Chancellor Angela Merkel spent her childhood in Templin, a small town north of Berlin, to which her whole family migrated from West Germany, for her father-a Lutheran official determined to fulfill his ecclesiastical duties in G.D.R. The Kasners lived in the seminary with a group of handicapped people- an experience making a profound impact on Angela which taught her to treat the disabled in a normal way. The roles of the church and its strained relationship with the state put the Kasners under suspicion, while the cultural division between East and West people led to their failures in assimilating into the local communities. Under such circumstances, Angela said that ‘there was no shadow over my childhood’, all thanks to her sunny disposition and expectations for the future path of life.
Angela Merkel was a highly-motivated student, uninterested in fashionable clothes but showing a great passion for Russian language and the culture of the Soviet Union. She studies physics and earned a doctorate at Leipzig University, however her accomplishments were attributed by critics like Ulrich Schoeneich, Templin’ mayor, to her participation in the Free German Youth, namely her obedience to the state. She acknowledged that she never considered the G.D.R. as her home country, and she was only a ‘passive opponent of the regime’, while it is just her political stamina that helped her through tough times.
