Berlin - German Chancellor Angela Merkel metamorphosed this
week into a comic book heroine who learns the hard way how to work
the levers of power.
Most Germans would be surprised at the idea that their matronly
chancellor could yield up much humorous potential.
But a 64-page comic, published this week, retells her biography as
trickster fable: dimple-faced underdog Merkel outwits a menagerie of
political beasts, German and foreign, who vainly try to trip up her
political career.
Merkel is not easy to caricature, but artist Heiko Sakurai
captures to perfection her hooded eyes and tiny chin.
He uses the cartooning convention to depict Merkel's guile, with a
speech balloon having her say one thing, while a separate thought
balloon reveals her next cunning move coming up.
As a result, it may be Merkel who laughs all the way to the
September 27 general election after reading the caper, entitled 'Miss
Tschoermaenie.'
That title is a whimsical re-spelling of 'Miss Germany' as
pronounced with a thick German accent.
While Merkel is a staple of newspaper political cartoons, this is,
oddly enough, the first comic novel has been published about her.
Miriam Hollstein, a journalist at the conservative daily newspaper
Die Welt who wrote the story for Sakurai's pictures, joked Thursday,
'Nicolas Sarkozy is to blame for this book.'
Hollstein was on holiday in France when she stumbled on a
best-selling comic-book series about the French president.
The three-part series - Sarko the First, The Hidden Face of Sarko,
and Carla & Carlito - pokes fun at Sarkozy's bling, his ruthless
manipulation and the airs put on by his Italian-born third wife
Carla.
Miss Tschoermaenie is more sympathetic to its heroine.
'We wanted to both amuse and educate readers about the main points
in her life,' Hollstein told reporters in Berlin.
The comic's framework is an imaginary conversation after Merkel
wins the upcoming election between the two heavyweight opponents who
Merkel had to shunt aside earlier to get to where she is now.
Gerhard Schroeder, the former German chancellor, and Edmund
Stoiber, the former premier of Bavaria state, are depicted crying
into their beer as they continue to wonder what hit them.
Hollstein's wry tale begins with Merkel as a baby, one of the rare
children to be taken across the Iron Curtain the wrong way.
While most other people were escaping from communism, her father
moved from the democratic west to the communist east, convinced it
offered a better life. Oops. Wrong move.
After the fall of communism, Merkel was brought into Germany's
cabinet as a token and rather naive easterner by then chancellor
Helmut Kohl. She was dismissively referred to as 'Kohl's little
girl.'
Hollstein describes how she was toughened up by a series of
setbacks, and perhaps acquired the ultimate trickster skill: bringing
out the worst in your opponents so that they defeat themselves.
That rings true in the case of cigar-smoking Social Democrat
Schroeder. He only narrowly lost the 2005 general election to Merkel,
but has seemed to shrivel since leaving the political stage.
Reviewers this week compared Miss Tschoermaenie to Tintin the boy
reporter, a Belgian cartoon character whose incredible escapes from
danger have been avidly read by children since the 1930s.
Sakurai makes a running joke of Merkel's self-effacing husband
Joachim Sauer, whose face somehow vanishes behind all the speech
bubbles or behind the smoke stoked up from a barbecue by visiting US
president George W Bush.
Those puzzled at how Merkel can be so unassailable in the 'mother
of the nation' role may find some answers in the book, which is
issued by Frankfurt publishing house Eichborn Verlag and goes on sale
in German this week.
USA
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