How Angela Merkel got politics to write books

Angela Merkel has never been as valuable as she is today. At least that’s true from the perspective of your publisher. Her book “Freedom” sold 35,000 copies on the first day alone. At the beginning of December, more than 200,000 copies, each priced at 42 euros, were gone. A certain sentimentality towards Merkel after three years of traffic lights will have done no more damage to sales than the Christmas business. Given the current situation, here is a warning to the fan community: Angela Merkel will be lying under many Christmas trees on December 24th, but two months later she will still not be on any ballot paper as a savior.

However, the candidates for whom power and influence are really at stake on February 23rd are following Merkel’s sales figures with great interest. And some reacted very quickly. No wonder, after all, the election campaign is coming earlier than expected. The parties need every euro for their campaigns. That’s why some political celebrities quickly hit the keys. In this issue before Christmas Eve we want to present the most important works. Maybe you’ll find a book just before the party that can replace the last-minute classics of perfume and funny socks.

Some of the work appears noticeably loveless. In Annalena Baerbock’s “My Chancellor – What Robert Can Do Better Than Me” the passion seems artificial, the length (only 13 pages including table of contents, glossary and name index) and content are thin.

Others work experimentally, for example Olaf Scholz. His book is called: “This is something that…”. It should be noted that the author, in his typical diction, chose an unfinished sentence construction as the title. In doing so, he signals that this is an unfinished story. In addition, Scholz only provided just under 80 pages of text, while 615 pages are white paper on which readers can think through his success story themselves. As an orientation, the head of the Chancellery, Wolfgang Schmidt, has already written a sample text in advance: “The unrecognized genius – How three years as Chancellor turned into three decades.”

If you really want to browse, it’s better to pick up Markus Söder’s “The Long Road to Nowhere”. The adventure novel about an ambitious politician from Franconia who makes numerous attempts to become chancellor, always fails due to the resistance of his sister, who is dominated by dark fellows, and then takes revenge on everyone, is based on a true story. Nevertheless, some things are fictitious, some things are contradictory and many things shouldn’t be taken entirely seriously. But Söder is an entertaining narrator. The book has 280 pages of text and contains 4,250 selfies as well as an extra with Franconian bratwurst recipes.

Two originally announced books are missing. Friedrich Merz’s programmatic work “Klarheit” will probably not be finished before the election. According to the publisher, the author is still working on the chapter on the delivery of Taurus cruise missiles to Ukraine. The editors are said to have commented that the 1,139 pages of the chapter so far lacked rigor.

And Christian Lindner actually wanted to provide a guide on how to get over the next hurdle with perseverance and team spirit. But the author failed to finish all three attempts to write the book. That’s why the publishing director has now thrown him out of the program after a short pitched battle.