Chapter 3
Genesis (Eastern Roots)
Angela Merkel is more than just Germany’s first female chancellor, the first from the formerly communist East and the first born after World War II. She is the first true postwar chancellor. Brought up behind the Iron Curtain as the future European Union took shape, she was little burdened by 40 years of West German politics and ideology when the Berlin Wall fell in 1989. Cautious by nature, she exploited freedom gradually, driven by a will to succeed honed since her sheltered childhood in small-town East Germany. She had grown up the daughter of a Lutheran minister and chosen an academic profession, making her an outsider in a communist state that worshipped workers and peasants. That meant she had to work harder ...
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