In a crossover outfit

Angela Merkel, June 1990

Klaus-Dieter Frankenberger

Editor in politics.

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It was an encounter like the one that happens in hotel elevators: the door opens, you want to get in and then you run into someone who wants to get out quickly. In my case, the setting was a hotel in Dublin in June 1990, where the German delegation was staying. I was also accommodated here, or rather we: my wife came with us, our youngest son was also there. The occasion was a European summit, about which I reported, it was about German unification. So my wife and I, pushing the stroller with our son, stormed into the opening elevator. We could only barely avoid a collision with a woman who was coming towards us. She was unknown to me. For the local and other conditions she looked a bit strange: half hippie,half visitor to an evangelical church convention, in a completely unmondy crossover outfit.

The riddle of the woman, with whom we almost collided, was solved a few hours later: Helmut Kohl had taken the freely elected Prime Minister of the GDR, Lothar de Maizière, with him, and he in turn took his deputy spokeswoman: It was Angela Merkel.

She invited the press to our hotel.

I was flabbergasted.

If someone had told me back in Dublin in June 1990 that she would become Chancellor 15 years later, then hold that office for 16 years and be proclaimed Leader of the West in parts of the democratic world - I would have such a prediction for the result an overly heavy Guinness consumption explained.

Because of the course of the soccer World Cup in 1990, the consumption of beer would not have been unlikely.

These mason jars

In Ljubljana, June 1991

Why do you send a young editor as a reporter to the Slovenian war and crisis area, even though he has not yet been noticed by knowledge that would justify a posting to the Balkans, from a purely technical point of view? I still don't know today. But apparently the political editorship management thought it would be a good idea to send me to Ljubljana. By the way, she had already sent me to Saudi Arabia on the Gulf a few months earlier, although I hadn't been noticed as a second Lawrence of Arabia until then. But it doesn't matter.

Well, at the end of June, the first shots and bombs fell in Slovenia. The Yugoslav Succession Wars had begun. I should go there. And so it happened that I was walking to an improvised press center in the city when the sirens wailed: Air raid alarm! A police vehicle sped past me, braked, backed up, a policeman got out, yelled something at me, which of course I couldn't understand, whereupon he grabbed my arm and pushed into the entrance of a large apartment building. And suddenly I was in a basement, surrounded by women, children and some old men. They stared at me and I stared back in disbelief. My gaze fell on the countless tin cans and mason jars on the shelves, there must have been hundreds of mason jars. In the bizarre situation my colleague Konrad Schuller would havethe years later, when he was reporting on the Ukraine, and devoting entire reports to the local mason jars, was overjoyed. Despite brief concerns, my first professional trip to the Balkans did not last for the last hour in the basement of an apartment block in the Slovenian capital. The all-clear was soon given. I stepped out into the bright sunlight. But those mason jars ...But those mason jars ...But those mason jars ...