Angela Merkel’s memoirs: Did she forget any names in her book?

The trait of vanity is completely alien to me. I think I can say that generally for all political journalists. We smell the vanity of politicians ten meters into the wind, such as Robert Habeck and Friedrich Merz, but we ourselves are immune to it. When we sit on talk shows, it is only to participate in the democratic discourse, i.e. to use our modest knowledge to educate people, but certainly not for personal self-expression. Journalists are reserved, distant people.

When a book like Angela Merkel’s memoirs comes out, I personally don’t start reading at the beginning, but at the end. In the name register. Not out of vanity, for heaven’s sake. Out of interest. I covered Merkel’s entire chancellorship as a journalist. Roughly speaking, in 16 years I wrote more than 2,000 articles in which she appeared and typed the name tens of thousands of times. I traveled with her, conducted interviews with her, attended press conferences, discussed her with colleagues, told my family about her, dreamed about her, and more than once. How many times do you think my name appears on the register?

Honestly, I’m above that, believe me. She only mentions one journalist by name, his colleague Rainer Erlinger from the “Süddeutsche Zeitung”, who wrote an article a few years ago about quitting at the right time. But otherwise? No one. Not even Giovanni di Lorenzo. In Merkel’s book, journalists are just an amorphous mass. I think it’s Merkel’s way of paying tribute to the humility of our profession.

Incidentally, someone like Robert Habeck is not mentioned either. And Christian Lindner only once. So when someone asks me how often I am mentioned in Merkel’s book, I answer: Just as often as Habeck and only once less than Lindner.

If I were vain, I would make a small insert at this point and refer to page 518. It’s about Merkel’s press conference with Austrian Chancellor Werner Faymann a few days after her decision in September 2015 not to close the border to refugees from Hungary. A journalist then asked the Chancellor about the growing accusation that she had signaled an excessive willingness to accept refugees and thereby “really broadened the flow of refugees.” Merkel gives a longer answer, from which one sentence will stick: “I have to say quite honestly: If we now have to start apologizing for showing a friendly face in emergency situations, then this is not my country. “

Now you’re probably asking who this journalist was. You know, it doesn’t really matter. Any colleague could have asked this question, it was obvious. By chance I just came across it. Only if I were very vain would I say that I encouraged Angel Merkel to make a historic sentence, perhaps even her second most famous sentence after “We can do it.” But I don’t feel like making a big fuss about something like that. I was just doing my job. Of course, if someone buys the Merkel book now and asks me to write a dedication, I will oblige.

But of course I would never write a column on the whole topic.