The Chancellor review – who knew Merkel makes a mean cocktail

The Chancellor: The Remarkable Odyssey of Angela Merkel by Kati Marton (HarperCollins), £25.

When Angela Merkel was studying physics at Leipzig University in the early 1970s, she worked as a bartender at the student union where her speciality was a concoction of whisky and cherry juice.

To make sure there were enough supplies, Merkel would cross Leipzig by streetcar each week to stock up on the canned cherries and cheap whisky which she sold to fellow students behind the Iron Curtain for a nice profit. 

I love this image of Merkel standing behind a bar mixing such horrendous sounding cocktails as it’s so removed from the picture we have of the world’s sternest of political leaders. 

Yet underneath that prim boyish bob, the buttoned-up jackets and black trousers that make Merkel at times look like a bell boy, lurks a seriously mischievous woman. 

One, it is said, who had Barack Obama in stitches with her mimics of President Putin and risqué jokes about parts of his anatomy. She spreads her put-downs fairly and hasn’t been afraid to roll her eyes at Donald Trump when he went too far.

When the German football team lost out in the 2006 World Cup, she called on Jurgen Klinsmann, the manager, to visit her in her office. With the help of charts and statistics, she then proceeded to lecture Klinsmann on why he had lost and how to improve the team’s game.

These are just a few of the fascinating anecdotes in Kati Marton’s new biography, The Chancellor: The Remarkable Odyssey of Angela Merkel, and which let us glimpse into how a young East German scientist who, after only a few years in politics, was in a position to join Helmut Kohl’s new Cabinet so shortly after reunification.

Within 15 years, after serving as minister of the environment under Helmut Kohl, she had become the first female Chancellor of Germany and its first noteworthy female leader. From an early age, she understood power, once saying that asserting authority is something you must learn as a woman: “Without power, you cannot achieve much.” 

The book is all the more delightful because Merkel is famously private, guarding her personal life with obsessive detail. Apparently, no one who she has worked alongside her as Chancellor over the last 16 years is said to have ever been inside her two-bedroomed flat in Berlin where she lives with her second husband, Joachim Sauer. (She kept her first husband’s surname). 

Marton’s description of Merkel’s childhood and school days – and her uneasy relationship with her Pastor father, Horst Kasner – a devout Christian who was also a socialist, are particularly insightful in helping us understand how the young Merkel developed such an interest in history and politics. 

Even though their relations may have been strained, Kasner was clearly a powerful influence on the young Merkel and, although criticised for being too close to the Communist regime, ran a relatively open home. Indeed, Kasner managed to smuggle a rare copy of Andre Sakhorov’s essay attacking Moscow’s dangerous arms race into their home which Merkel read. When called on by the Stasi to explain how he got a copy, he refused to give up the source. 

At school, Merkel was one of the few to have blue jeans – smuggled out of Berlin – which were confiscated. She also secretly followed what was going on in West Germany, sneaking into the girl’s toilets at her school in 1969 with her transistor radio to listen to the debates prior to the election of the West German president. 

Marton tells us she revered America, and George H.W. Bush became one of her heroes, for helping Germany unify after the wall fell.

Yet Merkel nearly missed going to university because she took part in a school skit that showed solidarity with the people of Mozambique waging war against the Portuguese colonists. But the students’ crime was then to sing the Internationale – the Communist flag-waving anthem – in English, the language of the imperialists. 

Only the intervention of her father, who asked his local bishop to plead with the authorities to be lenient with Merkel – a brilliant scholar – saved her and her classmates and they were allowed to go on to university.

 One can only hope that these nuggets told by Marton are accurate. Because unfortunately, the Hungarian-American journalist and author has got some pretty basic facts wrong elsewhere in the biography. According to Oliver Moody, Berlin correspondent for the Times, Marton has dropped several big clangers, such whopping factual clangers that he suggests the book be pulped.

For example, in a chapter on Merkel and the banking crisis, Marton states that the eurozone was created with “no central banking system” which is not correct as the European Central Bank was established the year before in 1998. 

In another chapter, she says that France is “the only western democracy that still holds military parades”. This is also inaccurate as many other countries, from Britain to Italy, hold regular military processions.

But perhaps the biggest clanger is her claim that the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD), has “made it into the German federal government”. It hasn’t – there are no MPs in the Bundestag. 

Marton goes on to accuse Annegret Kramp-Karrenbauer, Merkel’s then successor as party leader, of “joining forces” with the AfD to elect a state premier in Thuringia. Incorrect.

Such mistakes are huge and surprising. Marton has met Merkel and dined with her, and has clearly had great access into the Chancellor’s inner circle for this biography, interviewing many political leaders who know her including Hillary Clinton and Henry Kissinger. 

She was also married to the late diplomat Richard Holbrooke who in 1993 and 1994 was the US ambassador to Germany.

Marton is the author of nine books, including True Believer: Stalin’s Last American Spy and Enemies of the People: My Family’s Journey to America, the story of her own family’s years behind the Iron Curtain in Hungary and which she also, rather annoyingly, brings into this book. It’s a mistake.  

As a former NPR correspondent and the ABC News bureau chief in Germany, Marton really should know better than dropping such clangers. But the book’s worth a read for the story of Merkel’s early years alone, and that whisky cocktail.