Time Magazine's 2015 Person of the Year: Angela Merkel

The “Merkel rhombus,” or “raute,” inspired an emoticon, -<>-, flash mobs and a 2013 CDU campaign ad with 2,150 supporters holding the pose to pledge “Germany’s future in good hands.”

...of Germans that they have made it a verb: Merkeling. The second was a thunderclap. In late summer, Merkel’s government threw open Germany’s doors to a pressing throng of refugees and migrants; a total of 1 million asylum seekers are expected in the country by the end of December. It was an audacious act that, in a single motion,...

...strictly off the record, and no one dares disobey. Glimpses are visible sometimes, however, in the behavior of world leaders emerging from closed-door sessions with her. Sarkozy went from narcissist to wingman on the euro. George W. Bush famously sneaked up on her from behind at a G-8 summit and started to give her a neck rub. She clenched...

Merkel’s legacy—her bold, fraught, immensely empathetic act of leadership—challenges more than the comfort of European life.

...the de facto leader of the European Union, the most prosperous joint venture on the planet. By year’s end, she had steered the enterprise through not one but two existential crises, either of which could have meant the end of the union that has kept peace on the continent for seven decades. The first was thrust upon her—the slow-rolling...

That, after all, is the story of the E.U. and the story of globalization, both terms as colorless as the corridor of a Brussels office building.

Many Germans share those fears, but elected officials in Berlin seem more concerned that all the other attackers evidently grew up in Europe and were radicalized in the ethnic ghettos that spring up when immigrants are not integrated in society, a prevalent problem in Belgium, for example.

Berlin’s historic center is stippled with memorials to the nation’s victims.

The system’s limits on wanderlust rendered Merkel, waiflike in her youth, with her face pressed up against the glass of a warm shop window.

There the collapse of the Wall had been swiftly followed by the collapse of the economy, an event as traumatic as the breach had been euphoric, but experienced only by the Ossies, as East Germans were called.