NPR,
Morning Edition 11:00 AM EST
December
8, 2011 Thursday
Can
Angela Merkel Save Europe From Economic Turmoil?
ERIC
WESTERVELT: But CDU politician Elmar Brok, a member of the European parliament,
says Merkel is using the crisis as an opportunity to reshape European fiscal
policy more in tune with German postwar sensibilities of frugality,
caution and historical fear of inflation.
She
wants to have a long-term solution, not a cheap way. This
is sometimes difficult in politics, which look for the next election date.
That
cautious, methodical manner is rooted in Merkel's personality, as well
as her political and personal background. She is a bit of an anomaly as leader
of her Christian Democratic Union, a party deeply influenced by Catholic
social teachings with its core support traditionally in Western Germany. By
contrast, she's the daughter of a Protestant minister who grew up in the then-Communist
east of the country and trained to be a physicist before entering politics.
Merkel
biographer Gerd Langguth says her family had two cars and traveled relatively
easily between East and West Germany, leading him to conclude that her pastor
father had what he calls a sympathetic relationship with the Communist
dictatorship. He says little in her orderly upbringing suggests she's capable
of truly courageous leadership.
GERD
LANGGUTH: She is not a dreamer, she is not a historian. She does
not have big visions. She does not like to create big pictures of the future.
She is a step-by-step decision-maker.
ERIC
WESTERVELT: Langguth knows Merkel and finds the popular image of her as
charismatically challenged and aloof unfair. She's a logical, unpretentious woman, he says,
who still lives in the same apartment that she did before becoming chancellor,
with her husband, a chemist who hates media or public attention. Yet Langguth says Merkel was not shaped by
history the way her CDU predecessors Konrad Adenauer and Helmut
Kohl were. Kohl, he notes, as
chancellor would sprinkle his speeches with personal memories of hardship, of
American aid in the rough years after the war. His late wife had been raped by
the Red Army and thrown out a window as a preteen. Experience shaped Kohl's efforts to
build a united Europe and a strong trans-Atlantic relationship.
GERD
LANGGUTH: Helmut Kohl was much more European by heart. He knew what European unity means because he
lived during the Second World War.
ERIC
WESTERVELT: But Langguth says for Merkel the European project is much
more a rational, matter-of-fact decision. She was born in 1954, nine
years after the war, and learned about the conflict in school. It was an ideologically loaded communist
curriculum, the biographer notes, which glorified so-called anti-fascist
fighters, downplayed atrocities, and sidestepped the full historical picture.
GERD
LANGGUTH: It was not treated in the political and civic education in the same
manner as in Western Germany. And of course, younger people do not feel
personally responsible for the Second World War and for the Holocaust. So
the experience never made Angela Merkel in her youth.
ERIC
WESTERVELT: She is acutely aware of the European sensitivities toward a
powerful, resurgent, economically dominant Germany, Langguth says, but adds she may not appreciate
it the same way as her predecessors did. Merkel often says if the euro fails,
so does Europe. But some wonder if she
really feels the weight of history and her crucial role at this moment. As one
biographer put it, in her years in power, Merkel has not made a single truly
memorable speech. Yet that may not matter. A majority of Germans embrace their
even-keeled chancellor. Her personal approval rating today remains near 60
percent, and more than half of her countrymen say they trust her to guide
Europe out of the crisis. Eric Westervelt, NPR News, Berlin.
