On two lives - Timothy Garton Ash in TLS:

‘By far the most vivid part of Freedom – which appears simultaneously in German and in a very uneven English translation by no fewer than eight translators – is the first 100 pages, in which Merkel describes Life Number One: her thirty-five years in unfreedom. She recalls the spartan beauty of her childhood in the home of her left-wing Protestant theologian father and strong-minded mother; rambling in the woods of her beloved Uckermark, northeast of Berlin, where she still has a house; and the children’s Christmas Eve duty of retelling the Christmas story from St Luke’s gospel. A memorable journey to Bavaria and Austria as a seven-year-old in the summer of 1961 is followed by the unforgettable shock of the construction of the Berlin Wall, which began on August 13, 1961. From an early age she learns how you have to watch your words for fear of being denounced to a Party official or the Stasi. “Even as children, we knew not to say anything”, she writes. And later: “We were basically living in two worlds in any case”.’

(…)

‘She makes the compromises required in order to have a good career as a scientist, including active participation in the communist youth organization, the Free German Youth, but successfully resists an attempt by the Stasi to recruit her as an informer. Cautious, watchful, thoughtful, admiring of dissident voices such as Rudolf Bahro, Robert Havemann and Rainer Eppelmann, but certainly never a dissident herself, she honestly summarizes her own approach as “to live within the system, without passing the point where I would no longer have been able to look myself in the eye”. Having lived in the GDR at exactly this time, I find the East German reality perfectly described, with all its shades of light and dark.’

(…)

‘A former adviser to Kohl once told me that people thought his boss ruthless, which indeed he was, but not half as ruthless as Merkel. Describing how she sidelined Merz, the author herself says their problem was “we both wanted to be boss”. Yet she always remained inwardly an outsider.’

(…)

‘Instead, the verb merkeln (“to merkel”) became a synonym for reaching compromises while postponing hard choices.’

(…)

‘What breathes through these pages is a mixture of fascination with and fear of Russia. She mentions in connection with her Russian-language course in Donetsk in the early 1980s that “Russian still fascinated me”. Russian, yes, but also Russia. In her rather extensive description of the interior decoration of her office in the Chancellery, one detail she does not mention is that she had on her desk a portrait of Catherine the Great, the formidable east German woman whose long reign as empress of Russia included the incorporation into the Russian Empire of some of those parts of Ukraine now again occupied by Putin. At the same time one constantly senses between the lines of her cautious formulations the deeply ingrained German fear of Russia’s nuclear-armed military might.’

(…)

‘Here, then, is the story of the triumph but also the tragedy of this truly remarkable, strong, thoughtful, principled, decent East German woman who led the West. When someone uses grandiose words like triumph and tragedy, Angela Merkel has a rather endearing habit of shrugging her shoulders and emitting a dismissive “pouff!”, as if to say, “don’t give me this high-flown macho crap”. But if her life story is not a triumph and what is happening to Ukraine is not a tragedy, I do not know what is.’

Read the review here.

This is one of the better reviews of Merkel’s memoirs that I’ve seen.

Postponing hard choices is sometimes just the only way forward, or let’s say, the better way forward.

What else can we do than merkeln, most of the time.

And I don’t want to be a vulgar Freudian – even though that’s better than a vulgar Marxist – but what is omitted is often more telling than what is included, indeed.