BERLIN: He’s Germany’s first ‘first man’, but Chancellor Angela Merkel’s husband is so camera shy he’s been dubbed the ‘Phantom of the Opera’, since his few public appearances at his wife’s side have been at opera festivals.

Professor Joachim Sauer, 56, is a world authority on quantum chemistry with a string of awards and publications to his name. He refuses to give interviews, with the terse written statement to journalists that he does not want to speak about his wife’s political activities rather than his work as a scientist. He stayed in his office at Berlin’s Humboldt University and followed Merkel’s formal inauguration on November 22 on television rather than joining her parents and brother in the visitors’ gallery at parliament.

Sauer’s attempt to stay out of the limelight has brought him the attention he wanted to avoid. The day after the inauguration, Germany’s bestselling newspaper, Bild Zeitung, carried a banner headline that screamed: “Where Was Her Husband?” His absence has triggered questions in the press about their marriage.

“She couldn’t convince her husband to stand by her side at this heavily symbolic event covered by the world’s media,” wrote a commentator in the Berliner Zeitung newspaper. “Not even for a symbolic hour, for the sake of etiquette. For his wife. He could have gone back to his research after that. What we can see here is a rather amusing occurrence of the male self-importance gene.”

Others say Merkel, the country’s first female chancellor, doesn’t need her husband’s public support to sort out Germany’s problems. And Merkel, 51, has defended Sauer, saying publicity isn’t to everyone’s taste. “He could have sat in the gallery,” she told Bild. “But I can understand that he preferred to follow it all on television in peace and without publicity. What’s important to me, and I say this quite honestly, is that my husband supports me overall in what I do. And he does.” She added that she appreciated his help with the housework.

Merkel’s biographer, Gerd Langguth, said Sauer will be different: “He is very self-confident and ... determined not to get pulled into the media and politics circus. He ... doesn’t want to become another Denis Thatcher.”

Merkel and Sauer have refused to move into the futuristic, white concrete chancellery, preferring to stay in their flat in a restored, early 20th century house in central Berlin. Whether they will be able to stay there is uncertain. The government declined to comment on reports that it was reviewing whether the apartment can be adequately protected. —Dawn/LAT-WP News Service