2024-09-03 17:59:37
In December, Angela Merkel celebrated her 25th wedding anniversary with Joachim Sauer. 47 years ago today, she married a completely different man: Ulrich Merkel.
In the mid-1980s, Angela Merkel fell in love with Joachim Sauer. She was 30 years old at the time and had already been divorced for two years. The chemist is not the first man in the life of the former Chancellor. Before Joachim Sauer, the now 70-year-old was in a relationship with Ulrich Merkel – and married.
In 1973, Angela Merkel (then still Kasner) began studying physics in Leipzig. A year later, she met physics student Ulrich Merkel during a youth exchange with other students in the Soviet Union. “Angela caught my eye because she was a very friendly, open and natural girl,” he told the magazine “Focus” 20 years ago. They fell in love and became a couple. Three years later, on September 3, 1977, they married. The couple were married in a church in Templin.
Ralph Bollman, who wrote a biography about Angela Merkel, said in the Sat.1 documentary “The Merkel Era” that their relationship was a classic student romance. But it was not meant to last forever. After seven years of being together and four years of marriage, Angela and Ulrich Merkel separated.
“We got married because everyone else got married. That sounds silly today, but I didn’t enter into marriage with the necessary seriousness,” Angela Merkel is said to have once said. “I was wrong.” Their characters were said to be too different. She was adventurous, he was much quieter. Her ex-husband confirmed this. “I’m more of a homebody, Angela is more active, lively, sociable.”
And so the relationship ended. This is said to have come as a surprise to Ulrich Merkel at the time. “One day she packed her things and moved out of our apartment. She had come to terms with it herself and then accepted the consequences,” he told “Focus”. “Of course it is painful to be abandoned.”
The couple divorced in 1982. Two years later, Angela Merkel met Joachim Sauer. They met at the Academy of Sciences in Berlin-Adlershof. He was in his mid-30s at the time and worked as a professor of chemistry; she was five years younger and worked as a physicist.
They became a couple. This time, however, Angela Merkel took more time with the wedding. They married at the end of the 1990s, on December 30, 1998, after 14 years of being together. The former Chancellor also did not take her husband’s name because she was already known in public as “Angela Merkel” at that time.