section_path: Early life and education
section_name: Early life and education
paragraph_text: Early life and education
  
  Joachim-Friedrich Martin Josef Merz was born on 11 November 1955 to Joachim Merz (born 1924) and Paula Sauvigny (born 1928) in Brilon in the state of North Rhine-Westphalia in then- West Germany. His father was a judge and a member of the CDU. The Sauvigny family was a locally prominent patrician family in Brilon, of French ancestry. His maternal grandfather was Brilon mayor Josef Paul Sauvigny. Merz is Catholic. He was raised in his mother's family home Sauvigny House in Brilon. The house was announced for sale for €2 million in 2021. Two of his three siblings died relatively early; his younger sister died in the age of 21 in a traffic accident and his brother died of multiple sclerosis before the age of 50.
  
  From 1966 to 1971, Merz studied at the Gymnasium Petrinum Brilon, which he left for disciplinary reasons, moving to the Friedrich-Spee Gymnasium in Rüthen where he finished his Abitur in 1975. From July 1975 to September 1976 Merz served his military service as a soldier with a self-propelled artillery unit of the German Army. From 1976 he studied law with a scholarship from the Konrad Adenauer Foundation, first at the University of Bonn, later at the University of Marburg. At Bonn he was a member of KDStV Bavaria Bonn, a Catholic student fraternity founded in 1844 that is part of the Cartellverband. After finishing law school in 1985, he became a judge in Saarbrücken. In 1986, he left his position as a judge in order to work as an in-house attorney-at-law at the German Chemical Industry Association in Bonn and Frankfurt from 1986 to 1989.