Something is missing in Angela Merkel’s autobiography (“Freedom by Angela Merkel — a paean to a bygone halcyon age”, Books, Life & Arts, November 26).
Merkel’s inclination is to rationalise every decision she made. What I miss (and what I derive from Ralph Bollmann’s 2021 biography) is that at a young age she had observed two life lessons while living with her parents (her father was a protestant pastor in East Germany who entertained many freedom-loving visitors): first, the intrinsic importance of people being able to travel freely, and second, the impossibility of stopping the free flow of persons (witness the enormous amount of East Germans escaping to West Germany before the construction of the Iron Curtain and the exodus to the west via the Czech and Slovak Republic and Hungary).
Freedom of travel might be a European core value (her formal argument when defending her immigration policy, “Wir schaffen das”), but for her it was her internal compass, which she, when put to the test during the European migrant crisis in 2015, had no trouble in following. For her, a rational decision.
Carel van den Berg
Laren, the Netherlands
