Photo: Tobias Kleinschmidt, CC BY 3.0 DE, via Wikimedia Commons
For almost 16 years, Angela Merkel served as Germany’s Chancellor. Her legacy is deeply troubling, with euro zone bailouts angering both net payers and net receivers, chaotic migration policies, and suicidal energy policies that made Germany too dependent on Russia. She also ignored UK concerns about the EU, helping to cause Brexit, and she pushed to ignore referendums in the Netherlands and France on the “European Constitution”—another EU Treaty change that amounted to greater transfers of powers to the EU, repackaging it as the Lisbon Treaty. Importantly, she also hardly introduced any domestic competitiveness reforms. This view of Merkel is more and more mainstream. Recently, The Economist also wrote that “Merkel’s legacy looks increasingly terrible.”
Merkel herself, who has just published her memoirs, is basically regretting nothing when asked about many of these failures in a recent interview with Der Spiegel. There, she also mentions, “I am now 70 years old, 35 years in the East, 35 years in politics, apparently two lives, but in reality one life, and the second half cannot be understood without the first.”
In particular, how Merkel entered politics has always received very little attention. That is despite the fact that a number of biographies have been written about her, with the most critical one perhaps being “the first life of Angela M.” The book focuses on how she was a member of the FDJ, the communist youth organization, later serving as its cultural secretary while working as a physicist at the Academy of Sciences.
The book describes how her father, Pastor Horst Kasner, had left Hamburg, in West Germany, shortly after the birth of his daughter Angela, to settle in East Germany, then known as the “German Democratic Republic” (GDR). At a time when there was a mass exodus of citizens fleeing the communist regime, Kasner justified his action by saying he wanted to support the souls of his fellow citizens who remained on the other side. However, according to the two authors of the book, Kasner belonged to a group of theologians who considered socialism a real alternative to capitalism. He is said to have cultivated contacts in the SED, the socialist unity party that was in charge of the regime in East Germany, which allowed him to obtain advancement.
When the democratic movement in the GDR began to bring down the Berlin Wall in November 1989, Merkel advocated a shift in the system towards “democratic socialism” rather than a genuine peaceful revolution, the book alleges.
According to former German Transport Minister Günther Krause—an East German politician who worked with Merkel in the final months of the GDR—Merkel openly propagated Marxism, as he claims she served as the secretary for “Agitation and Propaganda,” saying: “With Agitation and Propaganda you’re responsible for brainwashing in the sense of Marxism,” adding:
That was her task and that wasn’t cultural work. Agitation and Propaganda, that was the group that was meant to fill people’s brains with everything you were supposed to believe in the GDR, with all the ideological tricks. And what annoys me about this woman is simply the fact that she doesn’t admit to a closeness to the system in the GDR. From a scientific standpoint she wasn’t indispensable at the Academy of Sciences. But she was useful as a pastor’s daughter in terms of Marxism-Leninism. And she’s denying that. But it’s the truth.”
Merkel has responded to this by arguing that she has not covered up anything about her past, stating: “I can only rely on my memory. … If something turns out to be different, I can live with that.”
What is probably hard to deny in all of this is that an academic career as a physicist would have been forbidden to someone openly hostile to the regime. However, to be fair to Merkel, the rest remains open to speculation.
What is not open to speculation is what happened after the Wall had fallen, with the “Wende,” the period during which the Berlin Wall fell and East Germany was absorbed into the West. There, a number of hard facts should raise profound questions about how Angela Merkel made her career.
During that period, Merkel made a blitz career in politics, morphing from a stuffy East German researcher in November 1989 to entering the German Bundestag in 1990, in order to be appointed shortly after as Minister for Women and Youth in the government of Chancellor Helmut Kohl in January 1991.
What’s really intriguing here is how she achieved this.
Merkel’s first job in politics
Merkel’s first job in politics wasn’t a great success. In February 1990, she had become the spokeswoman of the “Democratic Awakening,” an East German political movement and political party founded in October 1989. The party didn’t do well in the first democratic East German elections in March 1990, only collecting 0.9% of votes. This was because its chairman, Wolfgang Schnur, had to admit to having been an informer for the feared and ruthless Ministry for State Security (Stasi) for more than two decades. A few days before the election, he was forced to resign. This wasn’t exactly a great sales pitch for the leader of the East German pro-democracy movement. The man was later criminally convicted as well.
How did Merkel end up as spokeswoman for the leading opposition party when she was never active in opposition circles at all? According to her predecessor as party spokeswoman for Democratic Awakening” Christiane Ziller, who stepped down along with some other more left-leaning people over the decision of the party convention to adopt a more conservative program, “there wasn’t any democratic legitimacy [as to how Merkel was appointed], as far as I know. Her appointment was one of these discretionary decisions by Schnur,” the later disgraced party chairman. Ziller, who otherwise speaks positively about Merkel in an interview with Die Welt and later joined the German Greens, mentions how Merkel “remained a stranger within the opposition network in the German Democratic Republic.”
Merkel had joined the opposition movement Democratic Awakening only after the Berlin Wall fell, on 9 November, 1989. She has never claimed to have been an active dissident before the Wall fell.
The Democratic Awakening was based on existing politically active church groups and that’s where Merkel’s father, Horst Kasner, comes in. East German official documents describe him in his early days as “an opponent” of the regime, but later, his nickname seems to have evolved into “red Kasner,” as he was then campaigning for the East German Church to be split off from the Western German Evangelical Church in a bid to reconcile Christianity and “socialism,” as the Communists called their ideology. This was very much something the East German regime desired, as cutting church ties with the West would strengthen their grip on the church, which was a vehicle to oppose the regime. “At synods, he vehemently defended positions that were in the power-political interests of the SED.” Gerd Langguth, a former European Commission representative in Germany, recalls in an article about Merkel’s father in Die Welt.
Langguth furthermore points out in a biography of Merkel that, unlike the children in other pastors’ families, the higher education of Kasner’s children, including Angela Merkel, was not impeded, a sign that he may have been quite friendly towards the regime. Unlike the son of a system-critical pastor from Kasner’s circle, who had to work as an assistant locksmith, Angela, born in 1954, was among the just 10% of the class who were allowed to attend the extended secondary school.
A key fact here is that Wolfgang Schnur, the leader of the first East German opposition party who was later revealed as a Stasi, has been pretty clear that he employed Angela Merkel because her father was a longtime church friend.
Schnur was active in the Synod of the Federation of the Protestant Churches in the GDR and as an attorney, he defended many East German political dissidents in the 1980s. This may have helped this Stasi man to infiltrate so deeply into the East German opposition movement that he emerged as one of its leaders when the Wall came down. For what it’s worth: he has claimed to be acting against Stasi advice in joining the opposition movement. But also, while he acted as leader of the Democratic Awakening, he maintained contacts with the Stasi.
In any case, perhaps unknowingly, Merkel got her first job in politics due to the regime connections of her father.
Merkel’s second job in politics
After that, Merkel’s second job in politics is one where she ends up working for a politician who didn’t only have to step down over suspected Stasi links but who also comes out of the world of East German church politics. That is Lothar de Maiziere, the first democratically elected prime minister of East Germany.
When Merkel had to find a new way in politics after the Democratic Awakening had been crushed in March 1990 due to the Stasi connections of its leader, she was appointed as deputy spokesman for de Maiziere in April 1990. He was the leader of the East German Christian Democratic Union. In East Germany, there were so-called “bloc parties” whose function was to suggest there was an alternative to the SED. Also during the first free election in March 1990, these bloc parties took part. Short of any decent alternative, 40 percent of voters in East Germany opted for the CDU, as the real opposition party had been revealed as being led by a Stasi operator.
After de Maiziere won the first democratic elections in East Germany, he became prime minister of the East German State, which would end up integrating into West Germany in October 1990.
Before that, the East German bloc parties were all integrated into their West German counterparts. In a later interview, Lothar de Maiziere recalls how German Chancellor Kohl was easily convinced to merge the East German CDU with the Western German one, despite some protest in his party, because, according to de Maiziere, “in all areas of the GDR we had an office (…) and we were able to conduct a comprehensive electoral campaign. The Chancellor was always open to such considerations.” Despite some resistance, the West German liberal party also decided to do this, given the high number of members in their East German counterpart.
Lothar’s cousin and Germany’s former interior minister Thomas de Mazière was appointed as an advisor to the new East German Cabinet cabinet in April 1990, closely working together there with Merkel. Thomas comes from the West German wing of the family that had been estranged from the East German wing. He and Merkel go back a long way. In 2005, Merkel appointed him as her chief of staff when she became chancellor.
According to Thomas, in 1990, he recommended that his uncle hire Merkel. Thomas had been impressed by her qualities at the press conference where Schnur’s resignation as the leader of “Democratic Awakening” was declared. That party was in an electoral association called “Alliance for Germany” with Lothar de Mazière’s CDU. In a joint interview with his cousin, Lothar de Mazière makes clear that even before his cousin’s recommendation, Merkel had already impressed him, as she “was very good at moderating” between the “squabbling” different parties of the association.
Oddly, in this particular interview, Lothar de Mazière doesn’t mention that his father, Clemens de Mazière, and Merkel’s father knew each other very well. Both had been prominent in East German church politics for years, as Merkel’s father’s regular interlocutors in terms of church politics were Wolfgang Schnur and Clemens de Maizière, the father of Lothar de Maizière.
Clemens was the East German church’s lawyer, who worked closely together with Merkel’s father to split the East German church off from its Western German counterpart. As mentioned, this was a policy desired by the East German regime.
Notably, Clemens de Maizière was a shrewd Stasi-operator who apparently even betrayed his own family and his own clients, including the Protestant church. After the war, Clemens had swiftly converted from Nazism to Communism. He had once belonged to Adolf Hitler’s “Sturmabteilung,” with membership number 3952867, investigative journalist Uwe Müller has revealed.
This is also telling about Communist East Germany, where many former Nazis comfortably morphed into loyal Communists after the Second World War. For example, in 1946, 8-10% of all SED members had previously been members of Hitler’s NSDAP party. Nazi doctors that had been involved in terrible crimes were able to continue practising medicine in the GDR’s health care system.
After Merkel’s first boss in politics had to step down over Stasi links, the new leader of East Germany, Lothar de Maizière, was also accused of having been a Stasi operator. This happened in December 1990, resulting in his resignation as a minister in the first German government after unification, to which he had been appointed by Chancellor Helmut Kohl following the Bundestag elections of December 1990.
Lothar de Maizière would have worked for the Stasi since 1981, the year after his father Clemens, a long-time Stasi asset, had passed away, as he also took over his father’s role of the East German church’s lawyer. Before he went into active politics, Lothar de Maizière was the vice president of the synod of the Association of Protestant Churches in the GDR. Merkel’s father must have known him very well.
Questions abound
In a nutshell: Merkel may well have gotten her second job because the Democratic Awakening had been in a pre-election alliance with the East German CDU and because she did such an impressive job dealing with journalists when the Democratic Awakening was in crisis. But apart from that, there is something very intriguing about the closeness between her father and her first two political bosses.
Did Merkel use her father’s East German church policy connections to get her first two jobs in politics, twice working for people who had to resign over Stasi allegations? Did her father know or suspect they were? Did Merkel herself know or suspect? Questions abound.
Shouldn’t this have been investigated more deeply? Lothar de Mazière is still alive. Despite all the indications, he maintains he wasn’t secret Stasi agent “Czernie.” Then, it was De Maiziere’s government that ordered the destruction of Stasi computer tapes. The West German government had been warned even before the elections in March 1990 about Lothar De Maiziere’s possible Stasi connections in East Germany but due to his membership of the CDU, this may not have been thoroughly researched, according to Stasi-expert and Die Welt-journalist Uwe Müller.
At the end of the day, here are the facts: Both Merkel’s first two bosses in politics, Wolfgang Schnur and Lothar de Mazière, emerged as leaders of the East German opposition movement before having to step down because of Stasi accusations. Both brought Angela Merkel to the fore, and both were close to Merkel’s father.
There are the Stasi archives, the many people who were involved in the Democratic Awakening and East Germany’s CDU, people within East Germany’s church community. Doesn’t this deserve more investigation?
Maybe the only thing that can be concluded here is that Merkel was lucky enough to be able to use her father’s dodgy political connections to launch her career.
Has there been a proper debate in Germany over the role of the Stasi and its network during and after the unification of Germany? Even if this network would have only played a very minimal, almost accidental role in kick-starting Angela Merkel’s career: shouldn’t this be out in the open?
It’s commonly accepted that in the “East Block” countries that abandoned Communism, there was a lot of continuity after 1990. Not only Vladimir Putin and his KGB buddies who are ruling Russia; also in Poland and Romania, there are many examples of regime continuity.
When the Berlin wall fell in 1989, nearly three hundred thousand East Germans were working for the Stasi. This organisation has been described as “worse than the Gestapo” by Nazi hunter Simon Wiesenthal. The Christian democratic, liberal, and social democratic “bloc parties” of East Germany—which must have been infested with Stasi influences—were absorbed into Western Germany’s political system. Is it really surprising that the old elites managed to help each other in the politically turbulent period when Germany was unified?
According to GDR regime opponent Vera Lengsfeld, Stasi abuses have gone largely unpunished because it was decided that East Germans could not be prosecuted under West German law. She argues that Germany was so eager to move on with unification that it brushed too much dark history under the carpet.
Clearly, with so many involved actors still alive, this all deserves a lot more attention. A closer look at one specific case—that of how Angela Merkel started her political career—may be a good place to start.