Political Gatherings - Merz to host celebration for Merkel's 70th birthday
The leadership of the CDU intends to celebrate former party chairwoman and Chancellor Angela Merkel's 70th birthday with a reception. This event will be held at the Berlin Science Academy on September 25. Art historian Horst Bredekamp will give a lecture at this gathering, according to information from participants in a recent meeting of the Berlin party board. This gathering is part of the CDU series "Berliner Gespräche", a series that Merkel has coordinated herself. Merkel was replaced as party chairperson by Merz in 2002. Since then, her relationship with the current party and parliamentary group leader has been considered tense. Merkel didn't attend the CDU party meeting in May, as she had done in previous years, and in December 2021, she left the CDU-affiliated Konrad Adenauer Foundation.
Is this a sign of reconciliation?
Merz has been facing criticism from within his own party for making the CDU more conservative than during Merkel's leadership. The fact that the party leader himself has decided to organize the birthday celebration could be seen as a conciliatory gesture towards Merkel's supporters within the party. Merz has been working since taking office in 2021, following the Union's disastrous performance in the federal election and their subsequent move into opposition after 16 years of Merkel government, to rebuild the party.
This CDU series "Berliner Gespräche" event will be hosted in the Leibniz Hall of the Berlin-Brandenburg Academy of Sciences. Approximately 200 guests are expected to be invited, including former ministers and ministers from Merkel's governments, companions and friends.
Professor of medieval and modern art history at Humboldt University in Berlin, Bredekamp is Bredekamp will deliver the keynote speech at this event. Recently, he published a book titled "Berlin am Mittelmeer – Eine kleine architektonische Geschichte des Südverlangens," which discusses various topics from medieval sculpture to political iconography, art and technology, and new media.
A comparison to events for Merkel's 60th and 50th birthdays
This event is similar in format to two other gatherings where Merkel was also honored on her 60th and 50th birthdays. At her 60th, chancellor Merkel wanted a lecture by the Constance historian Jürgen Osterhammel, with the topic "Past: On the Horizons of History". One of Osterhammel's theses at the time was that the social upheavals of the past decades had not been predicted correctly by historians or "think tanks". On her 50th birthday in 2004, the Frankfurt brain researcher Wolf Singer was invited to give a talk, with the subject "The Brain: An Example of the Self-Organization of Complex Systems" as part of a special edition of the CDU discussion forum "Berliner Gespräche".
The choice of the venue and Bredekamp's expertise as the speaker both have symbolic significance as the former chancellor is a physicist.
