Angela Merkel Leaves Office (SNYT9/26/21)

On the front page of the Sunday New York Times 9/26 issue there was a story about Chacellor Angela Merkel leaving office after 16 years and it said so much about values held by many Northern Europeans and Anglo/Americans. It was especially interesting to me because I have been watching movies, documentaries and reading books about Europe after the second World War, most recently Savage Continent by Keith Lowe. As is so often the case the roots of the present reality are buried deep im the past and the modern European world has both arisen from the ashes of the past, and is forced to cope with the destruction of the past as it is stil felt in so much of the eastern part of Europe, the Balkans and Turkey, not to mention the Middle East, Afghanistan, Syria and Israel and Palestine.

But we are here to praise Merkel and this is what the article says: "As Chancellor Angela Merkel prepares to leave office afer 16 years, her country is among the richest in the world. A broad and contented middle class is one factor of Ms Merkel's Germany that has been central to her longevity and her ability to deliver on a core promise of stability. But her impact has been far greater.

To travel the country she leaves is to see it profoundly transformed. There is the father taking paid parental leave in Cathlic Bavaria, the married gay couple raising two children outside Berlin, the woman in a hijab teaching math in a high school near Frankfurt where many have German passports but few have German parents......She phased out nuclear power and ended compulsary military service." <[/> The article goes on to laud her successes and to note her failures as her detractors see them. And no one can please everyone. The rising right wing fears the growth of immigrant population, and the far left blames her for not doing more to combat climate change. She leaves a country committed to the Economic Union of Europe and to peace and staility.

Last night I watched a pbs series called Hotel Sacher, about a historic Viennese hotel in the period just up to and during the turn of the century, at the start of World War I. It was interesting to contrast the world as it was at that moment with the world that is today. Women had no civil rights, Germany still spumped up with the Prussian militaristic values from the civil war that unified it was joining with Austria and Hungary to get ready for a big world war which they couldn't imagine they were going to lose. The aristocracy ruled everything and the peasants struggled along in short and brutal lives, feudalism and serfdom still reigned. Two wars and a hundred years later and a Germany exists that the people of that time would have thought more like science fiction, a female chancellor in Germany and a good one with a 16 year career! Now that is progresss. If Germany could change, any country can. Series: Hotel Sacher (pbs masterpiece.) Book: Savage Continent, Keith Lowe Book: A Woman in Berlin, Anonymous (and in a later post, I will talk about a great essay on memoir, autobiography and the voices of the maginalized)

Happy Trail - inside and out! Jo Ann wrightj45@yahoo.com