Merkel, 70, appears to have no significant doubts about the major decisions of her 16 years as German leader, whose major challenges included the global financial crisis, Europe's debt crisis, the 2015-16 influx of refugees and the COVID-19 pandemic.
True to form, her book Freedom offers a matter-of-fact account of her early life in communist East Germany and her later career in politics, laced with moments of dry wit.
Merkel served alongside four US presidents, four French presidents and five British prime ministers. But it is perhaps her dealings with Russian President Putin that have drawn the most scrutiny since she left office in late 2021.
Merkel recalls being kept waiting by Putin at the Group of Eight summit she hosted in 2007 - "if there's one thing I can't stand, it's unpunctuality."
And she recounts a visit to the Russian Black Sea resort of Sochi that year in which Putin's labrador appeared during a photo opportunity, although Putin knew she was afraid of dogs.
Putin appeared to enjoy the situation, she writes, and she didn't bring it up - keeping as she often did to the motto "never explain, never complain."
The previous year, she recounts Putin pointing to wooden houses in Siberia and telling her poor people lived there who "could be easily seduced," and that similar groups had been encouraged by money from the US government to take part in Ukraine's Orange Revolution of 2004 against attempted election fraud.
Putin, she says, added: "I will never allow something like that in Russia."
Merkel says she was irritated by Putin's "self-righteousness" in a 2007 speech in Munich in which he turned away from earlier attempts to develop closer ties with the US.
She said that appearance showed Putin as she knew him, "as someone who was always on guard against being treated badly and ready to give out at any time, including power games with a dog and making other people wait for him."
"One could find this all childish and reprehensible, one could shake one's head over it - but that didn't make Russia disappear from the map," she writes.
As she has before, Merkel defends a much-criticised 2015 peace deal for eastern Ukraine that she helped broker and her government's decisions to buy large quantities of natural gas from Russia. And she argues it was right to keep up diplomatic and trade ties with Moscow until she left power.
The book details there was no warmth between Donald Trump and the former German chancellor. (AP PHOTO)
Merkel concluded after first meeting with Obama in 2008 that they could work well together. More than eight years later, during his last visit as president in November 2016, she was one of the people with whom she discussed whether to seek a fourth term.
There was no such warmth with Trump, who had criticised Merkel and Germany in his 2016 campaign. Merkel says she had to seek an "adequate relationship ... without reacting to all the provocations."
She called Britain's vote to leave the EU in 2016 a "humiliation" for the bloc and the question of whether she should have made more concessions to the UK "tortured me."
"I came to the conclusion that, in view of the political developments inside the country at the time, there would have been no acceptable possibility for me to prevent Britain's way out of the European Union from outside," Merkel says.
