Global Post: BERLIN, Germany — When Barack Obama traveled to the eastern city of Dresden with Angela Merkel in 2009, they stopped at the Frauenkirche, or Church of Our Lady. Leveled by Allied bombing raids in 1945, the towering landmark was painstakingly rebuilt after German reunification.
At the end of their visit, the US president and his German counterpart sat together in quiet prayer — something Germans wouldn’t know because photographs of that moment didn’t appear in the press here.
That’s because images of politicians praying are rare in Germany’s largely secular society. “Merkel didn’t want photos of it,” says Volker Resing, who called his biography of the chancellor Angela Merkel: The Protestant.
A former scientist with a doctorate in physics, Merkel is also the daughter of a Protestant pastor in what was then East Germany. Although Germans largely accept her faith, she’s rarely discussed it as a public official for her party, the Christian Democratic Union (CDU) — until this month.