Like no other couple on the contemporary political stage, Merkel and Putin have experienced parallel lives. However circumscribed Merkel’s admiration for Catherine the Great may be, the latter’s accomplishments offer crucial historical insights to those trying to comprehend the chancellor’s turbulent relationship with the current Russian leader, Vladimir Putin. And the good Lord will forgive me: that’s his.” Perhaps Merkel drew some comfort from those words as she worked behind the scenes to impose a very unpopular austerity package on Greece. Both leaders have had to master political environments falling under the proverbial curse, “May you live in interesting times.” As Catherine noted during her reign, 1762–1796, “A great wind is blowing and that either gives you imagination … or a headache.” She observed further, “I shall be an autocrat: that’s my trade. Deeply committed to democratic freedoms, Merkel claims to admire Catherine as a woman “who had accomplished many things under difficult circumstances” and “as a reformer, nothing more.” 3 As someone who has almost single-handedly impelled CDU /CSU hardliners to cross that bridge to the twenty-first century with modernized family policies, the chancellor’s idea of “nothing more” says a lot about an unusual political virtue she shares with the former empress: humility ( Demut).
She has moreover positioned unified Germany as a key actor on the global stage. As a Lutheran pastor’s daughter fluent in German, Russian, and English, Merkel frequented museums and collected art postcards in her youth she still attends concerts, theater, and opera performances. Merkel’s paternal grandparents, as well as her mother, were likewise born in Poland her family moved from the Western city of Hamburg to the Eastern state of Brandenburg in 1954, requiring Angela to adapt to a “foreign” culture in unified Germany thirty-five years later. Later known as the Volga Germans, they were granted the unusual privilege of maintaining their own culture, language, and religions, as Lutherans, Catholics and Mennonites, contributing to her reputation as a supporter of religious tolerance. She published two manifestos inviting farmers, miners, and traders (excluding Jews) to relocate from her homeland to help develop Russia. Fluent in German, French, and Russian, Catherine read vociferously and promoted the arts she also expanded the Russian empire to include much of modern Poland, Ukraine, and the Crimea. At 15 Sophie acquired a new name when she embraced the Russian Orthodox faith, a precondition for her marriage to the grandson of Peter the Great. 2 In 1995, her remains were transferred to the Pantheon Mausoleum in Paris, the first woman to be nationally honored “in perpetuity” based on her own accomplishments.Ĭharacterized as an “enlightened despot,” Catherine began her life as Princess Sophie of Anhalt Zerbst she was baptized as a Lutheran in Stettin (Pomerania), less than 50 miles away from Templin, where Merkel was later raised. Despite her Nobel Prizes in physics and chemistry, respectively, Marie Curie was denied admission to the French Academy of Sciences in 1911 but later served on the Committee for Intellectual Cooperation at the League of Nations. Each was unusually well educated for her time, preferring reason and evidence over passion and rhetoric both women, in turn, successfully established themselves in domains historically reserved for men. The two women Merkel admires most were both born in Poland but later adopted new homelands, where each managed to shatter the glass ceiling of her day. The only other painting on prominent display there is that of Germany’s first postwar chancellor, Konrad Adenauer. Indeed, journalists familiar with Merkel’s seventh floor sanctum in the Federal Chancellor’s Office report that she keeps a small portrait of Catherine on her desk. The first is a two-time Nobel Prize recipient, physicist Marie Curie the second is Russia’s longest reigning empress, Catherine the Great. At the end of her speech, the CDU opposition leader cited one of my favorite lines from Eleanor Roosevelt, which she erroneously attributed to Hillary: “A woman is like a tea-bag: you only know how strong she is when she’s in hot water.” 1 Rarely inclined to discuss the gender challenges she has encountered while climbing the political ladder, Merkel does pay homage to two women she claims as personal role models. In February 2005, nine months before she became Germany’s first female chancellor, Angela Merkel delivered the laudatio for then-Senator Hillary Clinton, who had traveled to Baden-Baden to receive the prestigious German Media Prize.