Suddenly she’s back, Angela Merkel. A politician from a bygone era who, as it turned out in Amsterdam on Thursday, still appeals to the imagination of many. She may have disappeared from the political scene for three years, but she has not forgotten how to campaign. Although it is no longer about her next term of office, but about the sale of her recently published autobiography, entitled Freedom, and her place in history.
Amsterdam gave her a warm welcome. Was it to find a source of hope and inspiration in these cold times? To forget for a moment the current political instability, with the woman who, as Chancellor, was called the anchor of stability of Europe? Or was it pure love?
Probably a little bit of all that. The highlight of her visit was a podium conversation with Arnon Grunberg, in the Old Lutheran Church on the Singel. The tickets (47.50 euros) were sold out in no time, and to thundering applause, Merkel (70) walked from the back of the hall in black trousers and a white blazer through the center aisle to the stage under the pulpit. There she was met by the writer – “Frau Dr. Merkel” had announced as “a symbol, an icon, a star” – was met with a series of personal, political and philosophical questions. All in German.
Love
Grunberg immediately made it clear that the conversation would not be a hard interrogation. After all, it was about one Buchvorstellungan introduction to the more than 700-page memoir, which Merkel wrote together with the woman who was her closest advisor for decades, Beate Baumann. In 2017, Jeroen Pauw once suggested that Grunberg had “a certain degree of admiration” for Merkel – “of love,” the writer corrected at the time, beaming.
It turned out to be the kind of love in Amsterdam on Thursday where you don’t have to spare each other. Wasn’t the refugee deal that she and then Prime Minister Mark Rutte concluded on behalf of the European Union with Turkish President Erdogan, to prevent refugees from traveling to Europe for a fee, actually cynical from a human rights point of view?
“It was not an ideal situation,” Merkel was willing to admit. “But if you allow human smugglers to enrich themselves by not caring about refugees, but putting them in great danger of drowning, no, then I don’t think the agreement we made was cynical. And we have greatly reduced illegal immigration.”
Arnon Grunberg turned out to be sometimes serious, sometimes disruptive or mildly mocking and therefore an ideal partner for a lively and varied conversation. About the no longer existing country where Merkel grew up, he asked: “Can one still smell the former GDR?” When I visit my old school, the answer was, I can’t smell it anymore, but I do remember what it smelled like.
Home
The conversation took a philosophical direction when Grunberg introduced the concept that was difficult to translate Home which means birthplace, place of origin to which you are attached, where you feel at home. “How many Home does a person need?” asked the frequently traveling Amsterdam writer, for whom “the abroad already begins in Diemen.”
Merkel started talking about the landscape of lakes and forests of her youth – and then introduced an anecdote about a visit she once made as Chancellor to a school in Stuttgart. Children, many of whom had a migration background, told something in class Home meant to them. “They all named people: their father, their mother, their uncles and aunts. I felt embarrassed because I had only mentioned things, not people, not my parents.” Everyone needs “a piece of Homeland”, whatever he or she means by that, Merkel thought.
Of course, it was also about the refugee crisis in 2015, “a break in my chancellorship.” It was during that eventful period that she decided to write a book later – “for interpretation [van de crisis] not just left to others. You have to imagine the alternatives. Should we have used water cannons to stop the refugees at the border? No!”
Grunberg confessed that he was Merkel Hoffnungsträgerin had seen, someone who embodied hope for him – and still does. The standing ovation that Merkel received at the end of the evening suggested that the audience felt the same way.
Controversial
The fact that Merkel is fiercely controversial, in Germany but also in the Netherlands, was not noticeable in Amsterdam on Thursday. After a lunch with former Prime Minister and fellow Christian Democrat Jan Peter Balkenende, she encountered a long line of people at the Athenaeum bookstore, some of whom had been waiting for hours to have a book signed. In the mayor’s official residence, Angela Merkel was then awarded the Gold Medal of the City of Amsterdam, the capital’s highest award.
Mayor Halsema called her a source of inspiration for many women and also for herself. She expressed her enthusiasm that Merkel had had a song by Nina Hagen played at her farewell as Chancellor (You have forgotten the Farbfilmby a band of the Bundeswehr). The mayor recalled that the punk singer also lived in Amsterdam for some time.
That was news for Merkel. With a small smile she commented: “I didn’t know we had to share Nina Hagen with Amsterdam.” It seemed on Thursday that Germany would also have to share Mérkel with Amsterdam from now on.
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