Jo Freeman Reviews The Chancellor: The Remarkable Odyssey of Angela Merkel

The Chancellor: The Remarkable Odyssey of Angela Merkel

By Kati Marton

Published by New York: Simon & Schuster, 2021

xviii + 344 pages with photographs; hardcover $30

By Jo Freeman

Until recently, Angela Merkel was the most powerful woman in the world and also a very private person.  Those contradictions have made writing about her for a popular audience a challenge.  Kati Marton is up to that challenge, presenting much detail about Merkel the person as well the top job she held for 16 years.

Like her subject, author Kati Marton had her own odyssey.  Born in Hungary to journalist parents, she came to the US as a child, eventually becoming a journalist herself.  Like Merkel, she is multi-lingual and well-traveled, with personal knowledge of the dangers of a Communist state.  Unlike Merkel, she married men who could introduce her to important people and their staff.

Although born in West Germany’s Hamburg, Merkel spent her first 35 years in East Germany. Her Lutheran pastor father was a missionary who took his young family east to pastor a small church in an atheist state.  Her experiences growing up in a surveillance state became the model of what she didn’t want a unified Germany to become.  

She earned a Ph.D. in quantum chemistry, intending to spend her life in a laboratory.  When the Berlin wall came down in 1989 she crossed into West Germany.  By then she had divorced her first husband but kept his name.  She would marry again to another scientist who is even more private than she is.  He kept his day job in a laboratory even after his wife became Chancellor.

Merkel joined a new political party that was small, conservative, and anti-Communist. When it merged with the much larger Christian Democratic Union, she quickly rose through the ranks by attaching herself to important men.  Chancellor Helmut Kohl called Dr. Merkel his Mädchen.  Etymologically derived from maid it means “my girl.”

Early on Marton asks if the most powerful woman in the world was a feminist.  By the end, she concludes kind of, maybe. Kohl appointed Merkel as the Minister for Women and Youth in 1991, but not because she wanted the job. She was rather indifferent to it, though she did champion an equal rights law.  However, she liked the company of women, especially strong women in important jobs, and wanted girls to have more opportunities.  Marton says that by the end of her tenure she had quietly transformed a patriarchal political culture into one that was more accepting of women.