Profile: Angela Merkel - Christian Democrat leader tipped to become Germany's first female chancellor: The world of politics is the new laboratory for the former East German physicist, writes Derek Scally in Berlin.
Angela Merkel has built her political career on being underestimated. The nice-but-dull pastor's daughter from East Germany came from nowhere to become the political apprentice of former chancellor Helmut Kohl in 1990. Now, the 51-year-old leader of Germany's Christian Democrats, a trained physicist with a love of Wagner, is tipped to become the first female chancellor of Germany.
The comparisons to Margaret Thatcher are inevitable because of their shared gender and science backgrounds. In the German world of consensus politics, though, Chancellor Merkel is likely to be more iron maiden than iron lady.
Eight weeks after Angela Dorothea Kasner was born in Hamburg in 1954, her parents packed her into a basket, crossed over the border to East Germany and began a new life in the town of Templin, an hour from Berlin.
Merkel's father, a Lutheran pastor, was born in Berlin to a Polish-German family and, after studying in the West, felt drawn to missionary life in the godless east.
Baby Angela refused to walk but quickly learned to talk and her interest in politics - West German politics - began at a startlingly early age. At five she was delivering mini political lectures to her grandmother. At eight she could name all the members of the then-chancellor Konrad Adenauer's cabinet, and still can. "One presidential election I listened in secret on a radio in the school toilet," she said later.
At school, the young Angela Kasner was nicknamed Kasi and was a bright student. Russian was her best subject and in a school language competition she won first prize - a "friendship" visit to Moscow.
The young Merkel wanted to continue with languages and become a language teacher or an interpreter, but the GDR authorities decided they needed more scientists and so, after leaving school, Merkel moved to Leipzig to study physics.
In Leipzig she met Ulrich Merkel and they quickly married in September 1977, though the marriage lasted just four years. Merkel never talks about her first husband, and whether she was in love or whether she just married young like everyone else in East Germany. The man whose name she still carries is just one more shadow in her closely-guarded past.
Merkel's love of forbidden West German radio and her new West German jeans brought her to the attention of the secret police, the Stasi. They hauled her in and tried to recruit her as an informer, but she refused and moved to East Berlin.
But the Stasi kept up with her. When she began research at a special scientific institute in East Berlin, investigating the behaviour of carbon dioxide molecules at high temperatures, her office colleague Frank Schneider turned out to be a Stasi informer with the codename "Bachmann".
"Friendly relations developed quickly between us but nothing of an intimate nature," wrote "Bachmann" in Stasi reports printed in Stern magazine this week. Often lovers would answer the apartment door wearing Merkel's dressing gown when he picked her up for the drive to work, he reported. The affairs "rarely lasted more than six months".
His reports speak of Merkel's "pacifist tendencies" and a "positive political engagement" - ironic considering her interest in West German affairs. But she learned early on at home not to talk about politics with strangers. She later learned about "Bachmann" but said she was more disappointed than angry.
When the Berlin Wall fell in 1989, Angela Merkel was sitting with a friend in the sauna, as she did every Thursday evening. When they emerged and heard the news they hurried to a border crossing and caught their first glimpse of West Berlin. But when a group of friends decided to head to the Kurfürstendamm shopping mile, Merkel turned back.
"I'm going home, I've got an early start in the morning," she said.
Former research colleague Hans-Joerg Osten remembers that, while everyone else sat around in the office discussing the political upheavals in Germany, Merkel showed little interest and continued to work away at her desk.
"I asked why she wasn't with the others. She said it wouldn't make any difference anyway," he remembers.
SO, ALL HER colleagues were surprised when, a few weeks later, Merkel was appointed spokesperson for the first and last democratically-elected East German government.
Merkel says she fell into politics by accident, after joining one of the many new groupings that came and went in those months.
After less than a year as spokeswoman, in another extraordinary career leap, she was recommended to Chancellor Kohl, who brought her into his cabinet.
"She didn't make it because she is particularly able, but because she fulfils the double quota: she's a woman and she's from the East," sniffed Der Spiegel in its first profile of the young Merkel in 1991.
But Merkel took issue at being reduced to being a quota-filling East German.
"I lived a very schizophrenic life," she said. "I was part of the GDR state and lived at the same time in a state of permanent rejection." She rose quickly in prominence, first as minister for family and women and then as environment minister, simultaneously earning her party political stripes in the Christian Democrats (CDU).
"In emotional situations she reacts extremely objectively," wrote Der Spiegel a few years later. "The scientist in her fears nothing more than situations that she cannot survey through to the end. She plans everything." It was after a decade in national politics that she would first demonstrate her gift for sensing the right moment - what Machiavelli describes as the occasione.
Three days before Christmas 1999 she wrote an article for the Frankfurter Allgemeine, Germany's leading newspaper, denouncing Helmut Kohl - then embroiled in a party fundraising scandal - and demanding that the CDU distance itself from the former chancellor and her political mentor.
IT WAS A go-for-broke moment, but one that yielded rich rewards. Wolfgang Schäuble, Kohl's successor as CDU leader, was tainted by the affair and, four months after her fateful letter, Schäuble was out and Merkel was voted in as CDU leader with 96 per cent support.
Merkel was a fresh, untainted leader who won CDU heads, but party hearts were a more difficult challenge, particularly when confronted with the same shopping lists of inappropriate character traits for a party leader: female, Protestant, East German, divorcee, no children.
Her five years as party leader have been a time of success but also huge policy mistakes, such as her decision to back the US-led war in Iraq despite huge German public opposition, only to reverse her position once the war was over.
Angela Merkel has ploughed a lonely furrow as CDU leader, with few close confidants in the party upper ranks. Still, her political rivals no longer underestimate her, especially considering the number of political corpses littering her path to power including Kohl, Schäuble, her health spokesman and two of her former deputies.
Merkel's sweetest victory will come next week, three years after the CDU decided that her great rival, Bavarian premier Edmund Stoiber, should face Chancellor Schröder in the general election. Stoiber lost and was politically neutered, and on Monday Merkel will graciously accept the nomination of her party to run for the chancellery in the autumn.
But people still wonder who Angela Merkel really is. Her schoolfriends and colleagues talk of her in adjectives rather than anecdotes. Intelligent. Nice. Helpful.
Her research colleagues from her East Berlin days say she's still a scientist at heart, and that the world of Berlin politics is her new laboratory.
Former schoolfriends say there's nothing East German left in her, except her handwriting and her voice.
"She's become a West German politician," says Lothar de Maiziere, the last East German leader, and her first mentor. "She enjoys playing the puppetmaster. It's the pleasure over the mechanics but also over the people."
To get elected, Merkel knows she needs to become more three-dimensional and let the world into the personal life she has guarded until now. She will also need all the charm she can muster to persuade voters, angry at continued high unemployment despite painful cutbacks, to swallow her party's brand of even stronger reform medicine.
The newspapers are filled with unsolicited advice, telling her to flaunt her second husband, put on a bit of make-up and smile a bit more.
"You have a lovely smile," a television host told her recently.
"I know," replied Merkel. "But I have to be sparing with it in case it runs out one day."