In Praise of Difficult Women

by Karen Karbo

  Angela doesn’t look difficult. No one lays an eye on her and thinks, Here comes trouble. Her chancellor uniform consists of black pants, low heels, a bright jacket, and a necklace. Sometimes she goes a little crazy with the necklace and accidentally makes a fashion statement. She still wears her hair in the standard bowl cut she’s sported since she was a girl—but lately she’s added some blond highlights.

  Saturday Night Live’s Kate McKinnon, the show’s utility player for all blond female politicians, portrays Angela as awkward and secretly in love with Barack Obama. McKinnon’s German accent is good, and the impersonation hilarious—but it’s not really spot-on. In private, peers say, Angela has a sharp sense of humor (she’s an expert mimic of arrogant men in power). And it supposedly took her a long time to warm up to President Obama—in part because Obama is also cool, intellectual, and analytical. A political reporter for Die Welt once wrote they were like “two hit men in the same room. They don’t have to talk; both are quiet, both are killers.”

  ANGELA KASNER was born in Hamburg, West Germany, in 1954. Her father, Horst, was a Lutheran pastor, and moved the family—her mother, Herlind, a Latin and English teacher, and two younger brothers—to East Germany. Horst had been offered a pastorate in Templin, located in the Uckermark, a rural region known for its deep forest and cold lakes. They were moving against the tide of emigration. Other East Germans, fearing the repressive fallout of Soviet occupation, were moving west before a more liberated life was no longer an option. When Angela was seven, she watched the Berlin Wall go up, sealing her off from freedom, opportunity, and the free exchange of ideas.

  Angela felt caged in but made the best of it, excelling in school and becoming a star of the Russian Club, a Soviet-backed educational program that encouraged the kids of its satellite states to master the mother tongue. Angela had a gift for pinpointing what she excelled in and forgetting everything else. As a girl she was gawky and uncoordinated, so sports were dead to her. She could manage a hike without tripping over her own feet, and grew to love the outdoors. At home, life was serious. Dinner conversation might involve drilling down into the arguments of Kant.

  Hardships aside, young Angela was shielded from Western consumerism. The trade-off for missing out on shimmery pink lipstick, push-up bras, and miniskirts was a sense of herself as smart, competent, and powerful. This view was never undermined by the itchy insecurity advertisers work to instill in girls and women, convincing us from puberty onward that if only we buy this (fill in the blank), we would be slimmer, smoother, silkier, prettier, sexier.

  If you raised a girl in a society where frivolity and consumerism weren’t valued, where you were never told you would be prettier if you smiled or lost weight, where you were allowed to find the thing you were good at and zero in on it, you might grow up to be Angela Merkel.

  IN 1973 ANGELA ENTERED Leipzig University, where she earned a degree in physics, then earned a doctorate in quantum chemistry at the German Academy of Sciences in Berlin.*2 In 1977, when she was 23, she married another physicist, Ulrich Merkel. They divorced in 1982, after she became enamored of Joachim Sauer, a professor of theoretical chemistry. The Stasi (the East German secret police) noted they lunched together often when they were married to other people. Both scientists left their spouses and moved in together in 1988, eventually marrying a decade later, and they are together still.

  When the wall fell in 1989, Angela was 35, the only woman in the chemistry department. Even though she appeared to be completely absorbed in co-writing papers with titles like “Vibrational Properties of Surface Hydroxyls: Nonempirical Model Calculations Including Anharmonicities,” she remained alert to the seismic political changes afoot. Since she was 14, she’d followed politics (once hiding in the girls’ restroom to listen to the returns from the West German presidential election), and she smelled opportunity in the reunification of the nation. In 1990 Angela was hired to be a deputy spokesperson for Lothar de Maizière, the first (and only) democratically elected president of East Germany. A year later, after the reunification, she ran for state representative to the Bundestag, the federal legislative body. In a scant year she had completely discarded her science career for one in politics, having become a minister in the new government of a united Germany.

  I’m curious: Now that a businessman and reality show star has become president of the United States, will the ongoing consternation over why Dr. Angela Merkel, physicist and quantum chemist, so abruptly left science for politics subside? This 180-degree career switcheroo is yet another measure of how indecipherable she is said to be. But Angela was never anything if not ambitious, and in the German Democratic Republic (GDR), the sciences were a field in which a citizen could make her mark. (Also, gymnastics, but that was a complete nonstarter.)

  Angela, with her analytic mind and deep, hidden well of ambition, saw the future. She may not have been dancing with a lamp shade on her head celebrating the fall of the wall—but she saw that radical change would be coming, and coming quickly. A situation this fluid and unstable offered opportunities—big ones.

  Angela walked into the offices of the newly formed East German political party Democratic Awakening and asked for a job.*3 She started small, running for local offices and winning ever larger elections until one day she caught the eye of Helmut Kohl, the stocky, unrefined chancellor who signed the German Reunification Treaty and was reelected in a landslide.

  It was 1990. As the guy who oversaw the successful reunification of the nation, Kohl was in the market for an East German woman to serve in his cabinet. The unassuming Angela fit the bill nicely. “She looked like a typical GDR scientist, wearing a baggy skirt, Jesus sandals, and a cropped haircut,” said Lothar de Maizière. She also smoked like a fiend and bit her nails.

  It was nothing for Kohl to take her under his wing. Look at the broadminded, influential West German man championing the poor, intellectual East German woman! Angela was quiet and frumpy and made for great optics. She was nonthreatening, with her bowl cut and complete disinclination to flirt or make small talk. He called her mein Mädchen, “my girl.” In 1991, Kohl appointed her minister for women and youth, even though she expressed not a whit of interest in either women or children. Nor in clothes, shoes, handbags, makeup, sports cars, or any of the other things now available to her as a German politician. In 1994, she became minister for the environment and nuclear safety, a job she was better suited for, given her academic background. Secretly, she longed for more.

  Meanwhile, Democratic Awakening had been absorbed into the Christian Democratic Union, the main right-of-center political party. With my American binary political party brain, I cannot begin to parse the many parties of Germany—but for our purposes, it’s interesting to note that Angela was never a natural fit with the CDU, which was Catholic and conservative and believed the role of women was limited to popping out kinder. She was the daughter of a Lutheran minister, a practicing Protestant, divorced, childless, and living with the man who wouldn’t become her husband until 1998. She was a misfit in every conceivable way, and it’s a measure of her instincts for politics that she was able to leverage the association.

  Of the many weapons Angela Merkel possesses—her formidable intellect, her chess master’s ability to see all the plays on the board, her patience—the greatest is her complete lack of vanity. She had no problem being treated like Helmut Kohl’s pet for as long as it took to gain power. She allowed herself to be overlooked, underestimated, and mocked for lack of feminine appeal. Another woman might have left her husband for a movie star, written a children’s book, launched a high-profile charity—something to show that she wasn’t just chopped liver.

  But being perceived as chopped liver is one of Angela’s main plays. While no one is paying much attention to her, she quickly figures out her opponent’s weakness, then waits until he makes a mistake. Usually, that opponent is a self-admiring man who believes himself to be smarter than he is—and always at
his own peril. She was and is oh so difficult, but people are lulled into thinking otherwise because she is quiet and keeps her own counsel. Difficult women need not be tap-dancing, opinion-slinging extroverts.

  In 1999, after eight years of being Kohl’s girl, Angela made her move. Without telling anyone in the CDU, she wrote an op-ed for a conservative newspaper exposing Kohl’s practice of putting campaign donations into a secret fund he’d then use to buy favors. She called for his resignation, as well as that of Wolfgang Schäuble, the man he’d handpicked as his successor. Many men were mired in the scandal, and thanks to her, they all went down. Remember the famous bloodbath scene at the end of The Godfather, where the heads of the Five Families are taken out at once during the baptism of I can’t remember which baby? It was a little like that, only German and political.

  A year later, in 2000, Angela Merkel became the chairman of the CDU. The few men left standing after the ousters and scandal that followed didn’t think she’d last two years. They plotted the best way to get rid of her behind closed doors. Still, they disliked each other even more than they disliked her, and could never agree on how to proceed with the coup—or even who to replace her with—and so she prevailed. She was much more popular with the German people than she was with her own conservative party members, and in 2005 was elected chancellor. On September 24, 2017, she was elected to her fourth term.

  ANGELA MERKEL IS A METHODICAL and dull leader. Most Germans prefer this—or, prefer it enough to keep her in office, anyway. She cannot give a speech to save her life, and is proud of it. Her public speaking style is dedicated middle school principal reading fire drill instructions. She doesn’t believe in the power of charisma, because, as she likes to say, “you can’t solve tasks with charisma.” Germans still have the burn marks from their last charismatic leader. They’re suspicious, and rightly so, of a politician who gives flamboyant speeches and is big on the theatrics of power: rallies, missile parades, and special salutes. They’ve had all that, and look where it got them.

  There are very few people alive today who have lived under fascism. One of the last members of the Third Reich’s inner circle, Brunhilde Pomsel, private secretary of Nazi minister of propaganda Joseph Goebbels, died in January 2017 at the age of 106. Germany has tried to move on—but even now, being called a Nazi remains one of the premier insults of the Western world. They cannot atone enough—but they can keep electing a woman who keeps the nation wealthy and drama-free.

  By and large, many Germans also approve of the way their chancellor lives her life outside the spotlight. She and her husband live in a modest apartment with a single guard. She shops for herself and cooks dinner. The Merkel-Sauers’ one extravagance is opera, for which they are season ticket holders.

  Angela has survived two global calamities during her administration. The Eurozone crisis has been ongoing since the financial crash in 2008. Basically, the fun-loving, irresponsible southern nations (you know who you are) are spending a lot of money and failing to pay their debts, while the hardworking, fiscally responsible northern nations (Germany) support them, making the European Union like one big dysfunctional family out of a Sam Shepard play.

  “If the euro fails, Europe fails,” Angela said in 2011. Then, using her giant math brain and a bunch of charts and graphs she reads for fun, she whipped the EU back into economic shape—that is, enough to stagger forward for another few years. Rather than kicking the fun-loving countries to the curb, she authorized a bailout that passed through the European Parliament with a lot of grumbling. She also insisted the fun-loving nations cut back on their partying, and instituted a draconian debt repayment schedule, which was also not met with good cheer. She was successful because everyone on every side of the extremely complicated issue was unhappy to the same degree—and so the EU was saved. (In 2016, Britain voted in a special election to leave the EU. As of this writing, Germany’s response to Brexit has been Don’t let the door hit you on the way out.)

  The Syrian refugee crisis is ongoing. In the summer of 2015, hundreds of thousands of migrants poured into Germany, seeking asylum. On September 4, in a move that was perhaps the most public display of passion in her life, Angela opened the German borders to 10,000 refugees stuck in Budapest. People were astounded. The woman who had no vision, no issue for which she was willing to become unpopular, no philosophical hill she was willing to die on, had taken everyone by surprise.

  “The heart and soul of Europe is tolerance,” she said in one of her usual lackluster speeches. “It has taken us centuries to understand this. We have laid our own country to waste…The worst period of hatred, devastation, and destruction happened not even a generation ago. It was done in the name of my people.”

  The other thing Angela Merkel has going for her is a long memory. She remembers being a girl living behind a wall. She remembers going to work every day, driving past the wall and wondering what was on the other side. She remembers being 20 and looking forward to the day when she was 60, the age at which East Germany would grant visas to citizens for nations in the West. (She planned to go to California.) She remembers what it’s like to feel caged, to be without freedom. And she wouldn’t wish that on anyone.

  This is my optimistic view of Germany’s chancellor. Many detractors believe her motivations are more nefarious—that she’s working on some long play she’s figured out in her head long ago. It’s utterly possible. She’s a difficult woman who can’t be shamed for possessing more intelligence, drive, and discipline than most of the men around her. In her quiet, self-contained, confident way she keeps on keeping on without fanfare. Great news for the introverted would-be difficult women among us.

  *1John Kornblum, the U.S. ambassador to Germany, who in 1999 reopened the American Embassy in Berlin after the reunification, called Angela’s governing style “mashed potatoes”—meaning bland and boring. I don’t know about you, but I love mashed potatoes, especially with garlic and butter.

  *2The layman’s definition of quantum chemistry is quantum physics as applied to chemistry. So, basically, a lot of incomprehensible theories expressed as mathematical equations on a whiteboard.

  *3They gave her one that day—setting up the office computers.

  CHAPTER 15

  BILLIE JEAN KING

  Competitive

  I ONCE HAD THE OCCASION to interview Billie Jean King for a magazine story about 20 female fitness icons. This meant contacting the representatives of 20 celebrities and almost celebrities. Let me tell you, there were a number of women who were thrilled to participate—that is, if I could just guarantee they would somehow be featured above the others. If I could give them more words or a larger photo, they were in. Not Billie Jean. Her rep didn’t even ask those questions. Billie Jean called me right up without fanfare and we talked for an hour.

  She really is a one-for-all, all-for-one type of difficult woman. Since fifth grade, her desire for the world has been kitchen-sampler simple: equal opportunity for everyone. The moment she played her first game of tennis in 1953, at a country club where the family of her grade school chum were members, she thought: I’m crazy about tennis, but where is everyone else? Where are the poorer people, and where are the darker people? Battling to become number one and fighting for fairness became the twin goals of her young life.

  BEFORE SERENA AND VENUS, before Monica and Steffi, before Martina and Chrissy, there was Billie Jean, generally considered to be the mother of contemporary women’s tennis. Born on November 22, 1943, she grew up playing on the public courts of Long Beach, California.*1 She would go on to win 39 Grand Slam titles, including 12 singles, 16 women’s doubles, and 11 mixed doubles. The list of wins on her Wikipedia page is six and a half inches long. (I know, because I measured it.) In 1972 she was named the Sports Illustrated Sportsman of the Year.*2 In 1987 she was inducted into the Tennis Hall of Fame, and in 2009 President Obama awarded her the Presidential Medal of Freedom.

  I’m
a generation younger than Billie Jean. But we grew up about 25 miles away from each other in Southern California, and I recognized her species of jokey, nonchalant girl-jock cool right away. She told me a story about how, in 1959 when she was 15 and already playing on the pro circuit, she needed to get out of a class early to make a big tournament. But her teacher said if she left, he would give her a zero (worse than an F). She said, “But you let boys go early for basketball and football games all the time.” He said patiently, as if she were stupid: “That’s completely different. They’re boys.” Billie Jean is in fact not stupid, and she heard him loud and clear: Even if females are playing a sport at an elite, professional level, they don’t matter. (Her parents permitted her to skip class that day, and true to his word, her teacher gave her a zero.)

  At Wimbledon in 1961, Billie Jean and doubles partner Karen Hantze Susman pulled off a jaw-dropping upset, becoming the youngest players to win the women’s double title. Billie Jean was 17. For the next several years her performance was spotty, and she realized that if she wanted to be the best, she’d have to practice longer and harder than everyone else. Five years later, her work paid off. In 1966 she won her first singles title, at Wimbledon, and by 1967 she was ranked the top women’s player in the world.

  In 1965 at the age of 21, she married Larry King, whom she’d met at California State University, Los Angeles, where they were both students.*3 “We got married so we could have sex!” she admitted. (Clearly she was not one of the millions who purchased Sex and the Single Girl.) Billie had no clue that she was attracted to women. Her family was homophobic, she was homophobic, and in those days, suburban Southern Californians rarely gave a thought to the nuances of sexuality. Anyway, Larry was Ken doll handsome and supported her tennis career. What wasn’t to like?