CHANCELLOR ANGELA Merkel is mourning the death of her father, Horst Kasner, who has died aged 85.
Born in Berlin in 1926, Kasner studied theology in Hamburg after the second World War, but moved to East Germany and a ministry near Berlin with his wife and new-born daughter Angela.
Though Kasner never spoke publicly about his famous daughter, Merkel biographers paint him as a cool and distant patriarch.
Angela Merkel’s rise to power is often framed as driven by a daughter who never fully won her father’s approval.
Rising to head the West German, male-dominated Christian Democratic Union (CDU) was her second triumph as an outsider. The first was enjoying a halfway normal life as a pastor’s daughter in East Germany – anything but a given in the socialist state.
Organised religion was viewed with suspicion and religious leaders with outright hostility.
Researching his Merkel biography, political scientist Gerd Langguth found documents from the 1950s describing her father as an “opponent of our worker and peasant state” – an unfavoured status Kasner made no attempt to hide from his daughter.
“You have to be better than the others,” he once told her. “Only then can you go to secondary school and university.”
Like many in public life, Kasner’s everyday existence in East Germany required a large degree of “arranging oneself” with the authorities.
He was a founding member of a working group of East German Lutheran pastors who supported the idea of breaking away from the West German church structures.
It remains unclear whether this was a pragmatic reaction to the Cold War division or an attempt to purse a greater dialogue between Christian theology and socialist teaching. “Spiritually, he wanted nothing to do with the East German hot air,” one former pastor colleague told biographer Langguth. “But he was not a real East German critic, either. He found his niche, knew where the limits were to not come into conflict with the state.”
In a rare personal interview with Gerd Langguth, Merkel remembered an absent father, physically and emotionally. When he was present, he insisted on things being “orderly and perfect”.
Visiting his 30-year-old daughter’s modest academic digs in East Berlin, Merkel remembers him saying: “You’ve not gone far yet.”
After watching her become Germany’s first woman leader in 2005, Kasner managed a smile and a glass of champagne but declined to play the proud father – in public at least.