MERKEL – Review by Loren King

What a timely and thoughtful look at former German chancellor Angela Merkel who served from 2005 to 2021 and is the only woman to have held the office. For those who don’t know much about her background and career, or even for those who do, director Eva Weber’s well crafted and surprisingly entertaining documentary provides not just important historical context but also illuminates the forces that shaped her character and world view.

Merkel grew up in East Germany before unification, and speaks with characteristic candor about living under authoritarian rule with the Stasi monitoring all speech and actions of everyone, including children. One of the main reasons she became a physicist, she soberly explains, is because science is about facts. It could not be distorted by lies, misinformation and propaganda. Weber’s fascinating archival footage and interviews with world leaders, journalists and colleagues reveal Merkel’s inherent seriousness and lack of pretense as well as her keen intelligence and dry but ever-present humor.

So much of Merkel feels prescient, even painful, as so much of the kind of clear eyed, fact-based diplomacy and democracy she stood for is crumbling in the West. Weber is aware of this, too, in the way she juxtaposes Merkel’s speeches and candid interviews with those of other politicians with less integrity and much less commitment to public service. Merkel’s formative years living behind a wall in East Germany and her fervent belief in human rights led to her policies of allowing refugees into Germany which proved to be her undoing.

Yet Merkel never wavered from her convictions even as the backlash over the wave of immigration forced her to step down. Merkel is a human portrait as well as a profile in courage.