Angela Merkel: This is what impressed her about her husband Joachim Sauer

Former Chancellor Angela Merkel (70) takes a look back at her life in her autobiography “Freedom” (Kiepenheuer & Witsch, from November 26th). In the book, which she wrote together with her long-time political advisor Beate Baumann (61), the top politician also talks privately.

Merkel reports in “Freiheit” that she met her first husband, Ulrich Merkel, in 1974, a year after she began studying in Leipzig. “It was a student love affair,” she writes. The couple married in 1977 and went to East Berlin together. It was there that she later developed the desire to “fundamentally change my life again. I decided to make a new start, also in my private life. One morning in the spring of 1981, I left the shared apartment on Marienstrasse with a suitcase in my hand.” She temporarily moved in with a colleague. The marriage ended in divorce in 1982.

While looking for an apartment, she got a tip from an acquaintance who knew of an unoccupied apartment. “Friends persuaded me to occupy this apartment. That was anything but easy for me, but I had no choice; I couldn’t live with my colleague indefinitely and I had to do something.” She asked neighbors how much they paid in rent and transferred this amount to the property management company. She also had the police enter her new address on her identity card. “My living conditions were thus legalized.”

In the mid-1980s, Merkel writes in “Freiheit” about her later second husband that her life changed “once again profoundly”: “I got to know Joachim Sauer, my current husband, better. We had already met professionally, but Now it was different. We fell in love.” She also says about her husband: “I was impressed by his clear political analysis, his joy in art and culture, especially music. We both loved and love nature and traveling. It was through him that I really got to know the music of Richard Wagner and understand.” Merkel and Sauer married in 1998.

The ex-politician, who was Chancellor from 2005 to 2021, writes about her house in the Uckermark that it was a “place of retreat” for her husband and she during her political career. “Even though I often didn’t get there until late on Friday evening, left early on Saturday and didn’t return until the evening, I loved sleeping there, taking a quick walk through the garden, taking in the light and the birdsong, taking a look on my flowerbeds, absorbing the silence. Immediately the pressure fell away, my head became free.”