User Profile

Disclaimer: This is a character LJ, set up and originaiiy run by aswanargent, which will be used to participate in the worldaffairs role playing game. The journal was handed off to foudebassan in May 2007.

The character who posts as iam_angelam is based on German politician Angela Merkel; information used to build the character comes from facts in the public domain, and her actions in the game will take place within a framework of real-world events (or potential future real-world events). Private musings in her posts to this LJ, and conversations with other WA characters or third-party nonplayers (in the form of LJ-post comments and responses), come entirely from the imagination of the player. This LJ has no connection to the real Angela Merkel. She is German, a physicist, and a politician. The person playing this character is none of those things.

My biography .... I'll try to be brief.

I was born in Hamburg and spent the first two months of my life in the West before my father moved our family to East Germany. He was a Lutheran pastor and a believer in socialism; my mother was a schoolteacher. I grew up in a bookish household, and did what was necessary to ensure having a chance of gaining admission to an elite university. I was successful. I attended the University of Leipzig, where I studied physics and ultimately took the degree "Dr. rer. nat." (doctor of science) in 1978, then went to work as a chemist in East Berlin. A first marriage ended in divorce in the early 1980s. I remarried in 1998. I have no children.

My interest in politics was sparked by the fall of the Berlin Wall. I joined the CDU (Christian Democratic Union) in August 1990, and in December of that year I was elected to Parliament. My ministerial experience began in 1991, when, at the age of 36, I was chosen to be Minister for Women and Youth under Chancellor Helmut Kohl. Later I was named Minister for Environment, Conservation and Nuclear Safety. While holding these ministerial positions, I was simultaneously the CDU vice chairman (1991-1998) and the CDU chairman in the state of Mecklenburg-West Pomerania (1993-2000). Since 2000, I have been the chairman of the Christian Democratic Union of Germany. As I finish writing these words (November 2005), I am the "chancellor-in-waiting" and the leader of the first grand coalition since the 1960s. Should all go well, I expect to be formally elected chancellor on 22 November.

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