This doctor in Chemistry, who continues to bear the surname of her first husband and does not have children, has cultivated an image of a prudent and even cold woman, without edges, who adores potatoes, opera and hiking.
Barack Obama, one of the four US presidents Merkel has known since 2005, describes her in his memoirs as a “trustworthy, honest, intellectually accurate” leader and a “beautiful person.”
The “Teflon Chancellor,” who seems immune from trouble, is a political animal as particular as it is terrible, and she was underestimated by many of her adversaries.
Merkel travels through flood zone, which leaves at least 190 dead in Europe
Merkel’s story: this was her youth
Angela Kasner, her maiden name, was born in July 1954 in Hamburg, the great port of the Federal Republic of Germany (FRG). She was the daughter of an austere pastor who voluntarily went to live with her entire family in communist and atheistic East Germany to preach just a month and a half after Angela’s birth.
“My heritage has marked me, especially the desire for freedom during my life in the GDR,” he said on the 30th anniversary of Reunification.
Angela attended high school at Templin and in 1973, with a brilliant academic record under her arm in which the subjects of mathematics and Russian language excelled, she undertook studies of Physics at the Karl Marx University of Leipzig.