Parenting & Family Quote by Angela Merkel

Germany’s postwar economic miracle came with a quiet bargain: import labor, export responsibility. Merkel’s line cracks that bargain open. She’s not offering a soaring vision; she’s delivering a managerial truth bomb, the kind that made her both durable and maddeningly unromantic. The hook is the pronoun: “we.” It indicts the state, the public, and a political class that treated “Gastarbeiter” as a temporary tool rather than future neighbors.

The intent is corrective, almost bureaucratic, but the subtext is moral. By describing the early policy as a call - “our country called” - she frames migration not as an invasion but as recruitment. Germany didn’t merely receive outsiders; it solicited them. That flips the usual script in immigration debates, shifting agency back to the host society and, with it, accountability.

Her sharpest move is “we kidded ourselves.” It’s self-incrimination packaged as realism: the myth wasn’t that workers might leave; it was that Germany could benefit from their labor while refusing the social consequences of permanence - schools, citizenship, political representation, cultural change. “But this isn’t reality” lands like a chancellor’s version of “grow up.” No sentimentality, no scapegoating, just the admission that demographic facts outlast political comfort.

Context matters: Merkel governed during years when Germany, after decades of calling itself “not a country of immigration,” had to reconcile law and identity with lived life. This quote is an argument for integration not as generosity, but as overdue recognition of a history Germany authored.