The 13 Most Surprising Things You Never Knew About Angela Merkel

Angela Merkel grew up Angela Kasner, and her father’s family is partly of Polish descent. Merkel is the name of her first husband, a fellow physics student whom she married in 1977 and divorced four years later, according to a profile in the New Yorker.

Merkel’s father was an official in the Lutheran church. He moved the family from West Germany to Soviet-controlled East Germany shortly after Angela was born, even as thousands of others were fleeing the other way. Merkel’s disciplined and cautious approach to politics is often credited to her East German upbringing.

German supporters call her Mutti, which means “Mommy.”

As a nine-year-old in gym class, Angela once stood paralyzed at the top of a diving board for 45 minutes before finally deciding to jump in the pool right before class ended.

Merkel worked as a bartender at disco parties in college.

She has a degree in physics and a doctorate in quantum chemistry, and some say her success as a politician comes from her scientific, analytic approach to situations. She went on to work as a research scientist, as the only woman in the theoretical chemistry section at the East German Academy of Sciences.

At the end of the 1970s, Merkel applied for an assistant professor position at an engineering school and was asked to join the Stasi (East German secret police.) She says she refused, claiming that she would make a bad spy because she was too much of a blabbermouth. She didn’t get the job. Had she joined, a future career in German politics would have been impossible, according to a profile in Bloomberg BusinessWeek. For some politicians in a reunified Germany, any past association with the Stasi would soon be considered politically poisonous, and many were forced to resign when past links were discovered.

After Merkel divorced her first husband, she lived like a squatter in an illegal apartment near the Friedrichstrasse train station. On her 30th birthday, her father came to visit, telling her, “You haven’t gotten very far.”

On the night the Berlin wall fell, in November 1989, 35-year-old Merkel visited a sauna. Afterward, she wandered across the border to celebrate briefly with strangers, drank one beer, then went immediately home so she wouldn’t be tired for work the next day. Almost everyone else in Germany was out all night long.

Her husband Joachim Sauer, a professor at Berlin University, dislikes publicity so much he didn’t even show up to Merkel’s 2005 inauguration as Chancellor. He has also been known to fly budget airlines even when he is allowed to travel with Merkel on official planes. They love seeing opera and hiking together. Thanks to his interest in opera and avoidance of the spotlight, the German media have nicknamed Sauer, “the Phantom of the Opera.”

Merkel is reportedly a very good cook, makes a mean plum cake, and has been spotted shopping for groceries at regular supermarkets where she pays in cash. She told former Nigerian President Goodluck Jonathan that she makes breakfast for her husband every morning.

She is afraid of dogs after she was bitten by one in 1995, and Vladimir Putin has repeatedly used his pet dogs to try to intimidate Merkel, according to numerous press reports cited by Foreign Policy.

Merkel frequently visits the German soccer team’s locker rooms to congratulate them after a win, and once saw star player Bastian Schweinsteiger naked by accident.