Merkel was clearly impressed by the man's profound faith. “That monk had a source of strength which was evident from his words. I envied him a little.” Merkel knows her Bible, as she has repeatedly shown when working on texts at Church congresses, and can distinguish between Luther's translation and the modern “Unified Translation”. A woman who grew up so close to the Old and New Testaments in her father's parsonage was bound to be awestruck when she saw the scenes of the Biblical tales of her childhood with her own eyes.
Unlike her predecessor Helmut Kohl, Angela Merkel is not a politician who indulges in history lessons. When Kohl spoke of the significance of Europe it was a matter of war and peace. At the heart of Merkel's Europe lies globalization and the dangers of the future. Merkel is the first Chancellor of Germany to have been born after the end of the Second World War – in 1954, ten years after Gerhard Schröder, who was a war baby. If she embodies German history in any way, it is for the period of the GDR and reunification; she was an eyewitness to the divided Germany. She gladly accepts invitations to events that further historical understanding of the GDR and help people to come to terms with its past. Apart from that she is sparing in her use of historical references and memories. But there is one exception: the systematic annihilation of European Jews by National Socialist Germany.
Merkel prefers not to use the word Holocaust. She speaks of the Shoah, as they do in Israel, and the term is becoming increasingly accepted in Germany. The choice of word is not insignificant. Historical studies tend to concentrate on the Jews’ image of themselves as victims, and the distinction between those who were murdered and those who were born later. Holocaust research has always been faced with the problem of finding adequate words to describe the unique nature of what happened without being judgemental. “Holocaust”, an ancient term for the burnt offering of an animal, complete destruction by fire, is a divisive word. It is frequently associated – particularly in Englishspeaking countries and Germany – with the American television series shown in 1978, and the debate about the museum built in Washington at the time, in memory of the murdered Jews. But it is precisely because of this reference to burnt offerings that the word is rejected in Israel. European Jews were not killed as sacrifices to God, and their annihilation was not a religious act. It was the act of a godless, bloodthirsty dictatorship. As a result, and particularly in Israel, the term that has come to be accepted is Shoah – the Hebrew word for “great catastrophe” or “disaster”. Merkel has adopted Hebrew terminology, which shows how close she is to the Jewish understanding of this uniquely horrifying act.
Merkel went to Israel four times in her first seven years as Chancellor, has made important policy speeches before the Knesset and has received an honorary doctorate from the Hebrew University. In Germany, the Jewish community has bestowed many awards on her, including the famous Leo Baeck Prize. In 2009, at the height of the financial crisis, she gave the memorial speech on the seventieth anniversary of Kristallnacht. She takes such speeches very seriously, writing them in close collaboration with colleagues, who supply her with the initial drafts. She often writes them herself, or makes many changes to the text. And her speeches never fail to mention that, because of the Shoah, Germany bears responsibility for Israel. “In a very particular sense, Germany and Israel are and will remain for ever linked by the memory of the Shoah,” she said in the Israeli parliament.
Whenever Merkel speaks of the Shoah, two lines of argument appear: “Never again” and “What is to be done?” In her view, the lesson we have to learn is that xenophobia, racism and anti-Semitism must never be allowed to happen again. Merkel often uses these three terms, and it is worth noting that, depending on the occasion, she mentions xenophobia or racism ahead of anti-Semitism. Only in the Israeli parliament did she deliberately put anti-Semitism first. Today, she probably sees racism in general as a greater danger than hatred of the Jews in particular. For Merkel, “never again” implies the task of promoting the relationship between Germans and the Jewish community, and taking responsibility for “the security of the State of Israel and our common values”. Values play a key role in Merkel's view of Israel. It was during the Arab Spring that she came to see that only Israel, as a constitutional democracy, upholds a European value system in the region. So she is all the more upset when Israel doesn't respect these values – especially in the building of settlements.
But she also takes concrete steps to convey the lessons of history. For instance, she asked in the Knesset, “How do we keep the memory of the Shoah alive when there are no more contemporary witnesses, when those who experienced that time have all gone?” On another occasion she said that it always disconcerts her to think how quickly those living witnesses, and the terrible things they saw, can pass into oblivion. “That brings me to a crucial question: how are we to understand our historical responsibility when the generation who experienced and survived the Shoah is no longer with us?”
Merkel has twice been faced very directly with the question of how to deal with responsibility, given the modern tendency to see everything in relative terms and to rewrite history. On both occasions she clashed with the conservative and Christian wing of her own party. On both occasions she paid a price: on the first because she did too little, on the second because she made too forceful a stand. The first of these challenges to her authority concerns a certain Martin Hohmann. An MP from Fulda, he made a speech on 3rd October 2003 – when Merkel was Chairman of the CDU and its parliamentary party. Hohmann claimed that the view of the German people as murderers was only relative, and said that “the godless, with their godless ideologies” were to blame. “They were the perpetrators of the bloodshed in the last century.” Going even further, Hohmann asked a rhetorical question: whether there was not also “a dark side” to the Jewish people. Later, in the context of the Russian Revolution, he said that there was “a certain justification” for describing the Jews themselves as perpetrators.
As Party Chairman Merkel reprimanded Hohmann, and made him apologize. However, when the ultra-conservative MP repeated his theories in an interview, Merkel felt she should suspend him from the party. There was resistance from all sides of the CDU. The main problem was that Merkel couldn't provide any good reasons for expelling Hohmann from the parliamentary party but not from the party itself. But then she changed her mind and demanded his expulsion from the entire party. She was to pay a high price for her indecision.
By contrast, in February 2009, at the end of her first term as Chancellor, Merkel showed great decisiveness when she took on no less a man than the Pope, Benedict XVI. At the end of January, the Pope had received four bishops of the traditionalist Society of St Pius X back into the Roman Catholic Church. A few days earlier, Bishop Richard Williamson, one of the four, had denied that any Jews were murdered during the Nazi period. The incident put great pressure on Pope Benedict, who was strongly criticized within the Church. Merkel waited for a few days, and then used a press conference with the President of Kazakhstan to answer an obviously planted question about her opinion of Williamson and the Pope. Significantly, Merkel began by speaking of a “matter of principle”, and then went on to say: “It must be so unambiguously clarified by the Pope and the Vatican that there can be no denial of what happened […]. As I see it, those clarifications have not yet been adequately made.”
The Catholic areas of Germany – and the Christian Democratic Union – all shuddered. Could Merkel criticize the Pope in such an aggressive manner? Could she really issue him with a warning and demand clarification? Could she imply that he had an ambiguous attitude to the Holocaust? The Vatican reacted immediately by publishing a clarification. Nonetheless, the atmosphere had been soured. The diplomatic repercussions went on for weeks. Bishops discussed the case, many German Catholics praised Merkel's comments, while others thought her criticism disrespectful. But the main problem was that Merkel had created friction within her own party. Once again, she was accused of neglecting the Christian aspect of the Christian Dem
ocratic Union and betraying its Catholic roots – an allegation that, as a Protestant from East Germany, had dogged her from her first day as Party Leader. The CDU was submerged with criticism from the media. Catholic voters wondered where they stood in the party; this was about values, political ideas, security, traditions. With a single sentence, Merkel had exposed a hotbed of mistrust within her party.
Yet Merkel believed that she was only being true to herself. Anyone who had heard or read her speech to the Knesset or the one she gave when she received the Leo Baeck Prize – anyone who was familiar with the background to the Chancellor's personal ties with Israel – knew that this was a matter of principle, not political manoeuvring.
But is that strictly true? Is everything concerning Israel perfectly clear? In Merkel's complex tapestry of relationships there is always a political dimension. In this respect, too, the Chancellor differs from her predecessors. She has raised German-Israeli relations to a new level, because questions of war, peace and security have suddenly become an issue again. Yet in order to examine this dimension, one must start from the conclusion: for Merkel, Germany's existence as a united country and a democracy is inseparably bound up with a correct understanding of the history of Israel. As early as 2009, during the Hohmann debate within the CDU, she made this remarkable comment: “It is because we have recognized the Holocaust as a singular event that we can say today: we are free, we are united. That recognition has made us what we are today.” Or, to put it the other way round: if Germany had not accepted its history and had been forced to come to terms with its past, the country would have been excluded from the unity and sovereignty of its neighbours, from the community of nations. A close friend of the Chancellor sums it up quite simply: without the USA and the Holocaust, Germany would not exist.
For Merkel, an urgent political duty arises from that historical recognition: the Shoah has not only bound Germany and Israel inextricably together, it has also given Germany a leading role in the construction of Israel's security and the protection of the country's right to exist. Merkel describes this operational and political task as a “reason of state”.
Merkel's speeches tend to be more significant than the public generally realizes. She puts more thought, intellectual effort and subtext into a speech than is read into it later. It is unfortunate that, as a politician who is acknowledged not to be an eloquent speaker, she can seldom make this second level of her thought process accessible to a wider public. It is also unfortunate that Merkel always makes her most important statements in front of the democratically elected representatives of the people. She sees parliament as the centre of democracy – and so, for her, that is where her major speeches should be made. Anyone wanting to know what Merkel has to say on important matters – Europe, the transatlantic alliance, the state of the nation – will always be told the same thing: read the official statement, the Chancellor said it all there. It is a shame that the public usually fails to grasp the true meaning of those statements – they are drowned out in the hubbub of Berlin politics.
On occasion, Merkel has successfully avoided the trap of her own self-effacement and managed to attract attention, once at the United Nations in New York, and another time when speaking to the Knesset. She had been in office for just under two years when, in September 2007, she spoke to the UN assembly, that forum of the world community, outlining her personal beliefs on what holds the world together. Among the things she mentioned were growth and social justice, the importance of the rule of international law, embodied by the United Nations, and her inevitable profession of faith – Merkel spoke passionately, and concealed within her speech was a political gem. In the passage about the UN's authority and ability to assert itself, particularly with regard to Iran, readers will find these remarks, which are laden with meaning: “Every Chancellor before me was committed to Germany's special responsibility for the existence of Israel. I too pledge myself to that historical responsibility. It is part of my country's reason of state. Which is to say that to me, as Chancellor of Germany, the security of Israel is never negotiable.” The press sat up and took notice, the message had been delivered – although it hadn't quite sunk in yet.
Six months later Merkel was awarded an unexpected honour. The state of Israel was sixty years old, and the German Chancellor, who had a particularly close relationship with the Olmert government, was invited to speak in the Knesset. Up till then, only heads of state had been allowed to speak in the Israeli parliament. Merkel was the first head of government to do so; not only that, she made her speech in German, a language likely to attract hostility.
This was probably the most emotionally charged foreign trip she had ever made – Merkel felt the weight of history and expectation. As so often, her visit began at Yad Vashem, the impressive monument to the Shoah outside the gates of Jerusalem. There are two places there that move Merkel particularly: as you leave the museum tunnel and climb towards the light, as if walking up a ramp, the sky and the landscape suddenly opens out before you in a vast sweep. The second is the memorial to the murdered children. This is where the tour of Yad Vashem officially ends, at the place where the children are remembered. Visitors are taken up a spiral passage like the inside of a snail shell into a dark cave, where the eyes become accustomed to the half-light only slowly. You make your way through the darkness step by step, and the light of three candles is reflected to infinity around the room. The effect of so many reflections induces a sense of vertigo. A quiet voice reads out the names of the children and young people murdered in the Shoah, with their age and the place where they lived – a million and a half of them lost their lives. A million and a half names, every name a human being. As you come out you are dazzled by the sun reflecting on the surrounding rocks.
For official visitors, there is a guestbook to sign as they leave. It is an unforgiving moment: at the very point when their emotions are in turmoil, all cameras are focused on them as they attempt to sum up their feelings in a single sentence which they then have to read out. In Merkel's case, of course, provision had been made, and she wrote her carefully prepared words in the book: “In acknowledgement of Germany's responsibility for the Shoah, the Federal Government wishes to emphasize its determination, after the first German-Israeli consultations, to shape a joint future.”
It is images such as these that bear witness to the emotional effect that the Shoah has on Merkel. With every visit to Yad Vashem she understands less and less how the Germans could kill so many people – simply for belonging to a different ethnic group.
The last day of Merkel's visit to Israel took her to the Knesset. In 2000, President Johannes Rau had been invited to speak to the parliament – at the time the first and only German to do so. Now the Chancellor stood in front of the stone wall, and several MPs left the hall in protest. For the most part, Merkel repeated passages that she had used in speeches on other occasions – such as when she was given an honorary degree by the Hebrew University the year before. In the Knesset, she had to outline her view of the German-Israeli relationship, and her words resembled a legacy.
Once again, Merkel began by saying that Germany and Israel were linked for ever by the memory of the Shoah; again she mentioned the break with civilization that the event represented and the responsibility laid upon Germany by history. But then she spelt out what she understood by a modern German-Israeli partnership. Only the day before, the first German-Israeli governmental consultations had taken place. The Merkel government established this diplomatic practice with various states in order to emphasize the particular depth of their relationship. It involves a delegation of ministers meeting their counterparts in the other state – almost like a bilateral cabinet session. It had been Ambassador Shimon Stein who, three years earlier, had regretted the absence of any formal symbol for the relationship between their countries to Merkel over a glass of red wine in the King David Hotel in Jerusalem, and so the idea of intergovernmental dialogue was born.
Now Merkel was standing in front of the
Israeli parliament and reading out the small print. “What exactly do unique relationships mean? Is my country actually aware of what those words mean – not just in speeches and on official occasions, but when it really matters?” asked the Chancellor. She went through the list of issues that lay ahead: continuing to preserve the memory of the past, driven by the concern that the Shoah might one day be forgotten; the massive shift in public attitudes to Israel as a result of the unresolved problems of the Middle East; and finally, threats to Israel from outside, particularly from Iran, its President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and its nuclear programme. The moment had come, as it had six months earlier at the United Nations, for a key statement that would bind Merkel to Israel for ever: “Every German government and every German Chancellor before me was pledged to Germany's particular historical responsibility for the security of Israel. That historical responsibility of Germany is one of my country's reasons of state. This means that for me as German Chancellor, Israel's security is non-negotiable – and if that is the case, then when those words are put to the test they must not be found to be empty.”
What exactly does Merkel mean, then, by “reasons of state”, in practical terms? Does she contemplate sending in troops in the event of an attack on Israel? Would Germany take part in a military strike on Iranian nuclear plants? Merkel would not have been acting in character if she had given clear answers to these crucial questions. For all her loyalty in principle to Israel, she has left the details somewhat unclear in order to leave her room for manoeuvre. In the Knesset she gave only vague answers to the many questions about Iran. “Germany and its partners are hoping for a diplomatic solution. If Iran does not make concessions, the Federal Government will continue in its firm support for sanctions.” Sanctions? Merkel doesn't even address the genuine danger of an escalation. She doesn't seem to have heeded her own warning that “when those words [on the non-negotiability of Israel's security] are put to the test they must not be found to be empty”. It was in 2011, at the beginning of the Arab Spring, that Merkel last used reasons of state as an argument. “Supporting the security of the state of Israel as a democratic Jewish state is part of Germany's reasons of state.” Full stop. No more words. No more decisions to be carried out.
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