Berlin – In the end, Angela Merkel also took care of the lame duck. Wasn’t the law of incapacity to act for politicians once they had lost offices? Since Merkel had given up the chairmanship of the CDU in December 2018, she has shown no signs of paralysis as Chancellor – not in the pandemic, not at EU summits, and certainly not at meetings with the alpha males Trump, Putin or Erdogan.
Her international farewell tour turned out to be a round of honor – shows of respect, homage, honorary doctorates so extensive and emotional that she sometimes blushed inside herself. From a civic point of view, the honors mean: They have raised Germany’s reputation to a degree that is not yet fully comprehensible.
Angela Merkel has taken every possible cliché ad absurdum: In the Union they were initially called “zone quail” and were considered to be a transitional phenomenon after the painful end of Chancellor Kohl. East German, woman, Protestant – each of these characteristics should have been enough to prevent a rise to the top. Would have.
Recently, the reverse clichés have been circulating: She wasn’t woman enough; it wasn’t East German enough. It is correct: She has achieved more for the position of women in the Federal Republic of Germany (old) than anyone before in the decades since the introduction of women’s suffrage. The parental allowance introduced on January 1, 2007 had a revolution.
Exactly 15 years ago, the patriarchs of the Union crackled “winding volunteer service” because Merkel, together with her then Family Minister Ursula von der Leyen, had implemented the “Plan Ursula” in 2006 to add two months of fatherhood to twelve months of parental allowance payment. This heralded the beginning of the end of the conservative family worldview.
Five years later there was four father months and shared parental allowance. Parental allowance plus came in 2015. In the well-known sobriety, the Chancellor described the fundamental change as follows: “We are working on – I find that very exciting – to include mothers and fathers equally in family work, because it is perfectly clear that equality cannot be lived if women work for families and job are responsible and the men and fathers only for the job. “
Creating facts for women and men
With this law, the ruling women created facts – made the expansion of daycare centers possible in the West too. The loud bad-mouthing speech by working women with children (“bad mothers”), which was common up until the 1990s, has become considerably quieter. But Merkel and von der Leyen did not order the great task of living an equal partnership, they created the state framework and called out to the people: fill it out! Complete the turning point! Split up the work in work, household, children, old parents! Now you have the prerequisites. However, they have still not abolished spousal splitting, this terrible woman’s bondage.
Nevertheless, the changes over the past ten years have been enormous. But the standard that was valid in the GDR until 1990 has not yet been achieved. The most modern family law in the world at the time was based on mature women (and men) – for example with regard to equal pay or abortion. That’s why women still take to the streets today. In this respect, the Federal Republic has gotten on its feet socio-politically and has started to run. In the end it took Angela Merkel a weary smile to let the feminists, who prefer to fix women’s rights to formalities rather than real revolutions, know: Well, then she’s just a feminist…. If you insist on it like that. Hold on to that kind of -ism.
The blazers are regularly added to the used clothing collection. … I don’t give clothes to the museum.
Angela Merkel on the question of the Süddeutsche Zeitung about her legendary jackets
As an Eastern woman, you have your experiences. According to the western definition, men and women carried the ballast of the Eastern biography. Likewise the dictatorship socialization. But after the fall of the Wall, women still got that extra portion of Besserwessi: internal instruction. An example: no sooner had the wall come down than a colleague from the left-wing daily taz, which appears in West Berlin, reported to the Berliner Zeitung: She wanted to speak to the women in the editorial office.
Around two dozen female journalists, younger and older, with professional and life experience, mostly with children, gathered politely and curiously. All alphabetized. As it turned out, the colleague did not want to talk to us, but rather to tell us that we as women had so far lived wrongly – in the wrong system anyway – but also without feminism. Now finally the moment is to turn to the correct, only true teaching, to finally be able to live woman power, etc.
A few months later we found ourselves in the women’s political bronze age of the Federal German housewives republic. Now the anger about the feminist gossip came up all the more. But then Merkel became Chancellor from the East. How did she do it? How did she overcome these entrenched prejudices? How did she endure the conflict?
How do you stand it, Ms. Merkel?
I asked her about it personally, in 1996. It was not yet foreseeable that she would get into the Chancellery. She was 42 years old, two years older than me, with a similar GDR education and now Federal Environment Minister, previously Minister for Women, also a member of the Bundestag, deputy CDU chairwoman. In 1995, a nobody on the international stage, she led the Berlin Climate Conference to a success that was widely admired – her big debut as a negotiator of big questions.
In May 1996 I sat next to her for about an hour in a bus that was driving through Thuringia because she wanted to see the progress of the bismuth refurbishment. The giant hole near Ronneburg had just been visited, into which the shining overburden pyramids of the uranium mine were being filled. Personally, I had just survived the latest wave of dismissals from Ossi in the newspaper, so I had reason to look to the next few years in the job and asked: How do you get through resistance, obstruction, and meanness? Much lesser things kept me awake.
Joy in resolving conflicts
She looked exceptionally happy (you know how she looks then) and said, “I enjoy breaking resistance.” It makes her happy to enter such struggles and then come out with a solution. When she goes to sleep in the evening, she looks forward to the argument with the venerable know-it-alls. I was amazed – I had never considered this option for myself: being happy about arguments and anger.
DPA/Picture Alliance
It is with obvious pleasure that Angela Merkel speaks to the girls present in the Federal Chancellery on Girls’ Day. In the background hang pictures of the former Chancellors Gerhard Schröder and Helmut Kohl. And who is painting your painting? She wants to take her time.
She described this in more detail using a conflict that was acute at the time, in which many venerable professors and other long-serving men played a role and loudly warned: “Traditioooon!” It was about WaBoLu. Behind this amusing acronym, the former Prussian State Institute for Water, Soil and Air Hygiene, founded in 1902 in the time of Robert Koch and Rudolf Virchow, hid for decades the scientific authority for all problems that were later called environmental pollution.
Since 1974 there has also been the Federal Environment Agency, which not only thought scientifically and technically and with a view to health like the WaBoLu assigned to the Federal Health Agency, but was also supposed to advise politically. Combining the two was one of Angela Merkel’s tasks at the time.
Ventilate the world of men
And what did the young minister who wanted changes hear? She listed three reaction options: “We always did it THAT way. We have NEVER done that like this before. Or: Where do we get to if we did this like that. ”And then she happily told how she was about to break through this phalanx and ventilate the offices of the gentlemen.
I took this story to heart. She has helped me through 25 years of professional life, and whenever the Chancellor was in the storm, be it on the stage of the CSU party congress next to an outrageous Horst Seehofer, in front of Putin’s fireplace with palace oil, on Erdogan’s golden throne chairs or as an addressee of Trump’s sayings, then it was clear to me: That won’t upset her.
When she pushed aside rows of supposedly strong men during her ascent, the others were amazed – not because it happened, but because a woman did it. Woman was able to learn: This is how it works. She has the courage to clear Patriarch Kohl, and woman was able to learn: Courageous outdoors, that works. Men also only cook with water. Surprisingly often with very thin.
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100 years of women’s suffrage: Angela Merkel and companions 2020 (from left to right) Rita Süssmuth (CDU), Manuela Schwesig (SPD), Chancellor, Angela Merkel (CDU), Franziska Giffey (SPD), Christine Bergmann (SPD) and Ursula Lehr (CDU).
On the other hand, she did not work as a wet nurse for girls. Women had to show that they can and want something. They got their chances. The three beaming women Merkel, von der Leyen, Kramp-Karrenbauer, the latter two after career jumps, spoke volumes. She encouraged the insufficiently ambitious women (in her own party and in general) in an interview with the SZ these days that women should have more confidence in themselves, because “even if there are some there, it is not the case that they are wrestling for a party chair” . She reminded that she started without a woman on a B9 position in the Federal Chancellery – this is the third highest civil servant wage level, at 11,600 euros. Now there is parity.
In general, the parity: the topic has been on her mind since her time as family minister. In 2019 she said in an interview with “Zeit”: “Parity in all areas just seems logical to me. I don’t have to keep mentioning that.”
In the most recent media farewell rounds one often read the question why she had not emphasized her being a woman and her Eastern origin earlier and more loudly. The answer is simple. Had she done it, she would not have become CDU chairwoman or chancellor. Neither the East nor being a woman are career accelerators. But it is not the usual sacrifice on all sides either. Wailing women about suffering suffered, mean as it may have been, doesn’t help. Women in victim mode are boring. Even retracted glass ceilings are just as obstructive as the patriarchal ones.
Learning from Merkel means: doing instead of grumbling.
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