Hello, welcome to the Editor's Desk.

This is the podcast where we take a closer look at the essays and articles in the latest print issue of First Things magazine.

I'm Rusty Reno. I'm the editor of First Things Magazine, and I'm here with you today at the editor's desk.

I'm delighted to welcome to the podcast, Chris Caldwell, and we're going to talk about his

review of Angela Merkel's recently published memoirs, published, that review published in the March

2025 issue of

First Things.

Welcome to the podcast, Chris.

Great to be back, Rusty.

Angola Merkel, you know, an interesting major figure in world politics, really, from the last part of the 20th and into the 21st century.

But kind of a mystery of woman in a certain way.

So who, like, who is, who is this?

Where's she from?

What's her background?

Yeah, well, her background is, unusual in many ways. She was born in the early 1950s,

in the aftermath of the Second World War, and she was born in Hamburg. And what's unusual about that is that

she was brought up in East Germany, not that far from Berlin, but outside of Berlin.

So her parents decided to migrate East as the country, as the Iron Curtain was being erected.

That's right. And what makes that stranger still is that her father chose that path because he was a pastor.

He was an evangelical pastor, evangelical being, the word that Germans used generally

to mean Protestant. And he was a, you know, a very socially active fellow, both in the, you know,

in the Christian sense. He, you know, he tended to the disabled and the people with birth defects and he had a charitable home for, and he, but he was also ideologically on the left.

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