Towards the end of her 16-year tenure, former German chancellor Angela Merkel was garlanded with superlative titles: the “queen of Europe”, the “most powerful woman in the world”, the “leader of the free world”. In reality, her role was always more that of a mediator than a sovereign. Born and brought up for 35 years in an anti-church, Moscow-allied socialist command economy but politically active for 31 years in a Christian, staunchly pro-Nato and pro-market conservative party, Merkel’s unique political calling card was her ability to see eye-to-eye with politicians from opposing camps, because she understood their ideological hinterland.
And so Freedom, released just three years after she left office, was never going to be a score-settling kind of autobiography. Meetings with politicians as different as George W Bush and former leftwing Greek prime minister Aléxis Tsípras are recalled with equal respect and affection – even though Merkel concludes that the former’s war in Iraq was “a mistake, waged on a basis of mistaken beliefs”, and the latter provides her with “the most astonishing moment of any phone call in my entire political career”, when he tells her he will recommend that the Greek people vote against a bailout deal he himself negotiated with her.
When it comes to those who slighted her, Merkel says she adhered to a motto usually associated with the British royal family: “Never explain, never complain”. The closest thing to disses here are non-mentions. Yanis Varoufakis, the self-styled rebel hero of the Greek government debt-crisis, is named not once in the 721-page tome. Boris Johnson gets two passing mentions in a book that goes into exhaustive detail when describing the menu at the chancellory canteen (“But nor will I forget the mixed salads,” reads one immortal line). Merkel’s personal hairdresser comes across as a more complex political animal than French president Emmanuel Macron.
The notion that political opponents “should be considered strange even as human beings,” she writes at one point, is “completely alien” to her, though she makes an exception for Donald Trump. When he flusters her at their first official meeting by refusing to shake hands in front of the cameras, she reprimands herself for assuming the US president would be “someone completely normal”. Trump’s combative approach to the European Union on trade and tariffs – from the perspective of a real-estate developer to whom “all countries were in competition, and the success of one meant the failure of another” – runs completely counter to her view of the world.
Even then, she swallows her scorn and lets the subtext do the talking. In a statement that is surprising given how long the book’s publication date was announced in advance, she says “I wish with all my heart that Kamala Harris […] defeats her competitor and becomes president.”
Freedom starts with a lengthy section on Merkel’s first three decades behind the iron curtain, and it’s hard to shake the impression that this is the book she really wanted to write. Not because of any lingering ostalgie: she thought the German Democratic Republic was “as petty, narrow-minded, tasteless and humourless as it could possibly be”. of the newly founded Democratic Awakening party backs East Germany’s currency to be replaced by the Deutschmark as swiftly as possible.
Rather, this reads like the voice of someone finally unburdened of the need to keep quiet about their upbringing. Her first experiences with journalists after the wall went down, she writes, make her realise that it is difficult “to speak openly with West German media about one’s own life in the GDR”, and she explains that she was reluctant to make too much of becoming Germany’s first female chancellor because she didn’t want to be “pigeonholed”.
Going by how eager her politician colleagues were to patronise her, that reluctance was perfectly understandable. There’s her former interior minister Horst Seehofer, who describes her 2015 decision to open German borders to refugees from Syria as having led to a “tyranny of injustice”, seemingly putting a Merkel-led Germany on par with the GDR’s dictatorship. Or how about Mexican president Felipe Calderón who, at a G20 meeting in 2012, thought he could nudge her into unleashing the European Central Bank’s quantitative easing programme by likening her to a “little girl” on the playground, asking her “big brother” for help to fight off the bullies.
“I’m not allowed to ask my brother,” she tells him. “I have to get through this on my own.” Her feelings are clear, but it’s not phrased as a complaint, and it doesn’t come with any further explanation.
The second half of the book, which deals with geopolitics, is more breathless, as if its pace is still dictated by her crammed diaries during the cumulative crises that marked her career: the global banking crisis that began in 2007, followed by the threat of the break-up of the eurozone, the arrival of an estimated 1.3 million displaced people on Europe’s borders in 2015, and a brewing military conflict between Russia and Ukraine.
The wisdom of the strategic decisions she made during these key moments came into question just two-and-a-half months after she stepped down, when Russia invaded Ukraine. Merkel was a stellar student of Russian, and Putin spoke fluent German, which had positioned her to become the west’s closest negotiating partner with the Kremlin. Even before diplomatic relations deteriorated, she writes, she held no illusions as to Putin’s desire “to push back against the American victory in the Cold War”. The 2014 annexation of the Donetsk and Luhansk oblasts made it clear to her that the Russian president was a “rulebreaker” who “must be stopped”.
If so, why did Germany under her leadership allow its reliance on Russian gas to rise? Why did she not discontinue the Nord Stream 2 pipeline project that linked Russia directly with her constituency in Germany’s north-east, allowing gas transits to bypass Ukraine? Why did she not campaign to ramp up Europe’s defence?
Her answers are frustratingly formulaic. Justifying Germany and France in 2008 blocking Ukraine’s admission to the Membership Action Plan that would have put the country on a road to join Nato, she says it is “illusory” that this would have deterred Russian aggression: Putin wouldn’t have “twiddled his thumbs”. But for Putin even the rhetorical gesture towards Ukraine’s future Nato membership that she agreed to as a compromise was a “declaration of war”. So what difference did her veto make? On Nord Stream, Merkel writes that halting the project would have required a special ruling at a European level, which she would have looked into had Ukraine and Russia not signed a new transit contract. A vigorous defence would read differently.
At its worst, Freedom is as patronising towards the European states to Germany’s east as her male colleagues were to Merkel. Many countries in central and eastern Europe, she writes, had very little appetite for investing in any relationship with Russia. “They seemed to wish that their gigantic neighbour would disappear from the map, simply cease to exist.” Yet wasn’t it Germany that engaged in make-believe, convincing itself that expanding trade relations with Russia would somehow restrain its imperial ambitions?
All the human qualities that made Merkel a likable and liked leader are in this book: the lack of showmanship, the understated sense of humour, the dedication to building alliances and forging compromises. And yet you finish Freedom asking yourself whether good human beings automatically make good decision-makers.
In the foreword, Merkel promises to “identify my misjudgements”, but the only mea culpas relate to a few rhetorical slip-ups, such as the “trite” and “parochial” image of the thrifty Swabian housewife she evoked during the eurozone crisis. After Brexit, she is “tormented” by whether more concessions would have kept the UK in the EU, but concludes that Britain’s exit had been a foregone conclusion ever since David Cameron tried to appease Eurosceptics within his own party. Answering to the rights or wrongs of Germany’s big-picture risk calculation – of banking on Russian natural gas to enable a nuclear energy phase-out – somehow gets forgotten in the rush from summit communique to summit communique.
Is it fair to hold one woman accountable for the mess in which the western liberal democracy she embodied finds itself in 2024, especially given her leadership of a country with more restraints on executive power than her counterparts in France or the UK? Merkel answers that question herself. What she admired most in her former patron Helmut Kohl, she writes, was his capacity for “genuinely assuming ultimate political responsibility”.
• Philip Oltermann was the Guardian’s Germany correspondent and Berlin bureau chief. Freedom by Angela Merkel is published by Macmillan (£35). To support the Guardian and Observer, order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.
