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简介：German Chancellor Angela Merkel says Europe's economic turmoil is the continent's greatest crisis since World War II. But critics say she has been doing too little and lacks a bold vision for solving Europe's problems.




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German Chancellor Angela Merkel
Gerd Langguth
CDU predecessors Konrad Adenauer and Helmut Kohl
Red Army
Second World War
kernel
European Central Bank
Merkel biographer Gerd Langguth says her family had two cars and traveled relatively easily between East and West Germany, leading him to conclude that her pastor father had what he calls a sympathetic relationship with the Communist dictatorship. He says little in her orderly upbringing suggests she's capable of truly courageous leadership. She is not a dreamer, she is not a historian. She does not have big visions. She does not like to create big pictures of the future. She is a step-by-step decision-maker. Langguth knows Merkel and finds the popular image of her as charismatically challenged and aloof unfair. She's a logical, unpretentious woman, he says, who still lives in the same apartment that she did before becoming chancellor, with her husband, a chemist who hates media or public attention. Yet Langguth says Merkel was not shaped by history the way her CDU predecessors Konrad Adenauer and Helmut Kohl were. Kohl, he notes, as chancellor would sprinkle his speeches with personal memories of hardship, of American aid in the rough years after the war. His late wife had been raped by the Red Army and thrown out a window as a preteen. Experience shaped Kohl's efforts to build a united Europe and a strong trans-Atlantic relationship. Helmut Kohl was much more European by heart. He knew what European unity means because he lived during the Second World War.