(Adnkronos) – Living under a dictatorship meant “always living on a tightrope”. This is recalled by former German Chancellor Angela Merkel in her memoir “Freedom”, due out next Tuesday. “Even if a day started off carefree – she writes in the book, of which the weekly ‘Die Zeit’ anticipates some excerpts – everything could change in a few seconds if the political limits were exceeded, endangering our lives.” Angela Merkel, however, remembers “a happy childhood” in Templin, in the German Democratic Republic, where her father, a pastor from Hamburg, directed a theological training seminary. “My parents did everything they could to create protected spaces for me and my siblings. I will be eternally grateful to them.”
“The art of living consisted of identifying exactly where the limits were” not to be crossed, Merkel continues. “My somewhat conciliatory character and my pragmatic approach helped me.” Not always, she says: like that time when student Angela Merkel was caught by surprise at university doing physics exercises (her field of study) instead of attending a compulsory course in Marxism-Leninism. She was expelled from the classroom in “deathly silence”, once outside she realized that “her knees were shaking” and – although without more serious consequences – the episode had marked her forever. With distance, Merkel writes that she feels a kind of superiority over that regime, “because that State did not succeed, despite everything, in depriving me of something that allowed me to live and feel: a certain lightheartedness”.
