BERLIN, May 19 Chancellor Angela Merkel said on Tuesday communist East Germany's Stasi secret police tried to recruit her when she was applying for a job at a university, but she quickly turned down the offer.

Merkel, who grew up in East Germany and became the first chancellor from the East in 2005, recalled how the Stasi approached her after an interview for a job as a scientific assistant at the Technical University in Ilmenau.

After the interview, she was shown to a room where a Stasi officer was waiting for her. “I said very quickly that it was not something for me,” Merkel said in a recording of an ARD television chat show.—Reuters