"I was a critic of the previous administration for those occasions in which I felt they had violated our values and I came in [to office] with a healthy scepticism about how our various programmes were structured," Obama told the press conference in Berlin's chancellery.
"Wherever there is a desire, there is also a way, and this should be our guiding principle here," Merkel said after talks at the chancellery in Berlin.
Angela Merkel's chancellery lies just beyond the Reichstag.
Napoleon later paraded through it, as did the Nazis with their torches after seizing power in 1933, with glitterati looking on from the balcony of the Adlon hotel on the embassy's eastern side.Looking in the opposite direction is the land, unmarked but for a tiny plaque, where Adolf Hitler's bunker and chancellery once sprawled.
It is 16 years since, as a far-left youngish Socialist, he (jokingly?) rattled the railings of the federal chancellery in Bonn shouting, "Let me in".
Bodo Hombach, former head of Mr Schröder's chancellery with whom Mr Lafontaine constantly clashed, was unqualified for the job and steeped in duplicity and intrigue (no examples given).Mr Lafontaine allows his thirst for revenge to show through more when talking of Mr Schröder, his one-time friend, turned deadly rival.
But for most of the past year or two the chancellery has seemed to want to have as little to do with the war as possible.
He recently quoted Mrs Merkel as saying that Germany was about to put in place a policy of expelling gypsies just like France's, which drew a sharp denial from the chancellery.
The two are at opposite ends of a furious debate over energy security and relations with Russia.The haste with which Mr Schröder hopped from the chancellery to chair the shareholders' committee of the Nord Stream pipeline, planned to run on the Baltic seabed, reflects both his own views (he once called Vladimir Putin a "flawless democrat") and his party's longstanding policies.
If Mrs Merkel is forced to rely on opposition votes to enact the most important law of her chancellery she will be weakened.In 2001 her predecessor as chancellor, Gerhard Schröder, could not construct a majority with votes from his SPD-Green coaloneon alone for sending troops to Macedonia.
