In 1852, Richard Wagner sent a lengthy letter to Franz Liszt about the sorceress Ortrud in his opera “Lohengrin.” He declared that she never experiences love because “politics are her essence. A political man is repulsive, but a political woman is horrible. This horror I had to represent. … In history there are no more cruel phenomena than political women.” Whether Angela Merkel, an avid Wagner fan, is familiar with this vituperative statement is unclear, but its sentiments would hardly come as a surprise to her. After the Christian Democratic chancellor Helmut Kohl plucked her from obscurity to become minister for women and youth in 1991, Merkel soon encountered the longstanding aversion to powerful women in German politics, let alone ones from the former East. The national media routinely referred to “Kohl’s little girl” and mocked her appearance. In the patriarchal Christian Democratic Party itself, a group of promising young men formed a secret pact in the early 1990s to try to impede her. Over a decade later, the Social Democratic chancellor Gerhard Schröder taunted her as “not commanding, pathetic.”
New York Times: The inexorable rise of Angela Merkel (Book Review)
German Chancellor Angela Merkel smiles after being handed her dismissal certificate by the German President during an official dismissal ceremony on Oct. 26, 2021 at the Presidential Bellevue Palace in Berlin.
