Nevertheless it was greater than that, Mr. Schröder mentioned. “I had been chancellor. I couldn’t return to being a lawyer coping with rental contracts. I wanted a venture,” he mentioned. “One thing I knew the way to do and the place I might serve German pursuits.”
When Mr. Putin known as Mr. Schröder on his cellphone the evening of Dec. 9, 2005, he accepted the provide.
Many in Germany had been appalled. No chancellor earlier than him had taken a job in an organization managed by a overseas nation, not to mention one which had benefited from their help in workplace.
However the pipeline venture itself remained uncontroversial.
“The subsequent authorities continued with it seamlessly,” Mr. Schröder recalled. “No person within the first Merkel authorities mentioned a phrase in opposition to it. Nobody!”
Mr. Ischinger, who was Mr. Schröder’s ambassador to america and later ran the Munich Safety Convention, concurred.
“You’ll be able to’t blame Schröder for Nord Stream 1,” Mr. Ischinger mentioned. “Most German politicians, whether or not in authorities or in opposition, didn’t critically query this. Nobody requested whether or not we had been laying the muse for getting ourselves into an unhealthy dependence.”
Ms. Merkel, by way of a spokesperson, declined to remark for this text.
Nord Stream 1 took six years to plan and construct. In 2011, Mr. Schröder attended each opening ceremonies — one on the Russian finish, in Vyborg, together with Mr. Putin, Russia’s prime minister on the time, and the opposite on the German finish, in Lubmin, on the Baltic Sea, together with Ms. Merkel and Mr. Putin’s trusted ally, Dmitri A. Medvedev, Russia’s president on the time.