The green tip was silent on Sunday evening, Monday morning and into Monday afternoon.

The otherwise Twitter-happy party also held back on social media.

Many Greens didn't answer the phone.

A press conference by the party leaders, which was announced for 2 p.m., was postponed.

At a quarter to three, Omid Nouripour and Ricarda Lang stepped in front of the microphones in Husum, where the federal executive board had met.

A few minutes earlier, the Federal Ministry for Family Affairs had sent an email.

"Anne Spiegel explains," it said.

"I decided today because of the political pressure to make the office of Federal Family Minister available." She does this to avert damage from the office.

Nouripour thanked Spiegel for "taking responsibility." "Despite all the toughness," the decision was "right."

Ricarda Lang spoke of the hardships associated with public office.

The personal statement from the previous evening "got under our skin".

Helen Bubrowski

Political correspondent in Berlin.

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Heike Schmoll

Political correspondent in Berlin, responsible for “Bildungswelten”.

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Federal Foreign Minister Annalena Baerbock spoke of the resignation of Family Minister Anne Spiegel.

"Anne Spiegel has gone through an extremely difficult, personally unbelievably difficult time," said the Green politician on Monday afternoon at the sidelines of an EU meeting in Luxembourg.

"Today is not only a political, but also a personal step for you, which I think makes it clear how brutal politics can be."

Visibly nervous and agitated, Spiegel appeared before the press on Sunday evening to make a statement that had been announced almost an hour beforehand.

Quite a few had expected a declaration of resignation, but this did not happen.

Hesitating, struggling for composure and with long pauses, she seemed to be struggling with every word.

She will now "give private details," she said, and then she reports on her husband, who suffered a stroke in 2019 and has had to avoid stress ever since.

The corona pandemic was “an insane challenge” for her family, which left clear marks on the three primary school children and the daycare child.

"Now I have to tie it up somehow"

In this phase, the then Minister for Family Affairs in Mainz not only expected herself to be the top candidate for the state elections, but also temporarily took over the Ministry of the Environment at the beginning of 2021.

In retrospect, the 41-year-old woman sees this step as a mistake: "It was too much", it "brought us across the border as a family".

And it was a mistake to go on vacation at all and stay away for so long.

The family urgently needed the vacation and therefore they went to France for four weeks ten days after the flood disaster.

You didn't make the decision easy for yourself, but then decided that the family urgently needed this holiday.

In doing so, she reveals a basic pattern in her argumentation that was already evident in her text messages after the flood disaster: her own state of mind and that of her family was more important to her than the fate of the flood victims.

And she used tremendous emotional pressure to justify a questionable role for a politician.

At the same time, she was under enormous tension on Sunday evening, it was written all over her face.

At the end of her statement she faltered again.

she paused

looked searchingly at an employee and whispered questioningly whether she hadn't forgotten anything.

Then she looked to the side and said "Now I have to tie it up somehow".

The atmosphere in the hall froze while Spiegel collected himself and said in a louder voice and full of helplessness: "I would like to expressly apologize for the mistakes".

It was a communication disaster that her ministry apparently did not know how to prevent.

Spiegel came back from vacation once – for an on-site appointment in the Ahr Valley.

She did not connect to the cabinet meetings digitally, as initially stated, but was represented.

She received the request on Saturday during a trip to Poland.

The cabinet meetings were listed in her calendar, but she was only able to have the minutes checked on Sunday, which showed that she was not there.

Did she really lose track of being present at those memorable sessions?

But she was always available, Spiegel assured her.