At the peak of her career, she was hailed as the world’s most powerful woman and the de-facto leader of the EU.
But as Angela Merkel turns 70 today, there will be no gathering of dignitaries to pay tribute to her legacy. Instead, she will celebrate entering her eighth decade “in private”, a spokesperson for her office told the German news agency dpa.
A more formal celebration will be held on 25 September, though not at the headquarters of her political party, the centre-right Christian Democratic Union (CDU), but in the studious setting of Berlin’s Academy of Sciences and Humanities. There will be no laudatory speeches by allies but instead, a lecture by the art historian Horst Bredekamp on the theme of “light and shade in the Enlightenment”.
The theme could not be more appropriate for a politician who has emphatically cut ties with the world of politics in a way that few of her peers have managed.
When Merkel announced in October 2018 that she would retire at the end of her fourth term, in autumn 2021, speculation was rife that she would heave her gravitas into a role such as the leadership of the UN. Others suggested she could follow her predecessor Gerhard Schröder’s path from high office to lobbying.
Instead, the ex-chancellor has retreated into the world of the arts.
The only big public interview Merkel has given since stepping down, at the Berliner Ensemble theatre in June 2022, was not with a political commentator or one of the reporters who tailed her during her 16 years at the top of German politics, but with Alexander Osang, a novelist and Spiegel columnist known for his wry observations about everyday life.
In the interview, Merkel revealed that she had spent the first months of her retirement immersed in William Shakespeare’s Macbeth and Friedrich Schiller’s Don Carlos – and frustrated those who wanted her to reflect on her decisions on Germany’s role in Russia’s war with Ukraine, energy security or immigration.
In May this year, Merkel held a eulogy at the offices of the CDU-affiliated Konrad Adenauer Foundation – not in honour of another politician, but the actor Ulrich Matthes, a longtime friend best known outside Germany for playing Joseph Goebbels in the historical drama Downfall.
When, in the same month, she did give a speech at a political occasion, it was to mark the retirement of an erstwhile political opponent, the former Green party co-leader Jürgen Trittin. To the chagrin of some party colleagues, she had ducked out of the CDU party conference days earlier.
Der Spiegel commented at the time that the space that Merkel, the pensioner, seemed to feel comfortable in was one in which “politics barely has a role to play, in which differences are barely heard above resounding unity”.
Differences of opinion, and questions about whether some decisions will tarnished her legacy, will come to the foreground when Merkel’s memoirs, entitled Freedom: Memories 1954-2021 and co-written by her longtime adviser and chief of staff, Beate Baumann, will be published in November.
Until then, the septuagenarian will continue to move mainly in more elevated cultural spheres, at the same time as making fictional appearances – or quasi-appearances – in several novels and television series this year. In the Hungarian writer László Krasznahorkai’s novel Herscht 07769, published in Hungarian in 2022 and to be published in Ottilie Mulzet’s English translation in September, the protagonist writes Merkel several letters about their shared passion for the music of Johann Sebastian Bach. The chancellor never replies.
In Miss Merkel, a television drama that premiered in Germany last March and was broadcast in Italy last week, the East Germany-raised politician takes a more central role. The show depicts Merkel, her husband and their pug trying to spend her retirement in the sedate flatlands of the north-eastern region in Uckermark, only to end up solving crimes instead.
Starring the veteran German actor Katharina Thalbach, the series is based on two novels by David Safier, published in the twilight years of Merkel’s time in power. In the first edition of the books, Merkel’s pug is called Putin, but after Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine Safier renamed him Pupsi (Farty). In the TV series he is called Helmut, after the late German leader Helmut Kohl, who mentored Merkel.
Merkel has spoken of her nervousness around dogs after being bitten by one as a child, and in the Russian writer Vladimir Sorokin’s novel Doctor Garin, which was published in Germany this year, her phobia haunts her deep into retirement.
Set at a sanatorium where the titular doctor looks after not just Merkel but also the ageing and increasingly unhinged Vladimir Putin, Donald Trump, Boris Johnson, Emmanuel Macron, Justin Trudeau and Shinzo Abe, it shows her tormented in her dreams by barking humans. A literal nightmare, because sleep is “the best thing that remains in my life”.
Surely that cannot be true, Dr Garin tries to reassure the retired power player: “You still have a wonderful future ahead of you.”
