Two mothers from Montclair, New Jersey, piled into a black Volvo on a recent rainy evening and drove forty-five minutes to a lonely street in Gowanus. Sixty moms had signed up. Tonight, she was hoping to help her fellow-moms find the same thing. Oliver, thirteen months , a personal stylist, said. Henry, six months , a stay-at-home mom from Prospect-Lefferts Gardens. Julian, three years asked a young woman who was sipping water. The woman looked petrified. Beth Pappas, a professional speed-dating host, who had on black stilettos and a spaghetti-strap top, took the stage. I feel like an underachiever. Mavis, three , who was wearing a floppy red hat. Others hit the bar for another round of Long Island Iced Teas. Eva, two months was tired. The material on this site may not be reproduced, distributed, transmitted, cached or otherwise used, except with the prior written permission of Condé Nast. The New Yorker may earn a portion of sales from products and services that are purchased through links on our site as part of our affiliate partnerships with retailers. Sixty moms had signed up. Tonight, she was hoping to help her fellow-moms find the same thing. Oliver, thirteen months , a personal stylist, said. Henry, six months , a stay-at-home mom from Prospect-Lefferts Gardens. Julian, three years asked a young woman who was sipping water. The woman looked petrified. Beth Pappas, a professional speed-dating host, who had on black stilettos and a spaghetti-strap top, took the stage. I feel like an underachiever. Mavis, three , who was wearing a floppy red hat. Others hit the bar for another round of Long Island Iced Teas. Eva, two months was tired. Rachel Levin tagged along. Rachel Levin tagged along. Soft Berlin light filters down through the great glass dome, past tourists ascending the spiral ramp, and into the main hall of parliament. At the lectern, a short, slightly hunched figure in a fuchsia jacket, black slacks, and a helmet of no-color hair is reading a speech from a binder. Her delivery is toneless, as if she were trying to induce her audience into shifting its attention elsewhere. Parliament voted to render itself meaningless, and the Nazis never repaired the damaged building. At the end of the Second World War, the Soviets saw the Reichstag as the symbol of the Third Reich and made it a top target in the Battle for Berlin, laying heavy siege. A photograph of a Red Army soldier raising a Soviet flag amid the neoclassical statuary on the roof became the iconic image of German defeat. The Wall, built in 1961, ran a few steps from the back of the building. A minimal renovation in the sixties kept out the elements, but the Reichstag was generally shunned until the Wall came down, in 1989. Then, at midnight on October 3, 1990, President Richard von Weizsäcker stood outside the Reichstag and announced to a crowd of a million people the reunification of Germany, in freedom and peace. Berlin became its capital. The magnificent dome, designed by Norman Foster, suggested transparency and openness. By integrating the slogans of victorious Russian soldiers into its parliament building, Germany shows that it has learned essential lessons from its past ones that the Russians themselves missed. By confronting the twentieth century head on, Germans embrace a narrative of liberating themselves from the worst of their history. In Berlin, reminders are all around you. To the non-German speaker, she could be reading out regulatory guidelines for the national rail system. Merkel has lost weight—bedridden last winter after fracturing her pelvis in a cross-country-skiing accident, she gave up sausage sandwiches for chopped carrots and took off twenty pounds—and her slimmer face, with its sunken eyes and longer jowls, betrays her fatigue. On this day, the role of opposition is left to Die Linke, the leftist party of mostly former East German politicians, which has just ten per cent of parliament. Sahra Wagenknecht, an orthodox Marxist in a brilliant-red suit, steps behind the lectern and berates Merkel for her economic and foreign policies, which, she says, are bringing Fascism back to Europe. While Wagenknecht accuses the government of supporting Fascists in Kiev, Merkel gets up to chat with her ministers in the back row. She returns to her seat and rummages in an orange-red leather handbag that clashes with her jacket. One by one, Social Democratic and Green parliamentarians come forward to defend Merkel. The vice-president of the Bundestag orders the woman from Die Linke to observe protocol. Merkel keeps ignoring the exchange, at one point turning her back, at another leaving the hall. Chancellor Merkel has the parliament under control. Merkel seems perfectly matched to the demands of this second chance. In a country where passionate rhetoric and macho strutting led to ruin, her analytical detachment and lack of apparent ego are political strengths. Germans call the Chancellor Mutti, or Mommy. Angry young protesters fill the public squares of countries around the world, but German crowds gather for outdoor concerts and beery World Cup celebrations. Now almost pacifist after its history of militarism, Germany has stayed out of most of the recent wars that have proved punishing and inconclusive for other Western countries. American politics is so polarized that Congress has virtually stopped functioning; the consensus in Germany is so stable that new laws pour forth from parliament while meaningful debate has almost disappeared. These qualities, though making her an outsider in German politics, also helped to propel her extraordinary rise. Yet some observers, attempting to explain her success, look everywhere but to Merkel herself. Her father, Horst Kasner, was an official in the Lutheran Church, one of the few institutions that continued operating in both Germanys after the postwar division of the country. That year, almost two hundred thousand East Germans fled in the other direction. The Kasners lived in the seminary at Waldhof, a complex of around thirty buildings, many from the nineteenth c
