Affluent, Anxious and Almost Normal: A Journey Through Merkel’s Germany
"Germany’s Merkel Hands Over Chancellor’s Office to Scholz"
IMAGE - The village of Mauerkirchen in the German state of Bavaria.
As Angela Merkel prepares to step down after 16 years as chancellor of Germany, she leaves behind a country profoundly changed — and anxious about changing more.
By Katrin Bennhold Photographs by Lena Mucha
STUTTGART, Germany — The small silver star at the tip of Aleksandar Djordjevic’s Mercedes shines bright. He polishes it every week.
Mr. Djordjevic makes combustion engines for Daimler, one of Germany’s flagship carmakers. He has a salary of around 60,000 euros (about $70,000), eight weeks of vacation and a guarantee negotiated by the union that he cannot be fired until 2030. He owns a two-story house and that E-class 250 model Mercedes in his driveway.
All of that is why Mr. Djordjevic polishes the star on his car.
“The star is something stable and something strong: It stands for Made in Germany,” he said.
But by 2030 there will be no more combustion engines at Daimler — or people making combustion engines.
“I’m proud of what I do,” Mr. Djordjevic said. “It’s unsettling to know that in 10 years’ time my job will no longer exist.”
Mr. Djordjevic is the picture of a new German pride and prosperity — and German anxiety.
As Chancellor Angela Merkel prepares to leave office after 16 years, her country is among the richest in the world. A broad and contented middle class is one facet of Ms. Merkel’s Germany that has been central to her longevity and her ability to deliver on a core promise of stability. But her impact has been far greater.
To travel the country she leaves behind is to see it profoundly transformed.
Workers assembling batteries for Mercedes electric cars in Stuttgart.
The F60 colliery conveyor bridge at the Visitor Mine Lusatia, a tourist hotspot in the eastern mining region of Lichterfeld-Schacksdorf.
There is the father taking paid parental leave in Catholic Bavaria. The married gay couple raising two children outside Berlin. The woman in a hijab teaching math in a high school near Frankfurt, where most students have German passports but few have German parents.
There is the coal worker in the former Communist East voting for a far-right party that did not exist when Ms. Merkel took office. And two young brothers on a North Sea island threatened by rising sea levels who do not remember a time when Ms. Merkel was not chancellor and cannot wait to see her gone.
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