Angela Merkel’s memoirs: Do we know them?

This week are Angela Merkel’s long-awaited memoir under the title Freedom appeared. 700 pages, translated into more than 30 languages, after two days they had sold 80,000 copies in Germany alone. And in Washington, DC, the former chancellor presented her book with Barack Obama.

Reason enough for a brand new non-fiction special from What are you currently reading?completely different than usual: this time everything revolves around Merkel’s book, and she is a guest at the microphone Heinz Budethe sociologist and generation expert.

Merkel’s memoirs are immediately at the center of the debate; there is currently heated debate about what her political mistakes and mistakes were and how Merkel writes about them today. In this podcast we instead try a different, analytical look: What’s behind the Merkel hype and Merkel bashing? What will the ex-Chancellor die with her book? How typical or atypical is she for her generation, how important is her GDR origins? After reading it, do you understand her better, the first female chancellor, a woman from East Germany, who then ruled for 16 years and managed world politics? We want to explain how she achieved this and what that says about the Germans – and how Angela Merkel telling her story for us today.

The team of What are you currently reading? reach you here.

Angela Merkel with Beate Baumann: Freedom. Memories 1954 – 2021, Kiepenheuer & Witsch, 736 pages, 42 euros