Germany: Beate Baumann, Angela Merkel’s “Bernardo”

There is no other example, in post-war Western history, of such a fusional, durable and high-level tandem between a political leader and an adviser. The book of memoirs that Angela Merkel and Beate Baumann are writing together and which will be published in several countries in the fall of 2024 is the culmination of thirty years of an osmotic collaboration, the consecration of a duo literally outstanding at the height of power.

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All Heads of State and Government have by their side directors of cabinet, people they trust, faithful and loyal collaborators, high-level assistants who advise them and whom they confide in. But none of these qualifiers suits Beate Baumann, who is much more than an adviser or the “head of office” mentioned in the organization chart of the chancellery. Of Angela Merkel, she is the pillar and the compass, the strategist and the accomplice, the one who brought her to power and who kept her there, the one who manages crisis situations and writes her important speeches, the one which serves as radar, filter, bodyguard, warning system and adversary, the architect who plans his objectives, sets the guidelines and gives, in his words, “die Tonalität” – the tonality. Baumann watches over the news, listens to the atmosphere of the country and reports it to his boss, like Bernardo de Zorro, who passes himself off as a deaf-mute when he does not is only mute, and thus informs his master of the indiscretions he can hear.

A meeting in 1992

Angela Merkel was in hospital with a broken leg when she first heard Beate Baumann’s name. It was in 1992, she was still this young 38-year-old Minister for Women and Youth, from the East, shifted in the government of Helmut Kohl, whom the Chancellor called “Das Madchen” (the girl). She was about to become deputy chairman of the CDU and was looking for an assistant. “I know someone,” said Christian Wulff, future President of the Federal Republic and then executive of the CDU in Lower Saxony, who came to see her at the Charité hospital in Berlin: “You should ask Beate Baumann. Very competent, hardworking and with experience in the party.” Beate thought she would become an English and German teacher, but she and Merkel talked for two hours and never left each other. Joined later by the blonde and comely Eva Christiansen, they formed this inseparable trio, two Catholics from the West surrounding a Protestant from the East, whom the CDU males treacherously dubbed the “Girls Camp”, as if it were three weasels in a scout camp. But Beate Baumann remained with her the only “Bernardo” with a silent mouth.

Angela Merkel’s first decision after her election as Chancellery in 2005 was to redevelop the seventh floor so that Beate Baumann’s office was separated from hers only by the secretaries’ airlocks, whose doors mostly remained open. Since leaving power on December 8, 2021, after four terms and sixteen years at the head of the most powerful country in Europe, her life has of course been less turbulent. The offices allocated to him by the German Parliament are a few hundred meters from the Chancellery, in a gray building on Avenue Unter den Linden with a view of the Brandenburg Gate. She now allows herself the luxury of only getting there at 9 a.m. – and not at 8 a.m. as before, when she had to prepare for the morning meeting with her close team. But the essential is still there. And the main thing is Beate Baumann in the office next door.

“Beate is busy, she can’t join us,” Angela Merkel told me the day I came to visit her, in the spring of 2023. Beate Baumann is as ubiquitous as she is invisible. We know very little about this co-leader of the shadows born in 1963, in July like her boss and eleven years before her. She does not give interviews, rarely appears in public, does not make speeches, only meets journalists furtively, is photographed only by chance. With the exception of her husband, the great physics professor Joachim Sauer whom they met when they were both researchers in East Berlin, no one is as close to Angela Merkel as Beate Baumann. She is his shadow and his ghost, the alter ego that accompanies him everywhere. The only one who allows herself to cut him off, to yell at him in a meeting, to reproach him for a statement. “How could you say such a thing?” she asked him. The audience jumped, embarrassed. Merkel accepted the reproach without saying a word, reports Der Spiegel. They do not spare each other any criticism and continue to say “you” with a professional distance.

The same style indifferent to coquetry

When they were at the Chancellery, they sometimes went to dinner together on leaving the office, in a restaurant on the banks of the Spree, not far from where Angela Merkel has her apartment. I met them there one day by chance. They entered without a bodyguard, like two friends, and went to settle at the back of the room with such naturalness that no one seemed to notice them. I saw them chatting without interruption. They laugh a lot together. They concocted many times Machiavellian games of political billiards from which many of their enemies have never recovered. At the beginning of their collaboration, in the troubled and explosive period of the CDU “slush funds” scandal which ended up carrying off the ex-chancellor (CDU) Helmut Kohl, they had developed a little ritual. Beate went to Central Station every evening to buy the next day’s newspapers. In the morning, she spent a head in Angela’s office. Not even “hello”. Just: “Nothing serious (Nichts schlimmes).” Angela nodded knowingly. Together, they brought down Helmut Kohl and former CDU Chairman Wolfgang Schäuble, spurred former Minister-President of Bavaria (CSU) Edmund Stoiber to defeat, then the former Chancellor (SPD) Gerhard Schröder. They have fun with their political calculations, especially when they succeed in destabilizing self-confident and narcissistic males. “I am not vain, Angela Merkel once confided. But I know how to use the vanity of men.”

Inevitably, Beate Baumann annoys. Too much devotion, too much influence. Her power is such that she disturbs those who have to pass through her. THE Spiegel notes that she merges so much with the one whose career she served that she forgets who she is, and says “I” when speaking of Merkel, or “me, Merkel”. It is true that they are not without similarities. The same style indifferent to coquetry and the attributes of power, the trouser suit, the absence of make-up, the short haircut with minimal brushing, so as not to waste time. The same incorruptible righteousness, the same cold and pragmatic relationship to politics, the same hard work and concentration, the same analytical and derisive look at human weaknesses. Lack of affectation, frankness, humor.

Since 1992, the shadow counselor has set herself only two political objectives. The first was to bring Angela Merkel to power. The second was to keep Angela Merkel in power. To these two well accomplished missions, Beate Baumann entirely subordinated her life. There remains the third objective: to write their book of memoirs. It will cover the life of Angela Merkel since her childhood in East Germany, the crises experienced, the decision-making process. Eva Christiansen comes by to help them with the souvenirs. They insisted on writing the book alone, without historians, without journalists, without ghostwriter. They work on it equally, alternating the writing of the chapters. “You will not be able to distinguish who wrote what”, promises the ex-chancellor. For the first time, Merkel will be confused with her double, Baumann, her false deaf-mute emerging from the shadows.