Merkel

Eva Weber’s 2022 documentary, Merkel, will find not a shred of resistance from European or even American streamers, TV, or festival programmers. A lot of that will be because Angela Merkel is immediately recognisable and extremely important in the West. It also helps that a lot of the interviewees are themselves political and media powerhouses: Condoleezza Rice, Tony Blair, Susan Rice are among them. Actually, Merkel and her successor Olaf Scholz might be the only persons who know enough about the subject to show up, but do not do so directly.

Part of Weber’s remit is to explain how that this former research scientist rose to become one of the most important figures in Europe’s recent history. A different part of her task is simply to laud the lady’s achievements. Weber reveres Angela Merkel and she wants you to be just as reverent. In pursuit of that reverence, her film begins in Boston, Massachusetts, a weird choice: why America for a woman who was in charge of Germany for more than a dozen years?

The answer to that is half obvious: the U.S. is the U.S. The other half seems attributable to Weber’s attempt to place Merkel as not merely a leader of a country but as part of the Western political infrastructure in contemporary times. The subject herself might frown at any attempt to, so to speak, glam up her image, but this is Weber’s show. In one scene with a TV journalist, Merkel is presented with two photos of herself. She says she hates the conventional cooler one because while she took the photo without makeup, it was touched up afterwards. It’s the type of thing that happens in political campaigns and we do see a shot of retouched Merkel as candidate.

She may no longer be campaigning for anything but this documentary, like any personality-focused project, is a campaign of sorts. Merkel, however, has always tried to play down her own importance. In one interview with a live audience, she emphasizes how, at home, she isn’t playing the leader role or thinking, “the Chancellor is stirring her soup”. The audience laughs but it is an important difference between her and the men who have dominated European politics for centuries. You can picture Trump thinking “POTUS is now tying his shoelaces” when he was president; something similar is possible with Putin.

And those are the two men this documentary invites viewers to compare her with. But it isn’t merely a matter of style. There is an interesting intercutting of her Harvard commencement speech with several Trump speeches. While Merkel discusses the fall of the Berlin Wall when she was 35 and how it freed her, Trump speaks about building his own wall, and at one point talks about how she is destroying Germany.

The Berlin Wall is also important in her relationship with Putin. While she thinks the collapse of that wall was the best thing for her dreams, it was also a symbol of what went wrong in Europe. In its link to the fall of the USSR, the fall of the Berlin Wall already places Putin and Merkel on opposite sides of European history. One of the interviewees also says that Putin considered Merkel as the person who took power away from his friend Gerhard Schroder. Whatever the nature of the Putin-Merkel affair, it hardly mattered because both their countries were then economically prosperous. Never mind that famous episode in 2007, when Putin brought in his dogs apparently after learning that his German counterpart felt uneasy around the animals. That was probably a leaf from masculine politics. Meanwhile, as one of the documentary’s star guests says, Merkel’s political rise stemmed from her ability to conserve her energies. Perhaps she learned that from her days as a scientist.

In any case, the result of the prosperity enjoyed by Germany in Merkel’s time has only been questioned with the invasion of Ukraine and the West’s inability to activate significant sanctions on Russia. For some, the carnage provoked by the ongoing war is Merkel’s legacy. If she had moved Germany away from its dependency on Russian energy and supplies, the West would have a whip for Russia. Even that other symbol of female political power, Hillary Clinton, says she could have done more.

As it stands, the EU, NATO and other important acronyms have only a feather and several New York Times op-eds to hold against Putin’s implacable war machine. But this is not that kind of work; this is not a critical documentary.

The other Merkel move that still looms over Europe and the rest of the West relates to migration. The initial fanfare greeting Germany’s open borders has since turned sour. Merkel and her friend/supporter Barack Obama believe she was right. But Europe has since voted or shown strong support for the other way. So, even if she was right, it could take a generation to obtain proof. For now, Merkel deserves her send-off party. And Weber has given her a fitting, if anodyne, one. Viewers are advised to stay for the credits. There is an interesting story about Merkel as a girl relayed by her mother. It involves a slap.