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Angela Merkel (born 1954) became the first woman ever to lead Germany as chancellor.
Merkel and the party she chairs, the Christian Democratic Union (CDU), formed a
coalition with two other parties in 2005, and the agreement installed the former physicist as
head of government. Perhaps more notable than her gender is Merkel's background: she is
the first person to lead a reunified Germany who comes from the formerly Communist
eastern states, a division that endured for more than four decades following the end of
Germany's defeat in World War II. My life changed completely in 1989, Merkel said
once at a rally, according to Judy Dempsey in the International Herald Tribune. I have had
many opportunities in the last 15 years. I would like to give my country back what I myself
have gained in terms of the opportunities from reunification.
Merkel was born Angela Dorothea Kasner on July 17, 1954, in Hamburg, Germany. This was
one of the largest cities of West Germany, but her parents moved east just a few months later to
the German Democratic Republic, or GDR, as Communist East Germany was called. The
decision was made by Merkel's father, Horst, a Lutheran pastor, who was offered a job at a
seminary in the state of Brandenburg, about an hour north of Berlin. Berlin was surrounded by
the GDR, but had a Western sector that remained technically part of West Germany. Soviet and
U.S. troops monitored the different Berlin zones, but in 1961 the East Germans, with Soviet aid,
began constructing a massive wall that divided the city into East and West, like Germany itself.
East German border guards patrolled the no-man's land adjacent to the Wall, with orders to shoot
on sight any trespassers. Nearly all of those who died were East Germans seeking freedom in the
West instead of the strictly regulated state socialism of the East.
A Prize-Winning Student
Merkel was raised as the eldest of three children in the Brandenburg city of Templin. After she
became chancellor, a biography was published in Germany which revealed that her father had
been instrumental in the creation of a separate Protestant church in the GDRallowing GDR
officials to keep a closer watch on its membersand his tacit support of the German Communist
Party likely gave the family the few perks they were able to enjoy. These included two cars
when one automobile was an almost unheard-of luxury in much of Communist Eastern Europe
and travel visas that permitted them to visit relatives back in West Germany and even vacation in
Italy.
As a youth, Merkel was nicknamed Kasi from her surname, Kasner, and was a studious high
schooler who excelled in languages, as had her mother, who had been a teacher of English back
in Hamburg. Merkel became so fluent in Russian that she even won a prize trip to Moscow. Like
nearly all other college-bound East German teens, she was a member of the Freie Deutsche
Jugend (Free German Youth, or FDJ), the official socialist youth organization in the GDR, but
most reports of her young adult years portray her as a dutiful East German who avoided political
rhetoric of any stripe. I would have loved to have become a teacher, she once reflected,
according to a profile written by Ruth Elkins in London's Independent. But not under that
political system. Instead she chose to study the sciences, remarking that physics was harmless
and uncontroversial, according to Elkins.
Merkel entered the University of Leipzig in 1973. According to a German-language biography
by Gerd Langguth published in Germany as Angela Merkel: Aufstieg zur Macht (Angela Merkel:
Rise to Power), her father's proregime attitude helped Angela's career, noted Luke Harding,
correspondent for London's Observer. Horst's status with GDR authorities permitted his daughter
to study at an elite comprehensive school and go on to university, at a time when the children of
clergy were routinely refused places. During her student years, Merkel worked as a barmaid in a
discotheque, and a year before earning her degree married a fellow student, Ulrich Merkel. They
moved to an apartment with neither toilet nor hot water in the Prenzlauer Berg district of East
Berlin, and began renovating it while Merkel also went to work on her doctorate in quantum
chemistry at the Central Institute for Physical Chemistry of the Berlin Academy of Sciences. The
marriage ended in 1982.
forum comprised of the world's most powerful nations). As chair of the latter, she proposed a
transatlantic free trade zone that might become known by the acronym TAFTA. I consider it my
job to express to America what's in the interest of Europe, New York Times correspondent Mark
Landler quoted her as saying about TAFTA. And for me, the trans-Atlantic partnership, in
general, is in the European interest. Europeans know that we cannot accomplish things without
America, but she added, America must also know that Europe is needed in many areas.
Merkel earns consistently high marks in public opinion polls, receiving the highest approval
ratings among all postWorld War II German chancellors. In 2007 Forbes magazine ranked her at
the top of its list of the world's most powerful women for the second year in a row. In 1993 she
married her former doctoral advisor, Joachim Sauer, a chemistry professor. Like many German
women of her generation, she is childless; the country has regularly posted some of the world's
lowest birth rates since the 1980s. On the domestic front, this demographic shortfall may keep
her in poweras the median voter age in Germany remains close to her own actual agebut
may also portend disaster for the country's future. If birthrates continue to decline, the country
will one day have a workforce too small to support the social and medical programs that its
elderly will need, explained Andrew Purvis in Time International. Previous governments have
sounded the alarm about this scenarioand then done little or nothing about it . If Merkel uses
her leadership to find ways in which women can be better integrated into the economy, she will
go down in history for a lot more than her gender.