A former teacher recalls little Angela Merkel trotting around her East German school in the blue shirt of the FDJ, the communist youth organisation. Later, Merkel served as cultural secretary for the FDJ while working as a physicist at the Academy of Sciences. She conformed to the status quo despite never believing in communism.

These seem strange beginnings for a German chancellor. Yet there is continuity. A consistent picture of Merkel emerges from five recent biographies: by Stefan Kornelius in German, Marion Van Renterghem in French, Matthew Qvortrup in English, Michèle de Waard in Dutch, plus a critical conservative German collection edited by Philip Plickert*. The woman almost certain to be re-elected on September 24 has a genius for locating the centre of any society she finds herself in. Henry Kissinger, a longtime confidant, once said she appears “the perfect expression of her time”. Merkel is an opportunist who often U-turns, yet she seems well suited to lead the west.

Communist East Germany shaped her. In her first 35 years she learnt that ideology is mostly bunk; became a physicist because the field was scarcely infected by Marxism-Leninism; and dreamt of being free to fulfil herself. Only months after the Berlin Wall fell, she embraced her vocation: Chancellor Helmut Kohl put her in his cabinet as a token female East German.