Editor in chief at IamExpat Media
Wondering what Angela Merkel’s got planned for her retirement? According to a longtime aide, the former chancellor is going to work on her political memoirs.
Just a few weeks after leaving office, Merkel already has her next project lined up. In an interview with Der Spiegel earlier this month, Merkel’s longtime aide Beate Baumann revealed that the chancellor was now planning to work on a memoir, looking back on her political career.
Merkel “does not want to retell her entire life,” Baumann said. “She wants to explain her key political decisions in her own words, and look back on her life’s journey.” It is widely expected that Merkel will address some of the more challenging periods of her chancellorship, including the financial crisis of 2008 / 2009, the refugee crisis of 2015, and the coronavirus pandemic.
The project will take two to three years, according to Baumann, and will be penned entirely by the two women: “The chancellor and I were quite certain: if we were going to do this book, we would do it alone - without ghost writers, without historians, without journalists.”
Like Merkel - who famously kept her private life out of the public eye during her career - Baumann has made a point of avoiding the spotlight, despite being a key advisor to the former chancellor since the 1990s and helping to write some of Merkel’s most famous speeches.
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