Maq Masi Blog

I’ve been reading Angela Merkel’s biography, Freedom, and found myself pausing over her memories not because I agreed, but because I disagreed so deeply. It’s an honest book, personal and vivid — but it also reveals how thoroughly our upbringing and beliefs shape what we praise and what we condemn.

Merkel tells a small story from her early days studying physics: attending a short parliamentary course where she met a girl from Dresden who proudly declared she knew how to make a bed properly. Why? Because her boyfriend was an officer cadet. Merkel admits this was a cultural shock, that she found it odd someone would use military training as evidence of domestic skill.

But I don’t see anything wrong with it. In fact, I rather admire a system that ensures even small practical disciplines — like bed-making — are valued. Keeping a tidy bed isn’t trivial. It’s a habit of order and self-respect that ripples out into other areas of life. Why not see it as the state taking responsibility for building good citizens, even in the smallest ways? Merkel might have appreciated that. Instead, she seemed almost offended that someone would draw authority from anything tied to the state.

Then there’s her reflection on doing practicals in a university tower that replaced an old church, demolished in 1968. She calls this “a unique act of cultural barbarism.” But is every ancient building automatically sacred? Does age alone make something untouchable? I live in England, where many old churches have been transformed into cafés, nightclubs or bars — not because a regime forced it, but because society moved on. Is that barbarism? Or simply history reshaping itself to fit new needs?

Why, then, is it wrong if East Germany chose to prioritise science over religion, building laboratories where once stood sermons? Perhaps it was a clear statement that investigation now mattered more than superstition. Merkel dismisses it as vandalism of heritage, but I see it as possible progress — a society putting research and knowledge above rituals of the past.

She’s equally quick to mock the so-called “scientific communism” courses, laughing at students who with weak maths were admitted to speculate for years on when the age of communism would arrive. To her, it was almost farce, certainly not real scholarship. But this is where her bias is most obvious. Because what makes one ideology-driven curriculum more laughable than another? Are modern Western universities truly free from dubious degrees that lean heavily on fashionable orthodoxies, admitting students for reasons that have little to do with rigorous thought? The difference is only in whose ideology gets propped up. Merkel seems blind to that, eager to condemn what didn’t fit her scientific or familial values.

The story that sums it up best is her account of being humiliated in a Marxism-Leninism class. Caught doing her physics homework, she was reported by someone behind her, publicly scolded by the lecturer, and told to leave. Her knees shook, the long walk back to her dorm was pure humiliation. Even writing about it years later embarrassed her. Yet alongside that shame, she admits to a sense of superiority — that she stood above a petty system that didn’t even trust its own citizens.

But here too, her judgement feels narrow. Was East Germany the only place where citizens were mistrusted? Is the liberal democracy she later led so entirely open-handed, so free of pressures, surveillance, or quiet forms of intimidation? Every society has its mechanisms to mould thought and behaviour. The GDR’s were blunt, yes — but Western systems have their own ways of enforcing conformity, often more subtle and harder to see.

For me, Merkel’s recollections don’t simply expose the flaws of East German socialism. They reveal how easily we all carry selective outrage. She called it cultural barbarism to replace a church with a laboratory, ridiculous to study Marxist ideas as if they were a science, humourless for a regime to insist on ideological discipline. Yet she never seemed to ask whether her own later systems also fell short of trust, tolerance, or genuine intellectual breadth.

That’s what I hope my readers take from this: not to dismiss Merkel’s experiences, which were real and painful, but to question her sweeping conclusions. The past is not always sacred because it is old. State-guided skills like bed-making aren’t petty; they’re often part of building shared standards. And every society, socialist or capitalist, tries to shape its citizens — sometimes harshly, sometimes subtly.

True wisdom lies in recognising these patterns everywhere, not only where it is easiest to mock. Because otherwise, our judgement becomes just as blind as the systems we criticise.

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