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Marie-Agnes Strack-Zimmermann: »Politics in particular is teeming with busybodies who lose themselves in their roles«
Photo: Kay Nietfeld / dpa
Marie-Agnes Strack-Zimmermann has been Chairwoman of the Defense Committee of the German Bundestag since 2021.
Her plan as a teenager, however, was very different, as the FDP politician revealed to Die Zeit in an interview.
»To become a hippie.
I wanted to go to America, ride a motorbike and live in a trailer,” the 64-year-old replied when asked about her dream.
“That was really not a political statement, but a way of life from the 1970s.
I still love the music of Janis Joplin, Jimi Hendrix, Joe Cocker and Rory Gallagher.«
So why didn't she end up with the Greens?
»I came from a conservative CDU household.
The image of women in the CDU was so alien to me as a young woman that this party didn't interest me," said Strack-Zimmermann.
In turn, they had no points of contact with the SPD.
And the Greens were considered "totally wacky" in their bourgeois environment.
broken knees
In the series of talks »School of my life«, Strack-Zimmermann also reports on a certain thirst for adventure.
Be it with the two-wheeler that she has been driving since she was 15 (»Everything that gets you moving quickly makes me happy«) or in her childhood in bombed-out Düsseldorf, where she and her brother raced down the mountains of rubble together with the bikes (» I always had broken knees«).
She grew up in an open, sociable home.
She describes her parents as »positive and open to life, with integrity, pious and helpful«.
They would have given her a value that is important for her work: not taking herself too seriously.
»Politics in particular is teeming with busybodies who lose themselves in their roles.
It's all just borrowed power."
She was also born with her quick-wittedness – and lived it out early on, even at school (“I found everything that was strictly specified to be terrible”), where she tangled with teachers and brought many blue letters home with her: »When I passed the Abitur with an average of 3.0, that was a day of liberation for me and my parents.«
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