Angela Merkel: A Life of No Regrets

Non, elle ne regrette rien...

Angela Merkel explaining her life and her decisions at the Deutsches Theater in Berlin on 26 November 2024. Img: Zeit Online

Angela Merkel’s much-anticipated memoirs are out this week. Having spent much of last week reading those 720 pages to review them for The Telegraph, I felt I learnt some additional factual information about the last three decades of German politics but very little about the former German chancellor herself.

Sometimes, Merkel simply takes us through her diary of meetings and conferences. Other passages give a lot of space to justifying the various momentous decisions she made, be that on Russia, immigration or energy. At all times, the message is clear: things were the way they were, and she did her best to deal with them.

Perhaps it was rather fitting that Charles Dumont’s recent death coincided with the release of Merkel’s memoirs. He was the composer of the famous French song "Non, je ne regrette rien" recorded by Édith Piaf and adopted by a defiant Foreign Legion. "No, I do not regret anything" certainly sums up Merkel’s relationship with her own past.

I don’t doubt Merkel’s sincere belief that she dealt with the problems she saw as best she could. But isn’t leadership about more than managing the status quo? Shouldn’t leaders have a vision of how they want their country to be?

Given Germany’s experience with leaders who thought they were visionary, it’s perhaps unsurprising that Merkel stands firmly within the (West) German postwar tradition when she rejects this kind of leadership style. Helmut Schmidt, Chancellor from 1974 to 1982, famously believed that "people with visions should go to the doctor."

Fair enough, but I would still have been interested to find out what Merkel really thought about her sixteen years at the helm of one of the largest economies in the world. Sixteen years during which she prided herself in a leadership style she described as “driving by sight”.

In my view, her unwillingness to consider what might be beyond the next bend or even where Germany’s journey should be headed has lead to more stagnation than progress in her time in office. But her book gives no space to these larger reflections nor any philosophical musings as to what leadership is about.

So I was looking forward to Merkel’s book premiere at the Deutsches Theatre in central Berlin on Tuesday night. Live and in person, perhaps her body language, appearance and spontaneous answers might reveal more about how she really feels….