Angela Merkel explains

“Never explain, never complain,” is a maxim supposedly espoused by the British royal family. As Angela Merkel writes in her exhaustive yet surprisingly fast-paced autobiography, Freedom, it also became a phrase that she would repeat to herself during her 16 years as German chancellor, from 2005 until she stepped down in December 2021.

- ELISABETH ZEROFSKY

Readers of Freedom might be surprised that Merkel brings up this English dictum not in a discussion of the consequences of a fraught policy decision, though there are many in this 709-page book, but in response to the bullying micro-aggressions of the Russian president Vladimir V. Putin, who on one occasion in 2007 brought his Labrador to a press-filled meeting with Merkel, even after his staff was told that the chancellor had a phobia of dogs. “Stay calm, focus on the photographers, it won’t be for long,” she recalls telling herself.

The episode also serves as an unintended parable, perhaps, of the way Merkel’s staid disposition, cultivated through her political coming-of-age in Germany’s buoyant 1990s, seemed more and more ineffectual as Putin and other illiberal leaders proliferated across the continent.

Despite her favorite motto, Freedom does offer something like an explanation of the countless decisions that Merkel made in response to the series of crises that hit Germany during her long stay in office. Yet, in the three years since, Germany’s reliance on increasingly authoritarian countries—Russia for energy, China as a trading partner—and, in a different but, especially now, worrisome sense, on the United States for defense, has left the nation in a vulnerable position.