1. Regrets? She has very few…

Merkel’s policies on migration, nuclear energy and Russia have come under severe scrutiny in the three years since she left office. But Freedom is not a book of any major mea culpas.

Her decision to accept more than 1 million refugees, mostly Syrian, into Germany in 2015 was not a mistake, she says: “The opposite is true.” Her 2011 policy U-turn on nuclear energy, leading to the phase-out of the country’s remaining reactors, came about because the accident in Fukushima, Japan, “changed my perception of risk posed by nuclear energy”. She says she wouldn’t recommend the use of nuclear in the future either.

2. … but there are a couple

Britain’s vote to leave the European Union in 2016 genuinely shook Merkel: she experienced it as “a humiliation, a disgrace for us”, which left the EU weakened, and she asked herself whether she and other European leaders should have done more to keep Britain in. “I was tormented by whether I should have made even more concessions toward the UK,” she writes.

It’s not a full admission of an error, because she concludes that Brexit was a self-inflicted wound that Britain’s neighbours could have done little to prevent. By promising a referendum to appease the hardliners in his party, she writes, David Cameron “put himself in the hands of those who were skeptical about the European Union, and was never able to escape this dependency”.

Merkel also corrects her stance on her domestic fiscal policy, even if this too is not exactly phrased as a regret. The “debt brake” mechanism, which limits Germany’s budget deficit to 0.35% of GDP, was enshrined in the constitution during Merkel’s first term. It was a totemic policy she steadfastly defended for the rest of her reign, in the face of critics who said it was leading to a chronic underinvestment in infrastructure.

3. Never trust a photograph…

There are many photographs and clips of Merkel in power, but not all are what they seem. One viral image from 2015 showed an animated Merkel with outstretched arms, talking to a seated Barack Obama, then the US president, on the eve of a G7 summit in the Bavarian Alps.

4. … or a video

One video clip was frequently shared not by her admirers but her critics on the far right: filmed on the eve of federal elections in 2013, it shows a stern-looking Merkel take a German flag out of the hands of Hermann Gröhe, the CDU general secretary and later her health minister, and chuck it to the side of the stage.

Far from showing her disdain for patriotism, Merkel writes, she found the flag-waving “inappropriate” because she believed her party should be humble in victory. “Even in our hour of triumph we do not forget that not everyone voted for us, and that there are others who are not so happy.”

5. She saw Donald Trump was ‘fascinated’ by Vladimir Putin (and the pope advised her on how to handle them both)

Unlike Bush, Donald Trump does not elicit sympathy from Merkel. She says she made the mistake of trying to engage with him as if he were someone “completely normal”. She sees parallels between him and Vladimir Putin, and says Trump is “clearly fascinated” by the Russian president: “I received the distinct impression he [Trump] was captivated by politicians with autocratic and dictatorial traits.” Both are childlike in their grievances, she says, and both try to embarrass her in front of the press – Putin once apparently tried to intimidate her with his labrador, Konni, and Trump refused to shake her hand.

6. She felt a lot more patronised by westerners than she let on

Since Merkel left office, a debate around continuing economic and cultural discrimination against people from the former East Germany has gone mainstream in Germany – the Leipzig-based literary scholar Dirk Oschmann’s polemic The East: A West German Invention and the historian Katja Hoyer’s book Beyond the Wall were bestsellers in 2023.

That kind of assertiveness is very different to Merkel’s attitude while she was in power. After she was elected as a member of parliament in 1990, she found that “it was more difficult than I had expected […] to speak openly to the West German media about one’s own life in the GDR”.

Interviews in which she mentioned her participation in Marxism-infused educational programmes in her youth sent journalists scouring archives for covered-up files from her schooldays.

7. But quite how she ended up growing up in East Germany remains a mystery even to her

Young Angela moved from Hamburg, in the former West Germany, to the East German village of Quitzow in 1954, when she was six months old. The timing of their move – a year after the suppression of a workers’ uprising in East Berlin, at a time when 180,000 people were moving the other way – has raised retrospective questions about the political character of the household Merkel grew up in.

Her father, Horst, nicknamed “Red Kasner”, was influenced by Latin American liberation theology and opposed the church tax that paid for the privileges he enjoyed in his parish, she writes. But that didn’t endear him to East German authorities, who were state atheist by policy and suspicious of any member of the intelligentsia.

Quite why her father, who died in 2011, had moved her family behind the iron curtain seems to continue to puzzle her: “He was convinced that people like him were needed there,” she writes in an intriguingly bristly comment. “I think it might be called a vocation.”

8. She’s a feminist (of sorts) after all

As with being East German, so with being a woman. Her first senior position may have been as the minister for women and youth in the cabinet of the chancellor Helmut Kohl, but Merkel never leaned into her sex – she was unwilling, she writes, “to be defined as part of a group”.

As a conservative, she also disagreed with Simone de Beauvoir’s “illusion” that “feminism and a socialist vision of the world belonged together”. Even as late as 2017, when she was asked, during a podium discussion with Ivanka Trump, whether she considered herself a feminist, she gave a non-answer and threw the question back at the audience. In her memoirs, she is more assertive.