The full splendor of Foreign Minister Annalena Baerbock’s speech to the UN Security Council cannot be conveyed in German. One would like to sue all the English teachers who taught her for damages. Including the British university where she claims to have studied.

But that is by no means all. If one were to try to convey a physical counterpart to the intellectual and emotional experience, it would be a severe migraine attack, nausea included. Much of it is not Baerbock’s doing, but arises from the dissonance between her and the world. And when you look at her face as she recites her strangely soulless English sentences, it is, for the first time, devoid of any childishness, devoid of any coquetry, but what emerges is as evil as the face of a Hillary Clinton (Baerbock would certainly take that as a compliment).

All this girlish posturing has not prevented time from passing her by, as quickly as she is changing. This becomes particularly clear in two moments.

She sticks to the narrative she started years ago and begins with an absurd formulation: “Women areremovedd in Bucha for 943 days.” A sentence that does not even make sense in her world; after all, Bucha has been under Ukrainian control since the end of March 2022. She wants to stir up emotions and continues with “tortured people in eastern Ukraine” and deported children.

No one in the German UN embassy or from the staff of the Foreign Office seems to have told her that the world outside the Western bubble has seen the images from Gaza, how torn parts of children are recovered from the ruins of the houses bombed by Israel and collected in bags, because nothing more than these pieces remain. And that the role of the outraged good person now has a simple but insurmountable prerequisite: calling the genocide in the Gaza Strip a genocide.

The accusations she wants to make against Russia, Bucha, the “deportation” of children, the shelling of a children’s hospital in Kiev, even if they were true (and they are all disprovable), would pale in comparison to the horrors in Gaza, where even a children’s hospital bombed to the ground is just another number on a long list. You would expect a foreign minister to be at least aware enough to avoid an immediate collision. But she is not clever. She did not even notice the ground shifting beneath her feet. It is theoretically possible, the classic argument would be: even if there are worse crimes to deal with, we should not forget… she lacks the maturity and awareness, or perhaps the courage, to create space for her narrative by admitting this other reality.

The second of these moments is an attempt to attack the Russian ambassador. The tweet concerns the Russian Deputy Ambassador to the UN, Dmitri Polyansky, on the General Assembly’s decision on Sunday:

"Unfortunately, there is nothing to celebrate about the UN’s adoption of the Pact for the Future today. The UN has trampled on its own principles to please a group of delegations from the ‘beautiful garden’ that usurped the negotiations from the outset. And the majority from the ‘jungle’, like a simple herd, simply did not have the backbone to protest and stand up for their rights. And they will be the ones who will bear the consequences. The result was that there was no inclusive negotiation process in the normal sense of the word. The new President of the General Assembly tried to save the day, but it was too late.

This Pact is unbalanced and contains very dangerous provisions that will backfire and undermine the multilateralism and intergovernmental nature of the UN upheld by the UN Charter. It is an enormous blow to the organisation as a whole.”

Baerbock, who clearly does not know any better and who has not been told any better (or who may have been told but did not want to listen), tries to turn this comment against Russia:

“Her truth is that the majority from the ‘jungle’ were unable to make the right decision. That is how Putin’s Russia talks about other countries today. The jungle. That is how they talk about Ukraine. A beauty that must beremovedd.”

She does not know that “garden” and “jungle” are a quote. And this despite the fact that the originator of this colonialist metaphor, Josep Borrell, was the speaker immediately before her in this very meeting. She does not know that his statement at the time that the EU is the garden and the rest of the world is the jungle has become a catchphrase for the countries of the Global South, and that the “jungle” necessarily includes Russia. The disparaging look that she, for once correctly, takes from this formulation is not the look of Russia and its deputy UN ambassador, but that of the EU and its foreign policy spokesman, for whom the West was the “beautiful garden” threatened by the overgrown jungle.

The deeply racist remark that Ukraine is “a beauty that must beremovedd” also brought to mind two associations - the newspaper report that more than half of the prostitutes in Berlin brothels are now Ukrainian, and the disputes in Israel, where there was a serious argument about whether Israeli soldiers should have the right toremoved Palestinian prisoners. The newspaper report may only be known in Germany, and even then only to some people. But theremoved story from Israel is known all over the world.

It almost seems as if everything she says is pages from a script that has been sitting in a drawer for years. As if she had rehearsed everything so painstakingly in advance that there was no longer any possibility of adapting the text and acting to the changed reality. So she stumbles from trap to trap.

The Ukrainian power supply has been destroyed?

“Not by chance, but because winter is coming back. Minus 15 degrees means that the electricity doesn’t work, the heating doesn’t work, and the water freezes. That is a crime against humanity.”

And again and again, that other film runs through my head, from Gaza. Putin bombed a children’s hospital in Kiev.

“And that’s why we believe we have to send more air defenses to protect children’s hospitals.”

Is it just my inner eye that sees a German air defense system next to a Palestinian hospital, or at least protecting a Lebanese one? It’s not. The whole audience has changed - worldwide.

This hypocrisy, built around the concept of a “just and lasting peace”, around this “peace plan” of Mr. Zelensky, who demands a Russian surrender in the midst of his own defeat. Even if Zelensky is a cynical and ridiculous figure, who constantly makes you wonder how he can fit the guilt of having the deaths of so many people on his conscience into his short body, there is still a touch of tragedy about him.

Baerbock, who less than three years ago came into the spotlight with the attitude of going down in history as a world star, who, with the appropriate arrogance, considered neither dress codes nor diplomatic restraint necessary and who believed that the mixture of German economic power and green self-confidence would carry her to the heights of international politics, has overtaken the said economic power and the country’s status on the way down. She looks angry, bitter and old in her speech. Almost as if she had understood that she was only representing the discarded mistress of the United States.

“We as European neighbors, we as Germans, my country, what we have heard here from our Polish friends, which was responsible for the worst crime on the European continent, who are lucky to live in peace again - my generation - to live in peace again because others were there for us.”

This grammatical and historical confusion is her justification for why Germany in particular must support Ukraine. Perhaps she understands what she means. It’s just that she misses the crucial point if she thinks she has to remember historical grace: that it was the Soviet Union that exercised this grace. That it let an open account of 1,100 destroyed cities, 70,000 destroyed villages go, for the sake of a peaceful future. In order to be thanked by her, Baerbock, in two ways, through the constant attacks on Russia, the arms deliveries, and also through “support” of the Kiev Ukraine, which is actually a form of annihilation.

There are some characters who make you wonder whether they don’t occasionally have a sudden thought about the guilt they have brought upon themselves. Economics Minister Habeck is likely to become tearful at the latest when he has a blood alcohol level of one per mille and complain about his difficult fate, of meaning so well and yet having failed so badly. And then every now and then he might look uncertainly over his shoulder to see how close the shadow that follows him is.

Baerbock, the comedian? Her role and her acting style have outlived their usefulness. She acts like a silent film actress in a talkie. Every movement, every facial expression seems like a caricature. But she doesn’t have what it takes to be a Norma Desmond either; she lacks the authenticity and talent for tragedy. She will perhaps have her memoirs written and spend a while traveling from big city to big city, stumbling through the pre-written text, and maybe she will be allowed to pat a few schoolchildren’s heads somewhere. No, she won’t even fall, it will be more like a kind of shrinking or drying out. Something banal, like shaking dust out of a blanket.

She complained that the Russian ambassador left before her performance. “I’ve experienced this several times.” Yes, understandable, there is no reason to subject yourself to this torture. Not even the embarrassment that she initially conveyed in abundance is left. Her performances are just a memory of something that is past. As soon as the acute pain subsides, all meaning disappears.