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if they were employable and, fourth, they couldn’t choose where they could live so they wouldn’t be concentrated. The Ger- mans spread them out throughout the country so that communities would be ready and able to receive them.
Marton: Yes. And you know what? I con- tinue to visit Germany. It’s not even a front burner story; they’re just part of what is now, since Merkel’s reign, a vastly more open and multi-ethnic population. And the Germans, I think, are proud to be on the right side of history for once. They’re justly proud of how they’ve handled this.
Of course, the great challenge now barreling toward them is the war in Ukraine that is raging very close to Germany. And this, of course, has been deeply and personally up- setting to the Chancellor who spent sixteen years trying to prevent this very outcome.
In my view, it’s not a coincidence that Pu- tin attacked Ukraine just two weeks after Merkel left the Chancellery. He definitely felt empowered by her absence. She was the only leader who he respected and who really knew how to get through to him. They literally speak each other’s languages. She’s fluent in Russian from her Commu- nist childhood; he is fluent in German from his days as KGB officer in Dresden. He would not have been able to seat her at the end of that ridiculously long table where Macron and others have been relegated be- cause that’s not their relationship. I discuss at some length her negotiating tactics with him and their history together. They did work together for sixteen years.
Craig: So Kati, the final point, which is a theme throughout your book, has to do with her being a woman; whether it was a benefit to her career or a disadvan- tage. And one saw pictures of participants of the summits – if you watched the news clips of the G7 or the G20 – and there they all were all lined up with just one woman in the middle of a phalanx of men.
You write very eloquently about how being a woman made her even greater and even more successful.
Marton: We’ve touched on aspects of her legacy, but I think her ultimate achievement will be that she has permanently put to rest any question we may still have about a woman’s ability to lead.
I sometimes felt while writing this book that I was writing Machiavelli’s Volume Two of The Prince, called The Princess. There is so much in this book about power, how to gain power, how to keep power, how to sustain
power, how to wield power, and how a woman ultimately leads differently, perhaps because we haven’t been at the table very long, and do not pre- sume that we are owed that place.
Merkel’s style and her remarkable achievement was to get stuff done without taking credit for it, without calling attention to it, to work, as I say, sideways. She didn’t use the bully pulpit very much. She’s actually a pretty lousy speaker.
For her, the important thing was to get the deal done. Okay, “You go,” she would say to Macron or Sarkozy, “You go to the microphones and tell them what we just did.” Even though it was her deal. I mean, her stamina in negotiations was incredible.
When Putin launched the Ukraine aggression in 2014, she knew every tree in the Donbas. She would face him and say, “You know, your guys moved into this village last night and destroyed it.” And he would say, “Those aren’t my guys.”
The Russian forces were known as “little green men” because they were not in uniform. They had no insignia. And she would just match him, nose to nose, with her knowledge and her command of facts and, again, the train- ing as a scientist was helpful – her ability to retain details and her ease with charts. All of that turned out to be really useful during COVID.
That was her final crisis. In truth, the entire sixteen years of her journey as Chancellor was a rolling crisis, but her final challenge was to manage the COVID crisis. Here, again, her ability to project the trajectory of the disease helped the German people.
The other thing that really helped was that the German people trusted her. When she told them something, when she said, “This is serious,” they be- lieved her because she had never lied to them. She might have bored them,
for sure, but she never exaggerated.
Craig: And when she left office, she was the most trusted leader in the world.
Kati, thank you so much for spending time with us.
Gregory B. Craig Washington, D.C.
WINTER 2023
JOURNAL 48
Unlike most other successful diplomats, Merkel didn’t use either charm or the threat of force to get to agreement. She has a photo- graphic memory. Nobody can beat her on her granular familiarity with the details of the battlefield.