east from the River Rhine, was disputed at the time even in Germany. A campaign was mounted to retain Bonn as the capital. When that failed, civil servants were offered free removals, subsidized accommodation, and counseling to help them get over the shock of the shift east. For Merkel, however, the move was a return home. She lives in the former East, does her shopping in the east, her electoral district is the city of Stralsund and the island of Rügen in Germany’s far northeast by the Baltic Sea. While others continue to scorn Berlin – six ministries are still based in Bonn – Merkel is completely at ease in the capital, which she knows from childhood. Even the government retreat at Schloss Meseberg north of Berlin, leased from the Messerschmitt Foundation established by the fighter plane maker, is just 40 kilometers (25 miles) from where she grew up. British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher and French President François Mitterrand famously opposed reunification, fearing a return of a “bad” Germany once again intent on domination of Europe. The advent of the euro crisis has achieved German preeminence by other means: by dint of its economic size, Germany is the biggest contributor to international bailouts and thus holds the key to policies adopted in the 17-member euro region. Under Merkel, Berlin and the chancellery that lies at the city’s core has come to reflect Germany’s status as the fulcrum of European decision making.
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Inside, the chancellery is a mixture of open airy spaces, attenuated corridors running off into the distance, and nondescript meeting rooms that could be in any modern office block. In a way, that’s just what it is: the building houses 370 offices and some 450 staff. Yet it is flooded with light. The floors are of Italian granite, the metallic walls are painted a color architect Axel Schultes christened Porsche Green, olive and fig trees are planted in inner courtyards. Contemporary art is everywhere, most of it German: Georg Baselitz, Bernd Zimmer, Rainer Fetting. Painter Markus Lüpertz, born in Liberec (then Reichenberg) in the Sudetenland in what is the present-day Czech Republic, devised six “color rooms” located around a central staircase, with each curved wall painted a color representing a traditional virtue: blue is for wisdom; red for courage; umber for strength or fortitude; ochre for justice; and the combination of green and white for prudence.4
The Cabinet meets on the sixth floor of the chancellery each Wednesday morning at 9.30 a.m. A clock is placed on the oval table around which ministers sit, a gift from Konrad Adenauer, Germany’s first chancellor of the postwar period, on his departure from office in 1963 after presiding over five Cabinets.
According to Merkel, the architects “very deliberately made sure of the views of parliament from many parts of the chancellery, that goes for the Cabinet room and for my office.”5 The result of the alignment is to constantly remind the Chancellor of the primacy of parliament in exercising its legislative power and the executive role of the government charged with implementing laws.
Merkel’s office is on the seventh floor, with one aspect looking south over the Tiergarten and beyond to Potsdamer Platz, the crossroads of prewar Berlin, when the city during the Weimar years was home to the likes of Albert Einstein, Marlene Dietrich and Christopher Isherwood. The other wall of Merkel’s office looks east to the Sir Norman Foster-designed glass cupola of the Reichstag building. The Reichstag’s original cupola was destroyed in a fire in 1933, an act of arson blamed on the communists that the Nazis used to swiftly eliminate all political opposition and cement Hitler’s hold on power. During the Cold War, the building marked the very extremity of Western territory, with the Berlin Wall wrapped around its northeastern flank by the River Spree.
Merkel’s bureau offers a view of 20th-century history unlike any afforded her European counterparts: no other European capital so reflects the contemporary realities of the age than Berlin. In the 21st century, when economic might has replaced military firepower, Berlin is once more at the nexus of history. Germany is coming full circle under Merkel.
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For all its global importance, the court of Merkel is unusually insular, even parochial, a characteristic accentuated during the euro crisis as policy making was brought closely within the chancellery. Mistrustful by nature, she learned quickly which media needed to be stroked and which could be ignored. Merkel can give a 90-minute press conference and say nothing of news value; she feels no need to deploy a soundbite that will make the front pages. She is an atypical politician in that she doesn’t seem to care much if she imparts a message or not, at least not unless it is on her terms. Briefings with senior officials are typically on a non-attributable basis. Foreign media are regularly excluded. Interviews with German media are vetted by tradition, with quotes having to be resubmitted for approval prior to publication. Unlike in the U.S. or the U.K., Merkel’s speeches are never distributed in advance, partly because she likes to fiddle with them, making adjustments until the last minute.
All the same, she can be remarkably candid. Merkel doesn’t dissemble, rather she openly signals her intentions. “If I take my position in a political negotiation, then that’s my position,” she told an interviewer before she became chancellor. “If I’m not sure that I won’t have to give it up, I won’t take it.”6 She won’t win prizes for public speaking: she is no Obama, whose soaring rhetoric can inspire with the poetry of his convictions; in fact she is the polar opposite. But she says what she plans, telegraphing her meaning in successive speeches that never amount to a grand vision but adhere to her guiding principle of “many small steps.” The trick is to interpret them.
In public, Merkel can appear severe. She publicly upbraided her deputy spokesman, Georg Streiter, during a visit by the Croatian Prime Minister Zoran Milanovicń in September 2012, halting a joint press conference with Milanovic to berate Streiter for talking and telling him to pipe down. In April 2009 at a NATO summit held jointly in Strasbourg and at Kehl on French and German sides of the Rhine, Merkel was visibly displeased as Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi broke with protocol and kept her waiting on the red carpet while he took a call on his mobile phone.
Early on in her first term, in May 2007, Der Spiegel christened Merkel “the queen of the backrooms” because of her negotiating prowess behind closed doors. In Berlin, crisis policy is kept extremely tight within a close-knit circle in the chancellery, where loyalty to Merkel is a matter of obsessive importance. She has two gatekeepers, both women, who rarely appear in public. They control who shall be granted an interview with the chancellor and who can travel on her plane on her many foreign trips. Scenes like the public infighting between Obama’s economic advisers early in his first term are anathema to Merkel. Those who witness her at close hand say she approaches problems in a calm and sober manner, analyzing without becoming emotional about the situation or the people involved. Her approach to crisis fighting has evolved with developments in Greece, Italy and Spain and as the economic situation has changed. But the constants of Merkel’s analytical nature coupled with her sobriety are cited as the traits that have best served her during the crisis.
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Ever the scientist, her background also ensures she is unafraid of challenging conventional wisdom. Having seen an entire system collapse, when the certainties conveyed by those in charge broke down almost overnight, Merkel is wary when told that things have to be the way they are. She is always ready to question the foundations of the system. Something she never understood about Kohl, she once said, was that he clung to some policies even after it was obvious that they weren’t working. During the crisis, she canvasses outside opinion so that she can best assess the course of action to take. On more than one occasion she has sought the input of the Chinese government, of Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh, of Russia’s Vladimir Putin. She is always keen to get outside views on the euro area and its problems, however candid. Her own administration sends her articles such as papers by economists Kenneth Rogoff and Carmen Reinhart with a non-technical summary to allow her to read the latest thinking that is shaping the political debate. After all, this is a woman who told the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung she took along the libretto of the Richard Strauss opera Die Frau ohne Schatten by Hugo von Hofmannsthal for summer reading in 2011 before seeing the opera in Salzburg.
Merkel took some time to digest how the financial markets function. To help her, she read the work of Polish-born mathematician Benoit Mandelbrot, who held joint French and American citizenship. Famous primarily for his work in fractal geometry that brought order to apparently random phenomena like the wind, the leaves of a fern or Britain’s ragged coastline, fractal theory found applications in everything from computer graphics to the paintings of Jackson Pollock. However, Mandelbrot also studied financial markets. In 1999, he wrote a piece for Scientific American entitled “A Multifractal Walk down Wall Street.” It was followed in 2004 by a book co-authored with Richard L. Hudson, a former managing editor of the Wall Street Journal’s European edition, called The (Mis) Behavior of Markets: A Fractal View of Risk, Ruin, and Reward.7 Merkel began to read and digest it as the euro crisis spread from 2010 and into 2011.
Chapters have subtitles including “How the operations of mere chance can be used to study a financial market” and “Orthodox financial theory is riddled with false assumptions and wrong results.” It begins with a description of how Mandelbrot’s father escaped death during Germany’s occupation of France during World War II. Taken prisoner by the Germans, he was sprung along with the rest of the inmates by Resistance fighters who told them to run before there was time for a retaliatory attack. While the other prisoners left together, Mandelbrot senior saw danger in sticking with the crowd and took off by himself into the forest. A German Stuka dive-bomber strafed the road along which the prisoners were traveling; Mandelbrot, by taking his own path home, was unhurt. Meant to illustrate the unorthodox thinking of the author, who was professor of mathematical sciences at Yale University until his death in 2010, it might also serve for Merkel’s approach to tackling the financial crisis.
“From the start, Mandelbrot has approached the market as a scientist, both experimental and theoretical,” Hudson writes in the book’s prelude. Noting that the economics establishment “finds him intriguing, and has grudgingly adopted many of his ideas,” Hudson says “the establishment also finds him bewildering.” Not Merkel: She became fascinated with the theory that financial actors and policy makers always assume normal distribution and hence underestimate “tail risk,” according to a person familiar with her economic reading. She would confront her guests with her new-found knowledge, asking them “What do you think of the fat tail theory?”
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Unlike some of her counterparts, Merkel consults widely to better formulate her approach to policy making. She is not given to snap, intuitive decisions, but is rather very deliberate in the way she reaches her conclusions. Each year she invites the heads of the main international economic organizations to the chancellery for a discussion on policy as it relates to Germany. Most recently, in October 2012, she discussed competitiveness with IMF chief Christine Lagarde, Ángel Gurría of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, the World Bank’s Jim Yong Kim, Pascal Lamy of the World Trade Organization and head of the International Labour Organization, Guy Ryder.
“She’s full of just downright common sense and she’s very approachable,” says Gurría, the OECD’s secretary general. “She listens, she asks questions and she doesn’t seem to have all the answers. She may or may not like what you’re saying or may or may not agree, but she wants to listen. She wants the input, for the evidence.”
In such meetings, she speaks German while the others use English even though her English is fairly good. She sticks to the agenda, dealing thoroughly with each item in order, checking them off methodically before moving on to the next subject. Later, over dinner, she’ll speak English when the discussion is more relaxed and wide ranging. French President François Hollande emulated Merkel’s consultation with the same group after his election.
Merkel’s desire to take counsel can prompt her to change her mind, a sign of humility and ultimately leadership, according to Gurría. “If you have a scientific method, mind, and you find out that reality is different than you thought, you change your mind, you change your way,” he says. “It takes some humility. It takes wisdom to have your mind open to new facts, opinions and points of view. It also means that you leave your thoughts, your convictions and also your ego at the entrance.”
All the same, simply by exercising it she has become increasingly comfortable with Germany’s leadership role in Europe, growing accustomed to the fact that little can be achieved without her giving the final word on policy issues during the crisis. Merkel’s willingness to consult can help bring about a convergence of views, said Gurría.
“What is very important is that she is looking to put herself in the shoes of others. She may or may not share [their view], but she at least wants to know what’s in the minds of others who think differently from her,” he says. “It’s not nice to go to Greece and have thousands of people with banners and burning your effigy – but in order to talk to the leader, this is a question of courtesy but it’s also a signal.
“Let’s not forget these are not people like us. They have been touched with the vote, which makes them different. They have also been touched by another element: they lead. They are the ones who set the roadmap and that makes the leaders different. And when you see one that is literally reaching out to the others to say: OK, tell me your story and I’ll tell you mine. We may or may not agree, but at least we’ll understand each other better. That has made her better today. She understands better what’s going on because she reached out. She got out of the chancellery to find out. These are things that are in classic literature since the beginning of time, when the prince would disguise himself and find what people really wanted. Here you can’t disguise yourself but certainly go out and talk to the interlocutors.”
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Merkel adopts a similar tone when negotiating with fellow leaders. She takes command in meetings, setting aside all chit-chat and getting straight to the point. She has an agenda and wants to go through it, checking off each item. She doesn’t like to beat around the bush. In one meeting, she challenged then-Greek Prime Minister George Papandreou directly on his inability to stick to agreed targets in return for international aid. “Why are you not doing more on privatization?” she asked. In private, she likes to joke and is a congenial host. In the words of one southern European official, when business is over, however difficult it may have been, she is the model of hospitality: she comes across as a woman who has invited you into her house and takes care of you.
“High Politics, Housewife-Style,” ran the headline in a regional newspaper, the Märkische Allgemeine, after Merkel’s post-summer press conference in 2012. Indeed, the chancellor’s nickname in Berlin political circles is “Mutti,” or mom, because of her maternal ways, whether a concern for others or a scolding. Merkel is actually childless. German media have conjectured that the name may have originated with her former economy minister, Michael Glos, who resigned from the Cabinet in February 2009 feeling he had been poorly treated by Merkel. The term “manages to combine respect, subservience and insult in one,” according to Der Spiegel. It dubbed Merkel’s approach to governing, “Mutti politics,” which it boiled down to trying to please everyone.8 Certainly, after she won a second term, Merkel said that she aimed to be the “chancellor of all Germans.” In the years since the euro crisis erupted, however, she has moved on from a mom to a matriarchal figure with absolute power over her household: her party, her coalition, and her regional adversaries – leaders with power bases in the states who might one day have challenged her. Her sway over Europe cements her position.
Merkel’s role model is Catherine the Great, the Prussian princess who ruled Russia alone for 34 years. Merkel has a small portrait of Catherine alongside a globe on her office desk in the chancellery, a gift from before her time as chancellor, when she was leader of the CDU parliamentary group. Asked on a television show what she admired in Catherine, Merkel said she “was very courageous and accomplished many things under difficult circumstances.” She also cited her ability as a “clever strategist.”9
Catherine was born Sophia Augusta Fredericka in 1729 in the Pomeranian port city of Stettin – present day Szczecin in northwestern Poland – the daughter of the Prince of Anhalt-Zerbst, who was the city’s governor, a Prussian general, and a devout Lutheran. Using her mother’s royal connections, she determined early on to ascend to the Russian throne. She learned Russian, changed her name to the more acceptable Yekaterina, or Catherine, and abandoned her Protestant faith for Russian orthodoxy. After 17 years of marriage to the prospective czar, Peter III, she conspired to have him overthrown as soon as he succeeded to the throne. In 1762, just six months after he became czar, he was deposed and killed during a palace coup and Catherine became empress of Russia. She went on to rule until her death in 1796, expanding Russian territory to the south and the west during what came to be known as a golden age for Russia.
Merkel has read the journals of Catherine the Great and discussed her with Vladimir Putin. While the parallels are easy to make – both women came from similar geographical areas, had strongly Lutheran fathers and extraordinary levels of drive, and both prevailed over their male counterparts – Merkel never mentions Catherine other than on the rare occasion she is asked. If she genuinely sees Catherine the Great as a role model, it is another aspect of her life that she prefers to keep to herself.
Directly opposite Merkel’s desk in the chancellery, several wooden chess figures stand knee-high by the south-facing window, gifts from the German forest-owners’ association. The first chess piece she received upon becoming chancellor was a queen; she was subsequently given two pawns and a king.
Merkel is “an excellent chess player,” according to Xavier Musca, Sarkozy’s former chief economic adviser. “She never starts by putting all the cards on the table and saying, ‘that’s what I want to do’.” That was a significant difference she had with the French president and which gave her the upper hand in the beginning. She would also canvass civil servants for their views of a specific problem, discussing the issue with the whole team.
Merkel was dismayed when Sarkozy brandished any concession he had won from her, as she kept quiet about whatever political bartering had taken place. It led to her being reproached domestically for sacrificing German interests and being too lenient toward the French. Merkel was transparent during negotiations on the constraints put on her by the need to satisfy her coalition and to retain a majority in parliamentary votes, by the Bundesrat, the Bundesbank and the high court. Musca recalls one caricature in a German newspaper depicting Sarkozy and Merkel as prehistoric cave dwellers, he beating her over the head with a club.
In 2011, Sarkozy realized he was making it more difficult for her to agree to crisis-fighting measures and revised his approach to dealing with Merkel: he no longer proclaimed the concessions he had wrung from her and stopped presenting his positions up front. After meetings, they would claim a united front on tackling the crisis, even when it was evidently not the case. “For the sake of Europe, he chose another way, which was politically, domestically extremely difficult – to be silent,” Musca says. “The discrepancy between the German and the French line was destroying Europe and was also detrimental to France because it would put France in the camp of the southern countries” that were in trouble and demanding more help from Germany.
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Merkel, while candid on her constraints, is not afraid of appearing at odds with her own Cabinet members in discussions. In one meeting with European counterparts on the debt crisis, she openly told those attending that she disagreed with her finance minister, Wolfgang Schäuble, on purchasing government bonds on the secondary market as a means of calming the bond markets. Those present were taken aback at her frankness.
She can be tough. Merkel is known to raise her voice at times to shout at her political adversaries, and it can be fearsome. One target of her temper was cited anonymously in Die Welt newspaper as relating the experience with a mixture of shock, perplexity and respect. It was clear that he never wanted to be confronted by a wrathful Merkel again.10 Merkel admits she had temper outbursts as a child, boiling over when a series of grievances had built up.11
In May 2012, Environment Minister Norbert Röttgen witnessed her displeasure, becoming the first and only Cabinet minister to be dismissed from his post during Merkel’s term. Röttgen was in charge of the transition to renewable sources of power from nuclear – the biggest energy overhaul in German history – after Merkel abandoned her support for atomic power in response to the 2011 tsunami and nuclear disaster at Fukushima. Among Merkel’s closest confidantes, Röttgen had been touted as a possible chancellor one day, but to advance up the political ladder the more swiftly he needed a regional power base. So he took on the additional role of leading the Christian Democratic Union in North Rhine-Westphalia into regional elections. He made a name for himself for the wrong reasons, fighting a lackluster campaign that ended in Merkel’s party falling to its worst-ever electoral result in the state.
North Rhine-Westphalia was more than just politically significant as the most populous of Germany’s 16 states. It was symbolically important for Merkel. Two years earlier, in May 2010, the main opposition Social Democratic Party had snatched the state from Merkel’s CDU at an election overshadowed by voter anger at her last-minute decision to aid Greece. Her about-turn then cost her the state and her majority in the upper house, the Bundesrat. She wanted it back, and personally campaigned for Röttgen in North Rhine-Westphalia at least nine times.
He repaid her by leading the CDU to a postwar low score of 26 percent, a drop of more than 8 points on the last result. Not only did he fail to recapture the state, but the Social Democrats’ vote share increased to 39.1 percent, allowing them to form a more stable government with the Greens. Hannelore Kraft was returned as North Rhine-Westphalia’s state premier and went on to challenge Merkel’s popularity in national opinion polls. If ever there was a regional election with national ramifications, this was it.
Yet the dismal result shouldn’t have had any impact on Röttgen’s ability to carry out his role as a Cabinet minister. Bild ran an unsourced story saying that before she dismissed him, Merkel had talked to industry officials who complained that Röttgen didn’t listen to them over the energy transition. The reality was that he had lost Merkel’s trust and that of his party and had to go: three days after the election, she fired him. Merkel never gave a reason for her decision. In a hastily convened statement to the press lasting just 1 minute and 40 seconds, she said simply that, in accordance with Article 64 of the constitution, she had asked the president to release Röttgen of his duties. “The energy overhaul is a central theme of this legislative period,” she said. “The foundations have been laid, but we’ve got quite a bit of work ahead of us.” She thanked Röttgen for his work and nominated in his stead Peter Altmaier, her party’s chief whip and a close confidant. Merkel had come to her conclusion, and moved swiftly: Röttgen’s Cabinet career lay in tatters.
Altmaier and Röttgen, who was CDU chief whip during her first term, were both members of Merkel’s inner circle. In November 2005, they were among a select band of Merkel loyalists who attended a party in the chancellery held on the occasion of her election. Focus magazine reported that the others included Willi Hausmann, a close adviser from her time as families minister under Kohl; Volker Kauder, a lawmaker from Rottweil in Baden-Württemberg who followed Merkel as CDU/CSU floor leader; Ronald Pofalla, the CDU general secretary whom Merkel appointed her chief of staff in her second term; and Peter Hintze, a deputy minister in the Economy Ministry who as the official responsible for aerospace matters was instrumental in Germany’s decision to block a proposed merger of EADS and BAE Systems in October 2012.12 Hintze, who trained as a Protestant theologian, has since 2002 been a vice president of the European People’s Party, the umbrella group of European center-right parties including Merkel’s CDU, a position that puts him at the heart of EU strategizing.
Altmaier, the lawyer son of a miner and a nurse, worked at the EU Commission in his early career until his election to the Bundestag in 1994. In Merkel’s first term he served at the Interior Ministry as deputy to Wolfgang Schäuble until 2009. He grew up in the Saarland on Germany’s western flank, bordering Luxembourg and France. Now he is tasked with running the most politically charged ministry after that of finance, one that might yet trip up the chancellor over her decision to overhaul the power mix keeping Europe’s biggest economy turning.
He sees the chancellor’s greatest strengths as a cool head, an ability to laugh and a willingness to listen to other viewpoints. “Even in the most difficult situations, Mrs. Merkel doesn’t lose her calm consideration,” he said. “She has humor. And she allows herself to be convinced through argument.”13
Those character traits are the secret ingredient that have helped her to master the complex, existential problems posed by the crisis in the euro area while retaining public support, according to Altmaier. “To govern successfully requires the ability not to be pressured by events and to stick to what you hold to be right even in the face of resistance,” he says. “Mrs. Merkel has both qualities, and both have helped her during the euro crisis in successfully confronting countries like Greece or Italy as well as shoring up her profile domestically.” While investors, political foes and media pundits accuse Merkel of lacking vision, opinion surveys suggest German voters trust her. A December 2012 poll for Stern magazine found 76 percent view Merkel as a strong leader and 56 percent say she is “trustworthy.” Peer Steinbrück, her designated Social Democratic challenger in the 2013 general election, was rated a strong leader by 49 percent.14
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It may not prove to be enough. Merkel may have to abandon her iron ways and learn to give ground on Europe if she is to succeed in pressing her agenda. With Sarkozy’s defeat to François Hollande at France’s presidential elections in May 2012, Merkel lost her foil during the crisis. The demise of Merkozy meant the dissolution of a partnership forged over five years of tackling financial and economic turmoil. Merkel was forced to start from scratch with a political leader she campaigned against and who makes clear his alignment with the southern arc of Spain and Italy in rejecting her antidote of austerity. In private, the chancellor concedes she is still very much finding her way with Hollande.
Horst Teltschik, who served as Helmut Kohl’s deputy chief of staff, advising him during the diplomacy that led to German reunification, says Merkel will have to learn to be more sensitive to Hollande’s concerns. Just as Kohl bent over backwards to take into account the sensitivities of his French counterpart, François Mitterrand, so she needs to grant Hollande the space he needs to rally domestic French support for the economic reforms necessary and to get him on board for her European agenda. That may mean allowing him to trumpet the concessions he gains from her, something she railed against with Sarkozy.
“It’s hard for the French to take Germany as a role model. Kohl used to always say ‘I salute the French tricolor three times before I turn to the German flag’,” Teltschik said. “Kohl always tried to make it easier for the French to take joint decisions and make reforms. Merkel has to think about what she can do to make Hollande’s domestic policy decision making easier.”
Under her leadership, Berlin has moved from the eastern periphery of Europe to its core. She has unprecedented sway to take Europe in whichever direction she wants. The irony is that she may have to cede some of that power if she wants to get France back on board. She faces a choice: go it alone, breaking with Germany’s entire postwar philosophy on Europe, or bend and do more to get others, notably France, back at her side. “Merkel is in the dominant role in Europe, though it’s not something she has sought,” Teltschik says. “Germany is now in its most dominant role in Europe since World War II. So the question is, does Merkel make it easier for Hollande to agree to a new agenda or not?”15
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Nineteenth-century German author Theodor Fontane wrote a description of Berliners that could equally apply to Merkel and her time as chancellor. Fontane was born in Neuruppin, less than 65 kilometers (40 miles) from Merkel’s hometown of Templin, and was a pioneering German proponent of the novel through works such as Effi Briest. He also wrote about his wanderings in Scotland and through the Prussian state of Brandenburg which he and Merkel called home a little more than a century apart. Among his travels, in 1870 he went to the front to witness the Franco-Prussian war in eastern France, where he was captured and held prisoner for three months. The Berlin way, wrote Fontane, is to be “frank and sincere.” Yet “hidden behind is a whole lot of shrewdness.” The following year, 1871, France was defeated and the German states unified under the Prussian leader Otto von Bismarck, the first Iron Chancellor, with Berlin his capital. Modern Germany was born and the face of Europe changed irrevocably.
Notes
1. Catherine Croft, Concrete Architecture (Gibbs Smith, October 2004).
2. Michael Z. Wise, Capital Dilemma: Germany’s Search for a New Architecture of Democracy (Princeton Architectural Press, April 1998).
3. Catherine Croft, Concrete Architecture (Gibbs Smith, October 2004).
4. Tour of the chancellery: http://www.bundeskanzlerin.de/Webs/BKin/DE/Kanzleramt/Rundgang/rundgang_node.html.
5. Ibid.
6. Angela Merkel, Mein Weg: Ein Gespräch mit Hugo Müller-Vogg, p. 121 (Hoffmann und Campe Verlag, Hamburg, 2005).
7. Benoit B. Mandelbrot and Richard L. Hudson, The (Mis) Behavior of Markets: A Fractal View of Risk, Ruin, and Reward (Profile Books, November 2008).
8. “Angela the Great or Just Mom?” Der Spiegel, November 3, 2009: http://www.spiegel.de/international/germany/angela-the-great-or-just-mom-merkel-s-dream-of-a-place-in-the-history-books-a-659018.html.
9. Ibid.
10. “The EU Today is Angela Merkel’s GDR,” Die Welt, May 2, 2012: http://www.welt.de/politik/deutschland/article13850962/Die-EU-ist-heute-Angela-Merkels-DDR.html.
11. Mein Weg, op. cit.
12. Focus Magazin, November 28, 2005: http://www.focus.de/politik/deutschland/kanzlerin-aller-anfang-ist-leer_aid_209905.html.
13. Interview courtesy of Stefan Nicola.
14. Stern, December 5, 2012: http://mobil.stern.de/politik/deutschland/stern-umfrage-zu-peer-steinbrueck-guter-kandidat-mit-schlechten-chancen-1936800.html.
15. Interview courtesy of Leon Mangasarian.