Angela Merkel

by Stefan Kornelius

  Herlind and Horst Kasner had married in Hamburg, where their first child, Angela, was born on 17th July 1954. Her mother's parents, Gertrud and Willi Jentzsch, also lived in Hamburg, having moved there from Danzig after the war. Grandmother Jentzsch seems to have come from Glogau in Silesia, known today as Glogow, and Grandfather Jentzsch from the area of Bitterfeld. Merkel's mother Herlind was born in 1928 in Danzig, at the time known as the Free City of Danzig and under the aegis of the League of Nations. Why nearby Elbing is frequently mentioned as Herlind's birthplace is a mystery. Merkel's grandparents had lived there for only a few years.

  Her father, Horst Kasner, was originally from Berlin. His family background is more complex, and his forebears were quite severely affected by the troubled history of the area, where the borders of Germany and Poland were constantly shifting. Horst's father Ludwig, Angela's grandfather, was born in Posen in 1896 – although not as Ludwig Kasner, but Ludwig Kazmierczak. Like most inhabitants of the province of Posen, the Kazmierczaks had Polish roots, and since the second partition of Poland, the city and surrounding region had seen several boundary changes and various different rulers. At the time of Ludwig Kazmierczak's birth, Posen was part of the German Empire, so Merkel's grandfather was officially a German citizen. The family nonetheless had remained faithful to its Polish origins, although Ludwig clearly didn't share those sentiments. As a result he made a decision that was to have far-reaching consequences. In 1919, after the First World War and the Treaty of Versailles, Posen once again became part of Poland. In the years that followed, much of the German minority emigrated from the region – including those who didn't want to return to Poland. Ludwig Kazmierczak was one of those who left his native land and part of his family behind and set off for Berlin, where he met his future wife Margarethe. Their son Horst was born in 1926. But it wasn't until 1930 that Ludwig Kazmierczak decided to adopt the German version of his surname and began calling himself Kasner. Having worked as a police officer in the Pankow district of Berlin, he died in 1939. Angela, who was five at the time, has no clear memories of him. However, young Angela would often visit her grandmother Margarethe, who aroused her interest in art and music.

  In 1995, at a Church congress in Hamburg, Angela Merkel said that one of her grandfathers was originally from Poland. She repeated the statement in 2000, describing herself as “one quarter Polish”. There was great excitement over this apparently new revelation – especially in Poland, where a Friends of Angela Merkel group was immediately set up.

  While little is known about her grandparents, more research has been done into her parents’ background. A few weeks after Angela's birth in 1954, young Pastor Kasner and his family left Hamburg and moved to East Germany – his first parish was the village of Quitzow, in the Prignitz district of Brandenburg. Three years later the family moved to Templin. This was to be Angela Merkel's childhood home, the centre of her early life, the place which defined her youth. Templin is an hour and a half's drive north of Berlin, a hidden gem of the Uckermark district. Lakes, rivers, canals, the vast sky above, the old buildings – Templin retains its charm to the present day. The Waldhof had been founded in 1852 as a home for young people with learning difficulties, and had seen much upheaval – it was in a particularly bad state in the year when Pastor Kasner was setting up his seminary. It ceased to operate as an educational establishment under the East German Social Services. Instead, the Church used the large complex to house mentally disabled people, who could work in the vegetable garden and the forge, weave baskets or pursue one of the other crafts or trades. It was a remarkably modern concept for its time: the mentally disabled lived freely as part of society; they could take up gainful employment and were encouraged to do so. For Angela Merkel, mixing with them was part of everyday life.

  There are few accounts of the Kasners’ home life, but there is little doubt that Angela Kasner grew up in a politically engaged and open-minded household. For all the restrictions of the GDR system, Pastor Kasner and his wife still preserved their intellectual freedom, and their daughter Angela reaped the benefits. Her interest in the world was aroused and stimulated early in life, and the pastor's household provided protection from the regimentation of the system. Years later, in an interview with the photographer Herlinde Koelbl, Merkel said that “no shadow had darkened her childhood”, that the Waldhof was an environment that a child could easily absorb and understand. Merkel said she had always been fascinated by people “who were at peace with life”, such as the gardener who became a friend and confidant when she was a child, and who was a model of self-confidence and composure compared to her father. All her childhood memories are of security and intimacy. Horst Kasner, who died in 2011, said in one of his rare interviews: “The GDR itself was enough of a constraint. At home we gave the children space.” Even in the 1970s, Kasner himself made use of this freedom to travel to London and Rome.

  And yet there is something of a veil over Merkel's past – because many in the West find it difficult to imagine her early life in East Germany as picturesque and peaceful. Even the name Waldhof – forest court – has a fairy-tale ring to it, suggesting the good old days. Life in the parsonage, the sheltered idyll, intellectual brilliance – this conjures up the German intellectual bourgeoisie of the Biedermeier period, the rapid industrial expansion of the late nineteenth century in Germany, evoking safety and security.

  Even if the political system sometimes disturbed the peace of the parsonage, Angela Kasner was never really aware of it. She enjoyed the luxury of not having to identify with the State. “I never felt that the GDR was my natural home,” she told Herlinde Koelbl, “but I always made use of the opportunities that it provided.” She was a fervent supporter of Lokomotive Leipzig football club, but to this day she can still get in a rage about the deciding goal scored by Sparwasser in the defeat of West Germany by East Germany in the 1974 World Cup – or so she says. Sparwasser's shirt now hangs in the Museum of German History in Bonn.

  Among the more exotic aspects of Templin was the Soviet garrison stationed in Vogelsang, just outside the town. After Wünsdorf, Vogelsang was the largest Soviet military base outside the Soviet Union. The 25th Armoured Division and many other units were based there. Members of the garrison often came into Templin, and Angela Kasner took the opportunity to practise her knowledge of Russian on the occupying troops. She probably inherited her gift for languages from her mother Herlind, who had been a Latin and English teacher, but wasn't allowed to exercise her profession in the GDR because she was married to a Protestant pastor. After the fall of the Wall, however, she returned to teaching and found a job at the Berlin Mission House for church workers. Her daughter did not wish to become a teacher, as she did not want to be a conduit for ideology of the regime.

  Angela was unrivalled at school in Russian and mathematics, and even in her early teens was good enough to compete in the national Russian-language Olympiad, which was intended for pupils at the Polytechnic Secondary School two years above her. Despite her young age, she was selected as the third-best Russian-language student in the GDR, winning a trip to Moscow, where – irony of ironies – she bought her first Beatles record and, as she later confessed, was asked about her views on German unification. That was something she hadn't expected. Two years later, when she was in Year Ten, she won the Russian competition. It was already clear that she would go on to study at a senior grammar school and take the Abitur, the German equivalent of A Levels.

  Angela Kasner was an excellent pupil and naturally got top marks in the Abitur. Later, the journalist Evelyn Roll found a telling comment on Merkel's attitude to Russian language and literature in the Stasi file on her: “Although Angela tends to see the leading role of the Soviet Union as something of a dictatorship to which all other socialist countries are subordinated, she is enthusiastic about the Russian language and the culture of the Soviet Union.” The same thing can essentially still be said of her today.

  Angela Kasner already had a great passion for travel a
nd meeting new people. As a child she spent part of her school holidays with her grandmother in Berlin. “Those were wonderful times, complete childhood happiness. I was allowed to watch television until ten in the evening, and I rushed out of the house at nine o'clock every morning and systematically visited all the museums one by one.” The family hardly ever watched GDR television, Merkel would later claim, “except for sports programmes”. In Berlin, too, Angela was on a journey of discovery – and seems to have been especially fascinated by foreigners and their lives. “I met Bulgarians, Americans and British people – at the age of fifteen I went out for a meal with some Americans and told them everything I knew about the GDR.” But she was honest enough to admit that she “wouldn't be quite so trusting today”. Unfortunately, the people with whom she had that conversation have yet to be traced. Presumably the girl who was to become Chancellor must have made quite an impression.

  Until she was in Year Ten, the Kasners – Angela's brother Marcus was born three years after her, and her sister Irene was ten years younger – always went on holiday together. Merkel remembers two trips in particular. Just before the 13th of August, the day the building of the Berlin Wall began, the family were on their way back from Bavaria. Angela's maternal grandmother from Hamburg was also with them in their VW Beetle – it was to be her last holiday with her daughter, son-in-law and grandchildren. As they were driving home on the Friday, Horst Kasner saw that large quantities of barbed wire were being stored in the woods, and noticed that there was an unusually large number of soldiers around. He was filled with feelings of unease. On the Sunday the border was closed and construction of the Wall began. Angela Merkel has vivid memories of that 13th of August. Her mother cried all day, prayers were said in church, and young Angela was overcome by a sense of powerlessness – she wanted to help, but there was nothing she could do.

  Although the Kasners now shared the fate of so many Germans, and the extended family was split between the two countries – the first time Angela went to the West was in 1986 – the spirit of a united Germany remained alive within the family. Angela's parents were unable to come to terms with the partition of their country, and as a child she wanted nothing to do with the new State. She followed West German politics with passionate enthusiasm, and remembers listening to the election of Gustav Heinemann as President of the Federal Republic on her transistor radio in the school toilets. She knew the names of the West German cabinet off by heart, and at home in the Waldhof they always watched the news on Western television.

  But there was a price to be paid for this way of life: silence and discretion were a precondition for survival in a nation of State informers. The dangers were discussed openly in the parsonage, and although Horst Kasner's political role in the church hierarchy has been interpreted in markedly different ways by her biographers, Angela Merkel has always said that she had little to do with the system. When she had finished her physics studies and Stasi agents tried actively to recruit her, she reacted as she had learnt to do at home: she put on a show of innocence, pretending to be frank and claiming that she couldn't keep secrets. These tactics soon put an end to any attempt to enlist her services. If there is one thing that Merkel is particularly good at, even to this day, it is keeping quiet. “Yes, learning when to keep quiet was a great advantage in the GDR period. It was one of our survival strategies,” she said many years later.

  In another trip, in the summer of 1968, which was to have a great impact on Angela's political world view, the Kasner family visited Czechoslovakia, staying in Pec pod Snēžkou at the foot of the Sněžka mountain on the border with Poland. Leaving their children with the owners of the rooms they were renting in the Krkonoše mountain range, her parents went to Prague, where they witnessed at first hand the mood of change and open discussion in that year of the Prague Spring. For once there was a sense of freedom in the air. But on 21st August the Red Army moved in and crushed the democratic movement. Angela was just fourteen at the time, and remembers the fervent debates that she helped organize at her school in Templin. Not that the school authorities showed any interest in debating the matter, as she soon realized; Dubček's proposed reforms never came to anything, and Angela Kasner knew that it was best to keep a low profile.

  The consequences of that journey manifested themselves more than thirty years later, when the reunified Germany was involved in an acrimonious debate over past events in its Western half, brought about by the publication of some photographs of Joschka Fischer. Fischer was Foreign Minister at the time, and was confronted with pictures showing him wearing a helmet and attacking a police officer during a student riot in Frankfurt. As leader of the opposition, Merkel denounced his behaviour and demanded an apology for his stone-throwing, as a form of act of repentance in which Fischer would confess to his formerly subversive views. The crowning moment for Merkel was when she suggested the exact phrase which Fischer should recite for his apology: “This was not the right approach, and I must recognize that and atone for it.”

  Merkel is still annoyed with herself for using the word “atone”, but she must nonetheless be thankful for what she learnt from the rest of this episode. The country was outraged at her angry outburst, and SPD and Green politicians who had taken part in the riots of 1968 refused to comment on the internal affairs of the West. They could do without these history lessons from a woman from the East. Merkel suddenly found herself isolated, even within her own party. She thought that as an East German one could feel a sense of grief for 1968, because all hope for freedom and an open society had been crushed. And that it was ideologically questionable for a generation in the West to praise these actions, which had been carried out in the name of socialism or even communism.

  In the East, however, the section of the population who longed for freedom didn't regard the student movement as helpful. The leader of the opposition was unable to understand why it was considered a good thing in the West to embrace socialism and attack democracy simply as a way of publicly distancing oneself from the state and its authoritarian post-war structures. Merkel valued the Western system too much for that, with its constitution rooted in freedom.

  Merkel wasn't able to impose her views, however, and had to endure a fair amount of spiteful criticism from the Red-Green coalition government. For her, 1968 represented a departure from the ossified post-war system, even a break with the Nazi past of her parents’ generation. West Germans who had taken part in the 1968 riots refused to accept that someone could take their symbolic date and connect it in a much stronger way with a quite different historical event – in other words, the Prague Spring. Deep down, they too had the scent of freedom in their nostrils, but it was associated with freedom from the very ideology for which people in the West were demonstrating.

  Merkel has rarely been out of line with the march of history, which is why she was accused of having accepted the historical narrative of the West in order to further her political career, to ease herself neatly into the system. It was also suggested that she was ignoring her past in the East. In one sense the accusation is justified, while in others – as the episode with the 1968 protesters demonstrates – it was not. Later she would admit rather ruefully, “I used to believe that the 1968 movement was a total disaster for Germany. But there came a time when I discovered, to my astonishment, that there were people in the CDU who opposed the 1968 contingent in the Party, and now think there ought to be a monument to Rudi Dutschke [a leader the of student movement]. This threw me off balance, but today I can understand their attitude.”

  She felt the same about other major social movements in West Germany, such as the anti-nuclear campaign and the peace movement. Once again, Merkel had to learn from experience. “One day I heard Joschka Fischer speaking about ‘the fucking plutonium economy’. And I said to myself: ‘The what?’ Only then did I realize that for many people there are close associations between a nuclear power station and the production of nuclear weapons, and thus with NATO and our alignment with the West. I under
stand those sensitivities far better now.”

  She also had intensive discussions with her colleagues on why, among all of Germany's European relationships, so much importance was attached to that with France. The West German CDU's Francophile Rhineland notion of Europe didn't immediately appeal to her. But, in the spirit of a united Germany, the Kasner household had always kept a watchful eye on Western democracy. This is the only explanation as to why, as a woman from the East, Merkel didn't find herself at odds with the West German narrative of the past more often.

  From Year Ten onwards, young Angela Kasner travelled with her school friends, by train and with rucksacks on their back, to Prague, Bucharest and Sofia – the Central European equivalent of Interrail. She said later that Batumi on the Black Sea was her favourite resort, and that in Budapest she had dreamt of London, imagining that the British capital must be similar. She was regarded as someone with a keen appetite for life, ready to try anything, outgoing and positive. Angela Kasner was filled with curiosity for life outside her own world: she compared and adapted to these different environments, testing herself and her intellectual capacity.