Angela Merkel dodged Stasi recruitment by claiming she was hopeless at keeping secrets
Finishing her physics degree in Leipzig, Angela Kasner applied for a teaching post and was told the job came with a condition: report on colleagues to the Stasi. She turned it down, saying she could never keep a secret well enough to spy. She spent the next decade as a research chemist instead.
She was born in Hamburg in July 1954, but when she was three months old her father, a Lutheran pastor, took a parish in East Germany. The family settled in Templin, in the countryside some 90 kilometres north of East Berlin. Friends called her Kasi. She joined the communist youth movement, since skipping it made university entry hard, yet chose church confirmation over the state's secular coming-of-age ritual. She topped her class in Russian and mathematics and left school with a perfect grade.
At Leipzig she helped students rebuild the ruined Moritzbastei as their own club, an unusual initiative the university first resisted. From 1978 she worked at the Academy of Sciences' physical chemistry institute in Berlin, earning a doctorate in quantum chemistry in 1986. Former colleagues say she did propaganda work for the youth group there; she says her role was culture, such as getting theatre tickets.
She stayed home the night the Berlin Wall opened in November 1989, but a month later joined a new party, Democratic Awakening, and became its press spokeswoman. When its leader was exposed as a Stasi informant, the party collapsed at the polls, yet it sat in the winning alliance, and Merkel became deputy spokeswoman of Lothar de Maizière's government, the last before reunification.
Elected to the Bundestag from a Baltic coast constituency in 1990, she was quickly made Minister for Women and Youth by Helmut Kohl, then environment minister in 1994. After the 1998 defeat she became her party's general secretary and, two years later, its first female leader. In 2005 she became Germany's first woman chancellor and the first raised in the East, and she stayed until 2021, having chosen not to seek a fifth term.
Source: Angela Merkel
