After six months of radio silence, Angela Merkel has publicly asked herself questions about her Russia policy for the first time. The interview was remarkable for a number of reasons.
I was impressed by three things about Angela Merkel’s first major public appearance, the interview with her novelist and reporter Alexander Osang, who, like her, is from the East and very Berliners.
Firstly, the big sentences that Merkel is now making again after 16 years in her state office, after all the diligence that was diplomatically required. One is particularly simple and yet has a great deal of potential. It reads: “I didn’t believe that Putin would be changed by trade.” Another statesman from the luxury class did believe that and then apologized for his mistakes in Russia: the Federal President. The Chancellor believes that she doesn’t have to apologize for anything. Nor for preventing Ukraine’s early membership of NATO.
Because that’s a big narrative that’s being built right now. About the Ukrainian ambassador in Berlin, Andriy Melnyk, who dictated a corresponding question to the Spiegel journalist in his block. Namely, whether Merkel, by saying no to Ukraine’s NATO membership in 2008, didn’t make Putin’s attack possible 13 years later. Merkel sees it the other way around: If NATO had been prepared a good ten years ago to accept a democratically unstable Ukraine, which Merkel said was in the hands of oligarchs, Putin would have put pressure on them even then, perhaps attacked them. Merkel doesn’t say that literally here, but there’s no other way to understand it.
However, because this is an important step that will reach far into the future from the past and which is likely to have a say in Germany’s role and reputation in the western world, it will have to be discussed again. In any case, Merkel is defending the course she has set with solid facts, self-confident, statesmanlike and sovereign. And here’s another big sentence from Merkel, big because it’s courageous at this time: “Russia is a fascinating country.” And: “The tragedy is greater because I like this country.”
Merkel still claims that she thinks Russian culture is great, remembers what she read in school, like Bulgakov, for example. But invite the opera diva Netrebko to dinner: “No.” And she thinks it should be possible to still be grateful to Gorbachev for German unity today. A Russian should not be convicted because he is a Russian. When assessing people, each individual case counts – not the system that Putin installed for the individual case.
Second: Merkel’s humor, which is now so obviously returning after a half-year break from politics. And her ability to combine the anecdotal with the political. “I was surprised that you talked for an hour,” Merkel says to her interviewer. When he met her once, she asked him to tell about his time in America. What he did for so long that he had no more time for questions. Journalists can be very self-absorbed, which Merkel sums up with her sentence without being vulnerable for even a second.
Osang then wants to know how it was with this famous dog scene with Putin, this attempt at intimidation, for which there is a probably unique photo. And Merkel talks about her very first visit to Putin, when she hadn’t been in the Federal Chancellery for long. Right at the beginning, Putin, the trained secret service agent, asked about her troubled relationship with dogs. Merkel was bitten when she was young and has been afraid of dogs ever since. According to Merkel, Putin gave her a “huge” stuffed dog. As I said, that was before meeting Putin’s real Labrador. She then needs a self-deprecating sentence: “A brave Chancellor has to deal with such a dog.”
Third: The openness and seriousness with which Merkel reflects on her self-image as former Chancellor. “I have to be even more careful than I used to be.” Because an ex-Chancellor is still under surveillance, which restricts her freedom. In any case, Merkel thinks so. Unlike Schröder, who does not allow his personal freedom to be restricted by his previous state office.
For Merkel, there is an institutional obligation that extends well beyond her term of office, possibly to the end of her life. She also believes that she should still do good for the country today. And would be ready when she was called, which, with one exception (Olaf Scholz), has not yet happened. But now she expressly does not want to say that she is waiting for such a call.
Merkel hasn’t finished defining her new role, she also says so: “I’m still looking for my way.” But it is already clear that she finds it “fatal” to remain silent forever; as well as locking yourself up in the local Uckermark. This is only because Ambassador Melnyk called out to her via Twitter when she was on vacation in Italy that she was better off going to Bucha than to the Italian sun.
Merkel does not want to comment on current politics, which does not mean that she is only being diplomatic. Merkel makes two points clear what that means: Because Social Democrats are now complaining how much Christian Democrats under Merkel’s responsibility have run down the Bundeswehr, she reminds the SPD that for years they have refused to use armed drones.
Finally, Merkel revealed how annoyed she was with the Americans because of the sanctions against Germany over the Nord Stream pipeline: “You can do that with Iran, but not with us.” A sentence that she never uttered in office lips would have slipped. But also someone who raises expectations of her memories, which she wants to write down together with her long-standing office manager, Brigitte Baumann. Perhaps, to protect herself from falling into the old Teflon habit, she should allow herself to be interviewed rather than try to write everything down herself.
