GOODBYE MUTTI

Many Germans see her as a mother figure. After 16 years as Germany’s chancellor, Angela Merkel is now retiring. What will her legacy be?

- OLIVER MOODY

EACH weekday morning, Angela Merkel would wake up at 5 am, put on her cardigan and corduroy trousers, skirt the perimeter of the Berlin Wall and catch the 6:15 from Friedrichstrasse to Adlershof.

If she was very lucky, she might pick up a copy of Pravda to read on the way. The rest of the time the only broadsheet on the newsstands was Neues Deutschland, a meticulously censored snoozefest issued by the communist regime of East Germany: tractor production in Romania, Comrade Gorbachev in Yakutsk, devious fascists in Bonn.

Getting off the train she’d pass through the tangle of barbed wire and sloe bushes surrounding the physical chemistry faculty of the National Academy of Sciences, a gloomy concrete box on the southeastern outskirts of Berlin.

She spent her days punching calculations for the decomposition of hydrocarbons into a 20-year-old wind-up computer from Hewlett-Packard.

But in the evenings, returning to the flat she’d squatted in Mitte, she would retreat into her secret world. She watched the West German television news, noting down every name, every face, every political speech of significance. She read, furiously: Bulgakov, Gorbachev, the liberal philosopher Karl Popper, the Marxist critic of capitalism Herbert Marcuse. She was, she later said, like a hamster gathering bedding for the long winter ahead.

Until the wall fell in November 1989, this was Merkel’s double life: unassuming, industrious, circumspect, concealing a wild whirr of intellectual activity behind a façade of dull scientific diligence.