At a Berlin event coinciding with the release of his new book, "Vermächtnis - die Kohl-Protokolle" ("Legacy - the Kohl Protocols"), Heribert Schwan defended the decision to publish despite a challenge from lawyers representing Helmut Kohl.

The book is based on 600 hours of interviews with Germany's longest-serving chancellor, conducted between 2001 and 2002, and includes some candid opinions on key figures such as current Chancellor Angela Merkel and former Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev.

A court ruled last December that the tapes were Kohl's property, a decision unsuccessfully challenged by Schwan; however, the appeal provided enough time to finish the book and back up the old audio cassettes.

"I would never have signed a confidentiality agreement," Schwan told reporters on Tuesday. His lawyer, when asked whether the publication amounted to intellectual property theft, said that the court case only concerned the ownership of the original tapes, not the rights to use the material.

Furthermore, Schwan - who was ghostwriter for three official volumes of Kohl's memoirs before falling out with the Christian Democrat's second wife, Maike Kohl-Richter - claimed that he had never signed a contract with Kohl, but rather with the publisher arranging the memoirs.

Table manners, ghosts in Leipzig, cash at the Kremlin

Despite the potential for a fresh legal challenge, 100,000 copies have been printed by publishers Heyne-Verlag; distribution began on Tuesday. Excerpts from the book were also printed in this week's edition of news magazine Der Spiegel.

Kohl was critical of his former environment minister and protege from the former communist East Germany, current Chancellor Angela Merkel, during his talks with Schwan a decade ago. Kohl turned on Merkel during the expenses scandal that toppled him in 1999.

"Ms Merkel couldn't even hold her fork and knife properly," Kohl, now 84 and in poor health, is quoted as saying in the book. "She hung around at state dinners so that I had to repeatedly tell her to pull herself together."

The Christian Democrat former chancellor also warned against overplaying the significance of public protests around the Nikolaikirche church in Leipzig ahead of the fall of the Berlin Wall and collapse of the Soviet Union.

"It would be wrong to pretend that the Holy Ghost had suddenly descended over Leipzig and changed the world," the German chancellor during reunification said. "Gorbachev went through the books and had to concede that the game was up and that he could not prop up the regime."

Schwan on Tuesday said that he harbored no ill feeling toward Kohl, either in the current legal dispute, or at the end of their official collaboration on the fourth volume of his memoirs. Schwan portrays Maike Kohl-Richter as the reason that the relationship came to an end, calling the former chancellor's second wife his "nemesis."

msh/mkg (AFP, dpa)