There’s an interesting new piece by Marci Shore (I recently reviewed her latest book on Eastern Europe in NRODT) in Foreign Affairs discussing a new book describing Angela Merkel’s “first life” in East Germany. Shore appears to give Merkel the benefit of the doubt over her role in the Freie Deutsche Jugend (Free German Youth), the Communist party’s youth movement (uniforms, indoctrination, torchlight parades, you know how it goes), and probably not unreasonably so. Not very heroic, perhaps, but most people are not, and young Angela had to deal with the state and society with which she had been presented.

And this too is fair:

In discussing Lachmann and Reuth’s new book, the newspaper Die Welt describes Merkel’s support for democratic socialism [a kindly way to describe what Gorbachev was up to, but let that pass] as “an astonishing point of departure” for the future federal chancellor and Christian Democratic Union chair. The question is: Why is this so astonishing? After all, in the second half of the 1980s millions of other people also looked hopefully toward glasnost and perestroika. At that time virtually no one throughout the communist bloc — be they Communist Party members, dissidents, or members of the largely passive majority — imagined that communism as such would end in their lifetimes.

And so is this:

Whether or not Merkel’s formal role in the Free German Youth was titled “cultural officer” or “secretary of propaganda,” those who have seized upon the apparently radical nature of this distinction reveal either willful bad faith — a desire to discredit a political opponent — or simple ignorance about what living under communism meant. In East Germany, as in other communist countries, the distinction between “culture” and “propaganda” in both theory and practice was vague. The point of organizations such as the Free German Youth was to affirm that there was no independent cultural space outside of socialism as conceived by the state. The language of socialism was omnipresent.

And so it was.

But this is to miss the point. What Merkel believed (or even did) then matters less than the question of how her upbringing in East Germany shaped the way in which she sees things now. Evidently she is no Communist today (very far from it, in fact), but in her public devotion to a sacred, totemic “Europe,” we can still see someone who dreams the big dream (or at least goes along with it), a prospect that is less than reassuring for those who understand what the reality of what this latest attempt at Utopia entails.

More than that, in recent years, particularly after Merkel forced through that dishonest and profoundly anti-democratic charade better known as the EU’s Lisbon Treaty, the German chancellor has revealed herself as an apparatchik who believes that those in charge know best, and that voters should have very little say in their future indeed.

Chancellor Merkel may have traveled a rather shorter distance from East Germany than Marci Shore might have us believe.