"The Austrians are always so agitated when dealing with famous people," she says, a comment which almost suffices to turn the accident into an international affair.įor 16 years, everything that happened to her was somehow relevant. The place had reserved an exclusive room for the famous couple, and on the way there, she slipped on the wet floorboards. During a summer trip to Salzburg with her husband, she injured her knee in a restaurant. Merkel takes a seat on a black sofa and elevates her leg, propping herself up with a bright-red heart pillow that has also been brought over from the Chancellery. The two women are now writing the chancellor’s political memoirs together. She has been Merkel’s office manager for decades, following her from position to position, and she was an important part of Merkel’s tenure as chancellor. On a chair at the window sits Beate Baumann, seemingly also part of the office furnishings. She seems so relaxed, its almost as if no bad news finds its way here into her doll house. It is surprising just how unchanged she looks. Once a shining example of leadership acumen, Merkel now appears to bear no small share of the blame she has transformed from crisis manager to crisis maker. Her successor has deprived her of her legacy. Russia has invaded Ukraine, natural gas and gasoline are expensive and Germany is afraid of what might happen this winter. But one year later, the world is a different place. He wears dark, slim-fit suits and the Germans initially hoped that he would just continue on as she had. And just like with global stars, viewers found themselves wondering: Is she crying, or is it just the cold?Īngela Merkel’s successor was Olaf Scholz, a small, rather stiff man from the German Social Democrats. German public broadcasters televised the entire farewell ceremony. The polar opposite of the populists and machos of this world. The first to ever hold the office, the first eastern German, the first scientist. They were the song requests of a confident German woman. A song from Hildegard Knef followed, a singer who injected a bit of rebelliousness into stolid postwar Germany. The last images of her as Germany’s leader showed a woman in a heavy overcoat against the icy cold at the Bendlerblock – the Defense Ministry in Berlin where Claus von Stauffenberg and his accomplices were hanged following their unsuccessful attempt to assassinate Adolf Hitler – listening to the German military band playing a folk-pop song by Nina Hagen, who is from East Berlin, though left for the West and even became famous as a punk singer in New York.
Re done free#
She was still chancellor at the time, but likely had a foreboding that such historical baggage could weigh heavy.Īlmost exactly a year ago, Angela Merkel left the Chancellery as a heroine of the free world. When Merkel heard about this for the first time, her reported response was: "Oh, shit." Before that, back when the Berlin Wall still ran by outside the window, it was used by East German National Education Minister Margot Honecker. This used to be the office of ex-Chancellor Helmut Kohl. SPIEGEL Media Menü SPIEGEL Media aufklappen.Alle Magazine Menü Alle Magazine aufklappen.SPIEGEL-Heft Menü SPIEGEL-Heft aufklappen.Gutscheine Anzeige Menü Gutscheine aufklappen.Marktplatz Anzeige Menü Marktplatz aufklappen.Wissenschaft Menü Wissenschaft aufklappen.Formel 1 – Liveticker, Kalender, WM-Stand.
0 kommentar(er)
