GERMANY'S NEW CHANCELLOR: Angela Merkel was born Angela Dorothea Kasner in Hamburg in West Germany on July 17th, 1954. Her minister father, Horst Kasner, moved the family to Templin, a small town 50 miles north of Berlin in the communist east three years later to train new clergy in the atheist state.
Told by her parents that as a pastor's daughter she would have to be better than the other children to have any chance to go to college, she excelled at mathematics and science, as well as Russian and English.
Graduating from Leipzig University in physics, she was an obscure, 35-year-old theoretical researcher at the East German Academy of Sciences when the Berlin Wall came down in 1989.
She got involved in a new political group, Democratic Awakening, which fizzled quickly in the first free East German election in March, 1990. She was elected to parliament that year as a member of Chancellor Helmut Kohl's Christian Democrats and was named as women's minister by Kohl, who became her political patron.
She became the party's general secretary in 1998 and moved up to become its chairwoman in 2000 after urging the party to dump Kohl during a scandal over undeclared, and therefore illegal, campaign contributions.
That exhibited the ruthless streak she has needed to rise above her party's powerful and ambitious regional governors.
Merkel, who has no children, is married to her second husband, Joachim Sauer, a chemistry professor at Berlin's Humboldt University.
Sauer shuns the limelight, except for the couple's annual red-carpet walk at the Wagner opera festival in Bayreuth that has earned him the media nickname, "the phantom of the opera". In 1977, she married fellow college student Ulrich Merkel but they were divorced in 1982.