14/05/2025

Freedom by Angela Merkel

Freedom by Angela Merkel – Memoirs 1954 – 2021 – got a very well deserved 1 star! According to the blurb, this was “the long-awaited memoir by one of the most important political leaders of our time”. I didn’t wait for it, but she was an important political leader. She was also weak and, I had a better opinion of her before reading the book. On top of that the book is incredibly boring. It was supposed to be, according to the blurb again, a personal account of her childhood, youth, and her political life. It was not a personal account, there were personal details, but no reflection on anything. Her parents moved from the west to the east, nothing about that, just boring and unrealistic – we were happy all the time – descriptions.

I have so many issues with this book and her. She is upset that a newspaper wrote she smoked and her second husband didn’t like that. What a powerful leader…
In this review I will talk about 3 things – Ukraine, Greece, and Covid. I could talk about her stance on same-sex marriages and her hypocrisy on that, about her perfect childhood, about her ignoring the corruption within Germany and within her party, brushing off migrant violence, and so on, but I picked only 3 because otherwise it would be a post very very long.

Ukraine and russian aggression
page 5 – “Then came February 24, 2022, Russia’s attack on Ukraine.”
page 61, talking about the russian language course she did – “But I haven’t forgotten that it took place in Donetsk, a city in the center of the Donbas coalfield in eastern Ukraine, which has been occupied by Russia since 2014.”

So she knows that russia attacked and occupied parts of Ukraine since 2014 and that the war didn’t start on 24 Feb 2022!

page 283 – “In a video broadcast to his nation on the evening of Saturday, April 3, 2022, the Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelenskyy said, among other things, that NATO states had rejected his country’s admission to the alliance in 2008 due to some politicians’ “absurd fear of Russia,” adding: “I invite Mrs. Merkel and Mr. Sarkozy to visit Bucha and to see what the policy of concessions to Russia has led to in fourteen years.”
I was no longer chancellor when he said this. I was in Italy with friends, visiting museums and churches in Florence and Rome, on a trip planned while I was still in office.”

Very Christian of her, to say that it was not her problem anymore. Did she visit Bucha? Did she consider her role in allowing that to happen and facilitating it because of Nord Stream 1 and 2? She shifted the blame on Schroder, saying that he approved that and that he was on board of Gazprom. She is just as much to blame as him. She was the one saying that russian troops in Moldova and Georgia were “unresolved conflicts” (286).

pages 311-312 – “I expressed my concern that any delivery of weapons would strengthen the forces within the Ukrainian government who hoped only for a military solution, even if that offered no prospect of success. However, I also understood that we should not leave the Ukrainians exposed to Russian violence without any means of defense. It was a dilemma.”

Yes, a dilemma if people should protect their homes and their country or not. Also, they were defending their country from russia and not some separatists.

page 389 – “The Baltic states, Poland, and particularly Ukraine kicked up a storm against Nord Stream 2. Ukraine feared above all becoming superfluous as a transit country. Nord Stream 2 became a significantly larger political issue than Nord Stream 1.”
page 390 – “The United States argued that its security interests were affected by the building of the pipeline because its ally Germany would make itself too dependent on Russia. In truth, I felt that the United States was mobilizing its formidable economic and financial resources to prevent the business ventures of other countries, even their allies.”

In truth, the Baltic states, Poland, Ukraine, and US were right. Germany was too dependent on russia. To write that this was not a mistake after 2022, after Bucha, after all what russia did just shows the lack of moral values she and her advisors have.

page 444 – “No one can say whether Vladimir Putin’s attack on Ukraine on February 24, 2022 could have been prevented had the pandemic not happened and, instead of virtual meetings, face-to-face exchanges had been possible, both bilaterally and in the Normandy Format of Germany, France, Ukraine, and Russia.”

Everybody who knows what happened, which should include her (see above), are aware that the war started in 2014 and that putin and russia wanted to take more of Ukraine then, including Odesa, but couldn’t.

Greece
page 207 – “Increasing spending on research and development. … And, despite the adversities of a global financial crisis and a eurozone crisis, which we could not have predicted at the time, we did reach that 3-percent target—not by 2010, admittedly, but by 2017.”
page 264 – ” “I cannot give any money because I cannot go along with a breach of contract. Our Constitutional Court has made a clear ruling on this. The Lisbon Treaty’s no bailout clause is in place. I will not knowingly break the law,” I made it unmistakably clear. While this was going on, I was thinking: Everyone here wants something from me. Why is nobody putting pressure on Greece to economize?
We called on Greece to fulfill its commitments to reduce its debt.”
page 274 – “there was a lingering question of whether it might not have been better to cave in and simply drop the various demands on Greece, Portugal, Spain, and Italy to implement harsh austerity measures and economic reforms. My reputation was in tatters in those countries, especially in Greece. There was no doubt that people on low incomes had suffered the most from these reforms. Yet, setting aside the fact that I would never have obtained a majority within my own party and the coalition if I had abandoned requirements for the crisis-hit countries to improve their fiscal discipline and their economic competitivity, I would also have been in breach of my own convictions.”
page 313 – “In 2014, German defense expenditure was 1.15 percent of GDP. We still had a very long way to go.”
page 377 – “It was obvious we wouldn’t manage to reach the 2-percent goal which had been set at the 2014 NATO summit as a target for all member states to attain by 2024, even though, as I was able to announce at the press conference, we had raised our defense budget by 8 percent from 2016 to 2017.”

Good, so Greece had to take harsh austerity measures which affected the poorer in their country because of her own convictions. But Germany didn’t have to make hard choices and spend the 2% they agreed on, that was not against her own convictions apparently.

Covid
page 429 – “As a scientist, I was frustrated by the fact that not everyone was familiar with the dynamic of exponential growth, according to which the number of infections would double every one to two weeks.”

Yes, the Germans were too stupid for her. She was in a position to improve the educational system if the Germans were so poorly prepared to understand basic maths.

page 436 – “Even though I believed in Germany’s federal system, I despaired of it during those days. And it grieved me to hear the Robert Koch Institute report around 1,000 deaths every day. I found the supposedly consoling statement that a person had died with COVID, not from it, hard to swallow.
Just because someone was old or had a serious underlying health condition didn’t mean they could suddenly be described as having only died with COVID.”

She wanted to be a dictator then? Democracy means trying to explain to people complex things. Also, as a scientist, she should have understood that in fact people died WITH covid and not necessarily FROM covid. Yes, if someone in their 90s are dying, it’s more likely that there are an array of reasons and not just one.

page 438 – “On April 16, 2021, I received my first COVID-19 jab. As recommended by the Standing Committee on Vaccination for people of my age, I was given the vaccine developed by scientists at the University of Oxford, among others, and marketed by the British-Swedish pharmaceutical company AstraZeneca. This was followed on June 22, 2021 by a second jab, this time with the BioNTech vaccine, following new advice from the Standing Committee.”

That’s a lie. When she got her second vaccine in June, everybody over 60, like her, could have taken the Oxford AstraZeneca vaccine. She decided to get another one, even thought the testing for getting different vaccines was underway, because of political reasons, to promote the “German” vaccine or because she was either too scared or not scientifically minded enough to understand why Oxford AstraZeneca was a good choice for the booster.

This is why I gave the book 1 star.