It is Merkel talking to Sarkosy on a walk along the beach. There is the sea and a very distant horizon of what I thought was sunlit land but is a wave.
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It's table manners at a very fine place, probably expensive, certainly exclusive. It reminded me of another photo I have had in my small collection for some years.
I have never watched TV. All three are famous, but I know only Churchill, often read him. --The one in the middle? Incredible his discipline.
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Angela Merkel and Vladimir Putin in Moskov 2002.
The way she watches him while he talks is typical of women. She is listening and taking in what he says and yet bravely holding on to her own train of thought for the answers she must presently furnish in split seconds.
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She probably could not sleep. To reconsider such a vast problem takes time and strength. She had probably done most of the thinking long before, partly already as a kid. Kissinger wrote about that. He said it is necessary to learn the basics before starting out in high office. But even so. She studied chemistry and would have done Kant in her free time ..... Her father was a Lutheran pastor. I don't think she called herself a believer, but I did read her saying that she derives strength from that background.
Now, June 2017, I read somebody using the term "a gamble" for the way she had stood there alone trying to open frontiers for the refugees. I have the quote, but am not absolutely sure of it, because I have not read any German newspapers for ages, though they are easily among the best and most reliable.
"Some say Angela Merkel gambled (and now lost) the legacy of her great European predecessors. The opposite is true: Europe was either going to be a moral entity, or not be at all. --Read Newest From Column Alexander Görlach"Postscript June 21, evening
That quote cannot be right, for the author would have written in German and I have only the translation where the (for me offensive) concept was "gamble". What would that have been in German? Certainly something more solemn, i.e. nothing so (insultingly) lighthearted. Was it maybe Wette = bet?
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I found the photo through "Die Zeit", a great German newspaper, but I don't have the reference yet and as to the name of the photographer ......There is the Papa Bear amused at the little one's effort. -- If this were one of those cruel Aesop stories, Papa Bear would be calculating whether to eat it for breakfast or have it for lunch.
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Getting ready.
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