Only three weeks after Angela Dorothea Kasner was born, she was brought by her parents, Horst and Herlind Kasner, in a pannier to Quitzow, a village in the Prignitz region of Brandenburg, in the German Democratic Republic. Her family had made the unusual choice of moving to the East. 

Having become a pastor, Horst Kasner took the family three years later to Templin in the Uckermark, where he founded a seminary and became director of a home for handicapped persons. M.'s father had a sympathetic relationship with the communist regime, and enjoyed a privileged social status, having two cars and the right to travel to Western Germany and even to Italy. His library was well-stocked with western books. Horst Kasner became a leading member of the Weissensee Work Group, a “brotherhood of priests” who cooperated with the state authorities. The Stasi controlled the activities of the group which was instrumental in splitting the Protestant church in Germany. 

Angela Kasner, the eldest of three children, grew up in the Waldhof, a large wooded estate at the edge of Templin. She joined the  "Pionierorganisation Ernst Thälmann" and the "Freie Deutschen Jugend (FDJ)", and took her "Jugendweihe". A star organiser in the FDJ, she worked hard and achieved constantly high grades. She was top of the class, winning a trip to Moscow because of her exceptional performance in Russian. At Leipzig University, where she studied physics, she was an enthusiastic member of the FDJ, became " Kreisleitungsmitglied" and was in charge of agitation and propaganda for the young Communists: „FDJ Sekretärin für Agitation und Propaganda“. M. was a brilliant student, graduating as a doctor of physics. For professional and political reasons, she often travelled within the Soviet bloc, above all to Moscow.

She married a physician, Ulrich Merkel, whom she soon divorced. She then moved in with Professor Joachim Sauer, divorced like herself but already the father of two children. After being awarded a doctorate (Dr. rer. nat.) based on a doctoral thesis on quantum chemistry, she obtained a research post in quantum physics at the Academy of Sciences in Berlin. In 1986, M. gained permission to attend a cousin's wedding in Hamburg, her first trip to the west. 

After the fall of the Berlin Wall in November 1989, the CIA attempted to take over by recruiting senior individuals under the old system who were willing to serve the USA like they had previously served the USSR. One month later, M. changed sides and joined the "Demokratischer Aufbruch". She took over the same functions that she had held before, except that the position was now, in West German terminology, “Press spokesperson”. However, it soon became known that the president of Demokratischer Aufbruch, Wolfgang Schnur, had been a collaborator of the Stasi. M. herself informed the press of this painful news, obliging Schnur to resign and enabling herself to be appointed in his stead as president of the movement.

Following the last parliamentary elections in the GDR in 1990, she joined the government of Lothar de Maizière, becoming the latter’s spokesperson. Her partner, Joachim Sauer, was recruited by the US company Biosym Technology, spending a year at San Diego (California) at the laboratory of this Pentagon contractor. He then joined Accelrys, another San Diego company carrying out contracts for the Pentagon. Once the Demokratischer Aufbruch had become part of the Christian Democratic Union (CDU), M. was elected member of the Bundestag and joined Helmut Kohl’s government. The communist Agitprop leader of the DDR youth movement had become a Christian Democrat minister of Youth in the Federal Republic. Lothar de Maizière, who had become deputy president of the national party, was convicted of having relationships with the Stasi and was obliged to resign, to be replaced by M..

In 1994, Helmut Kohl appointed his protégée M. as Minister of the Environment, the Protection of Nature and Nuclear Security. After assuming office, M. sacked all the senior officials of her ministry. In the September 1998 elections, the Christian Democrats were swept out of power by a wave of red and green, Gerhard Schröder becoming Chancellor, while M. was named Secretary-General of the CDU. Following a party financing scandal, which compromised Kohl himself and party chairman Wolfgang Schäuble, M. criticized her former mentor, Kohl, and advocated a fresh start for the party without him. She was elected to replace Schäuble on 10 April 2000. 

After Edmund Stoiber's defeat in the 2002 national elections against chancellor Schröder, in addition to her role as CDU chairwoman, M. became leader of the conservative opposition in the Bundestag. Her rival, Friedrich Merz was eased out to make way for M.. She advocated a strong transatlantic partnership and German-American friendship, and came out in favour of the U.S. invasion of Iraq in the spring of 2003. 
ABCD

With Chaim Saban

With Ehud Olmert

With Benj. Netanyahu

With Nicolas Sarkozy

With George W. Bush

With Jacques Chirac

With Donald Tusk

M. relied also on the advice of Jeffrey Gedmin, specially dispatched to Berlin to assist her by the Bush clan. This lobbyist first worked at the American Enterprise Institute under Richard Perle and Dick Cheney. He argued that the European Union should remain under NATO authority. Then Gedmin became director of the Aspen Institute in Berlin. In 2003, the US State Department entrusted Jeffrey Gedmin and Craig Kennedy with a programme of “public diplomacy”, including the funding of journalist and opinion formers in Western Europe.

In May 2004, she pushed through the election as President of the Federal Republic of the banker Horst Köhler, main author of the Maastricht Treaty and creator of the Euro, later president of the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development (EBRD) and director of the IMF. At the beginning of the 2005 national electoral campaign, the CDU had a lead of 21 percentage points in public opinion polls. It was then that her adviser, Jeffrey Gedmin, published an open letter to her in "Die Welt". After criticising the German economic model, he wrote: “Before advancing the country, you need to defeat intellectually those nostalgic individuals who are dragging their feet." In reply to this invitation, M. promoted the former Constitutional Court judge Paul Kirchhof, and entrusted him with the "Initiative Neue Soziale Marktwirtschaft". She announced the abolition of graduated income tax, proposing that the rate should be the same for those who only just have what is necessary and those who live in luxury. Gerhard Schröder, severely criticised this proposal in a televised debate. In the actual 2005 national elections, the CDU polled 35% of the votes and the SPD 34%. Following long and laborious negotiations, a Grand Coalition was agreed, and M. was elected Chancellor on 22 November.

M. then pushed through the participation of a German contingent in the multinational force under US command in Afghanistan. In 2006, when Israel intervened in Lebanon, she achieved the involvement of the German navy . From 1 January to 30 June 2007, M. assumed the presidentship of the European Union and pushed the equivalent of the EU Constitutional Treaty project and the proposed merger of the North American Free Trade Area and the European Free Trade Area, thereby creating a “great transatlantic market”. 
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