Angela Merkel morphs into comic-book heroine (News Feature)

By Jean-Baptiste Piggin Jul 2, 2009, 12:28 GMT

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.