The Berlin Wall opened on a Thursday in November 1989, and Thursday night was Angela Merkel’s sauna night. So the 35-year-old quantum chemist went to her bathhouse as usual. She left at around 9pm to find crowds thronging the streets of East Berlin. Joining them, she entered the West at the Bornholmer Straße crossing and ended up at a house party near the Kurfürstendamm, where she called her aunt in Hamburg to share the news. She returned home early. After all, she had work in the morning.
Such was the modest overture to one the most remarkable careers in postwar European politics. Without the events of 9 November 1989, Merkel would probably have served out the rest of her career in an obscure lab in East Berlin and might now be travelling in California, as she hoped to do on her retirement (when certain travel restrictions on well-behaved East Germans were lifted). Instead she was propelled into the political vortex of the reunified Germany, where she rose through Helmut Kohl’s centre-right Christian Democrat Union (CDU), becoming its leader in 2000 and chancellor in 2005.
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