IT'S TAKEN 20 years, but Chancellor Angela Merkel has finally revealed the decisive detail that made her abandon physics and a burgeoning career as a government spokeswoman to enter politics: high blood pressure.
As Germany celebrated 20 years as a unified country yesterday, the notoriously private politician finally opened her heart about growing up in the vanished East Germany (GDR).
In particular, she filled in the details of the months from 1989 to 1990, when she abandoned her career as a promising physicist to work as deputy press spokeswoman for the first and last democratically elected East German government. After unification, she planned to move into the unified German government press office.
"But the medical officer noted that I had high blood pressure, meaning I couldn't be hired," she said. With that, she decided to realise the notions she had entertained about running for the Bundestag. "I didn't need to go to the doctor for that." In a free-wheeling interview with the Bildtabloid, Dr Merkel showed she has not forgotten her eastern roots and gave westerners a finger-wagging for lacking empathy.
"It's a shame that, to this day, many people don't see or don't want to understand that the state apparatus of East Germany was one thing and the lives of every individual something else," she said.
"Many people in the east were hurt because they had the feeling that what they'd achieved in life - their daily battle to feed and clothe their families - was not adequately recognised. Unification made their life experience, at a stroke, completely unimportant."
Dr Merkel painted her GDR life as a "manageable, pleasant" personal life shot through with professional frustrations as a GDR physicist. From old computers to travel limitations, she said she "never felt pushed to the limits of my ability".
Her first doubts about socialism surfaced aged 14 when she heard of the Prague Spring, when Soviet tanks put down protests and killed 72 Czechs and Slovaks.
She bristled at the insinuation by Bildthat her Lutheran pastor father, by moving his family from Hamburg to East Germany months after Merkel's birth, indicated a sympathy with the regime.
"My father came to the conclusion in the 1960s that socialism would have to be tolerated for a while," said Dr Merkel. "But he realised early on that what the theory of socialism forecast would fail in practice . . . so he busied himself with the role of the church in such a society."
The German leader admits she was no dissident and lived a somewhat "conformist" life. But she rebuffed Stasi recruitment attempts with a rehearsed line about "not being able to keep my mouth shut".
"I would never have betrayed a friend, I would never have worked with the Stasi and informed on others."
She said the feeling of being "permanently under pressure" in the GDR had coloured her trademark political style of compromise and pragmatism.
"I like convincing people," she said, "but I don't like forcing people."
" Many people in the east were hurt because they had the feeling that what they'd achieved in life . . . was not adequately recognised