Foreign policy: Annalena Baerbock’s grandfather Waldemar as souffleur

Annalena Baerbock’s frequent slips of the tongue have often been the cause of blasphemy: whether she wanted “a ridiculous Russia” in the press conference with Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov in January 2022 and narrowly missed out on being “faceless”; whether she will speak of “armoured vehicles” in February 2022, before the start of the war in eastern Ukraine; whether precedent-free becomes “presidentless”…

Salvos of laughter, scorn and ridicule, like those once experienced by Federal President Heinrich Lübke, are now sweeping through the Internet, except that at the time of his linguistic slip-ups, the second head of state of the Federal Republic was ill and on the way to dementia. But the foreign minister? A case for psycholinguistics.

In addition, corrections to her own CV have given her the reputation of being an impostor. And the numerous plagiarisms in her book “Now. “How we change our country” (Ullstein) did not promote the image of the Green politician, but rather damaged it.

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Now we find out more about her grandfather Waldemar Baerbock for the first time – and can speculate about depths in the minister’s subconscious. She didn’t keep her grandfather and his time as a soldier under Hitler a secret. On the contrary: she has repeatedly wanted to illustrate history with him and his life as a soldier in the past.

The fact that Waldemar Baerbock was a “Wehrmacht officer in the anti-aircraft repair (mot) 3 XI” was suggested by his granddaughter in her scrambled book that was supposed to present her political agenda. New for the interested public are details from his Wehrmacht files, which curious journalists from the “Bunten” discovered. We learn that Grandpa Waldemar was named a “dedicated soldier” by his superiors in 1941, and it is also said that he was “completely rooted in National Socialism.”

In 1944, Waldemar Baerbock was to be awarded the War Merit Cross with Swords. Under the Nazis, this was considered a high award for “special merits in operations under enemy weapons or for special merits in military warfare.” In Waldemar’s file you can find these ratings: “outstanding practical person with a lot of initiative” and “unconditional National Socialist”.

When asked, officials from the Foreign Office stated that their boss had not previously known about this file and that she was not aware of these documents.

When the Foreign Minister included her grandfather Waldemar in speeches and statements, she seemed proud and joyful at the same time. For example, in May 2021. At a conference at the US think tank Atlantic Council, she chatted cheerfully about the enlarged Europe, told how she stood next to the then Foreign Minister Joschka Fischer on the bridge in Frankfurt (Oder) in 2004 and took part in this “reunification of Europe”, i.e. the reunification of Europe. And then she rambled on in English: “And this was really the moment when I thought, wow, we are standing of the shoulders not only on Joschka Fischer, but also of our grandparents.”

Standing victoriously on the shoulders of our grandparents – wow! A woman has to figure it out first! Willy Brandt’s détente policy may have fallen by the wayside, but Annalena Baerbock sees herself proudly standing on the shoulders of her grandfather, who died in 2016 at the age of 103 and who once fought on that same bridge in Frankfurt (Oder), as she told the public. That was at the beginning of ’45.

Four years earlier he had marched east with the German army. She didn’t say anything about that. Historiography speaks of 27 million deaths in the Nazi war of conquest and annihilation in the Soviet Union. Extenuating circumstances for the foreign minister from the next generation? Only in the sense that historical events and historical contexts seem to be little familiar to her to this day.

The first reactions to the discovery of the files, however, are strange. Suddenly there was a big shrug of the shoulders everywhere. There is no power, is the tenor in the reader columns of the right-wing organ “Focus”, which otherwise never misses an opportunity to agitate, blaspheme and rage against any Green party. Franz Josef Wagner, the epistle writer on page 2 of “Bild,” also chimes in comradely and writes: “In almost every German family there is a grandfather who remains silent about the horrors of the Nazis.”

Don’t worry! We all didn’t know anything, and we didn’t want to know anything, that’s it. “I didn’t know anything,” Hubert Aiwanger belts out from the Bavarian lowlands. People’s well-being is surging again, the repression virus is alive – quite fitting for the resurgent fascists, right-wing extremists and right-wing populists.

But what if, a good 24 hours after Putin’s troops attacked Ukraine, the Foreign Minister says that Germany’s sanctions will “ruin Russia”? And what if she later cheerfully tells the Council of Europe that “we are fighting a war against Russia”? Is Grandpa Waldemar still on the road as the Foreign Minister’s prompter in January 2023?

The Foreign Minister has a very limited understanding of history. In a talk show, for example, she had tanks appear in front of the viewer’s eyes “like in the 19th century,” although such steel death machines were only used during the First World War. On Twitter, she elevated Nigeria to a former German colony, even though this African country had been conquered and subjugated by the British.

And then there is the granddaughter’s claim to world happiness, who is racing around the globe because without her, wars and conflicts cannot be solved and human rights are in danger. Is this self-aggrandizement also a legacy from Grandfather’s time as a master? Yes, Germany wants to make the world happy again and is arming itself for this purpose. Will instructive arrogance soon be followed by military action again? In any case, the German chief diplomat does not seem to rely solely on diplomacy, if one takes her militant language seriously, especially against Russia.

“I briefly slipped into a trench,” she told the “Tagesspiegel” in August 2021, when she initially launched a character assassination campaign against her critics because of the many plagiarisms in her book. Trench? Grandpa Waldemar sends his regards.

There’s been a lot of laughter about the constant slips of the tongue – the dark subconscious hasn’t been talked about yet. A task for psychologists.

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