Fake: Angela Merkel's poem

A poem has recently been circulating again, which appeared in a GDR children's magazine in 1967 and is said to have come from Angela Merkel.

This poem, which is circulating again as a sharepic, raises the question of whether Angela Merkel decided at the tender age of 13 to “let the Federal Republic of Germany go bankrupt”.

This is how that poem goes:

Ernst Thälmann, you move forward,
I love socialism,
that's why I'm standing my ground here,
because revanchism has to go.

The red army has wanted to
eliminate the enemy for a long time.
I don't need a gun for this -
I'll infiltrate him!

I'll be head of the Federal Republic of Germany
- the class enemy will hate it!
– and follow the SED’s plan
to let them go bankrupt!”

In November 2019, the claim was already spread on another sharepic ( we reported ).
But it goes back even further: the poem has been distributed in text form on Facebook by relevant sites since 2016, supplemented by the fact that it is “not a joke” and “was also published in Spiegel”:

Of course, our obligatory note: Google is a search engine, not a fact database. The note that you can “check it with Google” is not necessarily conclusive.

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What was “FRÖSI”?

This was the abbreviation of the children's magazine “Being Happy and Singing”, a “pioneer magazine for boys and girls”. Strangely enough (?) the poem doesn't even appear in this edition!

Angela Merkel?

The Chancellor was born on July 17, 1954 in Hamburg . At the time the poem was supposedly published, she was 13 years old... and not yet married, this only happened in 1977.

This means that in 1967 she still had her maiden name, which was: Angela Dorothea Kasner.
So unless Angela Merkel had already taken the name of her future husband at the age of 13, it is more than strange that she signed the poem with Angela Merkel, not Angela Kasner.

The Eulenspiegel

This is a satirical magazine that has been published in printed form since 1954. Unfortunately, we were unable to verify whether and in which issue of the satirical magazine this alleged Merkel poem appeared (the 04/12 issue mentioned is unfortunately not currently available ), but the character of the poem corresponds exactly to the biting satire of the magazine, in which politicians are often featured and celebrities are dealt with sharply.

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Conclusion

Angela Merkel, née Kasner, certainly did not write this at the age of 13. However, the style of the poem fits with the satirical magazine “Eulenspiegel” as the supposed author.