But beyond this, she gives little away in interviews. Perhaps she declines to talk about herself because from a young age she has always worked so ferociously hard to achieve her ambitions.
Her drive and determination have, after all, taken her from a difficult background under a depressing dictatorship to becoming the dominant figure in Europe and the world’s most powerful woman.
Always No. 1: Angela Merkel aged three, before her rise to power as one of the most influential figures in world politics
There is, however, one anecdote she likes to tell interviewers. Twenty-one years ago, she applied for a job in the German government press office, but did not get it — a rare setback. A medical examination revealed that she suffered from high blood pressure, so her application was rejected since it was felt the stresses of the job might be too much.
Instead, she chose to become a politician, and was elected to Germany’s reunified parliament later that year. It was the launchpad for a stellar career which saw her leading her party within a decade and her nation five years after that.
‘I have to watch my blood pressure a bit,’ she told a television chat show host last month,
Mrs Merkel, raised under communism, fighting to salvage capitalism and walking an almost impossible tightrope amid wildly conflicting economic, political and social concerns.
So what do her fellow Germans make of her?
University professor Wolfgang Stock, her biographer, says: ‘No one loves her, no one adores her, but she is very well-respected.’ Others are more sceptical about Merkel’s ruthless pursuit of power. ‘She is like Tony Blair, but without the principles,’ remarks one party critic with biting irony.
To best understand the ‘Iron Frau’, you must travel to a small town of 13,000 inhabitants called Templin in the former East Germany.
Rise to the top: Merkel pictured in 2002 at the monastery in Andechs, Germany, three years before she became Chancellor
It lies just over an hour’s drive north of vibrant Berlin through flat fields, beech forests and dour villages that still betray their communist heritage, especially on a grey day in late November.
This is the place to which a protestant pastor named Horst Kasner moved in 1957 when his daughter Angela was three. It is where she still has a home even now she leads her nation, a weekend retreat hidden in the woods, and where she came to bury her father a few weeks ago.
Just as 57-year-old Merkel’s life story might stand as a metaphor for the success of German reunification, so her spruced-up home town with its cobbled streets, colourful buildings and cosy cafes reflects the transformation of the once-blighted heartland of a miserable experiment in socialism.
During her student days she worked part-time as a waitress in a disco, then met and, at the age of 23 in 1977, married her first husband Ulrich Merkel, a fellow physics student. Afterwards, they moved to Berlin, but their relationship soon fell apart and she moved into a squat.
Support: With scientist husband Joachim in July 2008
‘It sounds stupid, but I didn’t go into the marriage with the necessary amount of seriousness,’ Merkel said later.
By the time of their divorce in 1982 she had already met the man who would become her second husband, an equally studious chemist and fellow divorcee with two sons called Joachim Sauer.
As the Cold War began to thaw, she was settled into academic life at the Academy of Sciences in East Berlin. Her first political experience came at the age of 35 when she joined a civil rights’ group four weeks before the Berlin Wall came down.
‘Always the pragmatist, she joined when there was no danger,’ says Langguth tartly. When this group became subsumed in the Christian Democrat Union, the conservative party of Chancellor Helmut Kohl, she joined also.
Kohl, the boorish father of reunification, met Merkel at a party conference the year after the wall fell.
He instantly spotted her potential as a young protestant woman from the East, untainted by communism, who could increase the appeal of a party with Catholic roots to the newly-liberated eastern electorate.
He became her mentor, promoting her rapidly through government and party ranks in a relationship that benefited both of them.
Powerful allies: Since becoming Chancellor in 2005, The 'Iron Frau', seen here with David Cameron in October last year, has consolidated her hold on power in.
Curiously, while Angela Merkel symbolises the astonishing success of German reunification, there is one region where she is viewed with suspicion: the very place that helped to mould her into such a formidable politician.
Merkel, seen here with Nicholas Sarkozy in Strasbourg yesterday, is seen to symbolise the success of German reunification
‘People in the East see her as a traitor,’ says Matthias Matussek, an author and influential commentator. ‘They see her as part of the capitalist system and heartless when it comes to unemployment and subsidies for the poor.’
Although money has poured into the east in the 22 years since reunification, with cities in particular being transformed, unemployment remains stubbornly high at twice the rate of the rest of Germany, while wages and pensions are both significantly lower.
Source: the dailymail
