Merkel was born in Hamburg, West Germany, in 1954. She was the oldest of three children and was raised on the outskirts of Templin, a cobblestoned town in the pine forests of Brandenburg, north of Berlin. Her father, Horst Kasner, was an official in the Lutheran Church and she moved the family across the frontier just a few weeks after Angela's birth.She grew up in the neighbourhood of handicapped people, which make her learn back then to treat them in very normal way.

Merkel was a brilliant, ferociously motivated student. She studied physics at Leipzig University and earned a doctorate in quantum chemistry in Berlin.

In 1977, Angela married a physicist, Ulrich Merkel, but the union foundered quickly, and she left him in 1981. She spent the final moribund decade of the GDR as a quantum chemist at the East German Academy of Sciences.

Merkel was a critical toward their state. Her scientific habit of mind is regarded as the key to her political success. Her friend have the impression that she thinks things over more carefully and is always a few moves ahead of her competitor, which becomes one of her great advantages.