As Merkel keeps explaining in the media blitz accompanying the launch, her tome is really two books in one, analogous to her life, which she sees in two halves. The first is set in the communist dictatorship of East Germany. The second takes place in the reunited Germany and documents her rise to power as well as the wielding of it in the chancellery. The first part, when she lived without the freedom touted in her title, recollects life under the dictatorship.
Merkel found comfort in the sanctuary of privacy created by her mother and father, a Lutheran pastor. Once, when she was trying to get a doctoral position, the secret police tried to recruit her as an informant. If she had ended the story with the fall of the Berlin Wall, or in the s when she became a government minister and navigated a stuffy political culture dominated by macho Wessis, the book would have worked.
Her recollections up til then, while not lively, sprinkle charm and light on two mysteries. One is how she kept running rings around the men. The other is how she as an Ossi could break into the Bonn system that was transplanted to Berlin.
That experience stings most: She still smarts from an old Wessi commentary that described her not as a born but a naturalized European.
She deserves kudos for overcoming such moats of condescension. Unfortunately, Merkel and Baumann then revert to the style for which the chancellor was known, parsing details like bookkeepers until the audience either falls asleep or begs for mercy. In explaining her decisions as chancellor, Merkel lays out the evidence β who said what at which meeting β as meticulously as she once presented results in her quantum chemistry labs.
