Merkel's legacy The force that drove the head of Europe's greatest power

As Maren Heinzerling crossed hands with the most powerful woman in the world, leaned backwards and started to spin her dance partner in a circle, she began to worry.

- Philip Oltermann BERLIN

“What are you doing ?” the retired railway engineer recalled thinking. “You are spinning around the room with Angela Merkel.” Heinzerling had to grip the chancellor’s hands tighter. “I realised I couldn’t let go or the chancellor would have careered across the hall and smashed into a wall.” The scene dates back to 17 May 2017, when Heinzerling, then 78, was invited to Merkel’s chancellory in Berlin to pick up an award for her volunteering work, teaching physics to refugee children.

Heinzerling had improvised their little dance number after Merkel, who has a PhD in quantum chemistry, had been too quick on an experiment the science teacher had devised for the cameras. “ Then I remembered this other experiment,” Heinzerling recalled, and she spontaneously grabbed the chancellor’s hands. The point was to demonstrate centrifugal force, which in Newtonian mechanics is the invisible force that appears to act on a body moving in a circular path.

Merkel’s lack of a poker face has become immortalised in comedy sketches; her eyerolls and frowns at press conferences and public functions are memes on social media. But in pictures of her dance with Heinzerling, she is smiling.

“My impression was that Frau Merkel cared for nothing else in the world at that moment,” Heinzerling said in March this year, three weeks before she died unexpectedly.