Berlin
Chancellor Angela Merkel said Friday that the drastic limits placed on people’s freedoms to curb the coronavirus earlier this year had weighed heavily on her, bringing back memories of life in surveillance-riddled East Germany.
Speaking on the eve of the 30th anniversary of German reunification, Merkel told the RND newspaper group she was acutely aware of the sacrifices she was asking of Germans when the country went into lockdown in March.
“That I had to tell people they could only be out in the street in a single household or just two persons at a time, that no events could take place, that children could not visit their parents in care homes — these were serious restrictions.”
A pastor’s daughter who grew up behind the Iron Curtain in the communist German Democratic Republic (GDR), Merkel, 66, said.—AFP
