“Instead of putting up with this, I whispered to him that we should shake hands again,” he writes. “As soon as the words left my mouth, I shook my head towards myself. “How can I forget what kind of effect he wanted to achieve… he wanted to give people something to talk about with his actions.”

In another quote, Ms Merkel explained how this happened.He asked the Pope for advice on how to deal with politicians on the global stage, with an apparent reference to Mr. Trump.

“Without naming names, I asked him how he would deal with fundamentally different views in a group of prominent personalities,” he wrote.

“He understood me right away and gave me a clear answer: ‘Bend, twist, bend but make sure it doesn’t break.’ “I like this view.”

Freiheit is a highly anticipated memoir in Germany and was co-written by Ms Merkel and her close adviser Beate Baumann. Before the excerpts were published in Die Zeit, details of the book’s contents were kept secret.

Mrs. Merkel also defended herself in the book Refusal to give Ukraine a path to NATO membership in 2008He warned that it would be “playing with fire”

“At the time, only a minority of Ukraine’s population supported the country’s membership in NATO,” he wrote. “A deep rift has formed in the country.”

“No other NATO candidate country had such ties with Russian military structures,” he said, referring to the Russian Navy being based in Russia. CrimeaPeninsula controlled by Ukraine until Russian annexation in 2014.