Amy Gutmann is to become the new US ambassador to Germany. Your family history is linked to a dark chapter in German history. Gutmann’s father comes from Feuchtwangen in Bavaria
Amy Gutmann, the president of the US elite university University of Pennsylvania, is to become the new ambassador of the United States to Germany. As the “Spiegel” first reported on Wednesday night, citing German and US government circles, US President Joe Biden Gutmann will propose for the post in Berlin. The person is also with Federal President Frank-Walter Steinmeier. However, its consent is a matter of form. According to information from the German Press Agency, the USA made a request for consent to the personnel at the German embassy in Washington on June 18. After an official nomination by Biden, the US Senate would still have to give its approval.
The 71-year-old political scientist has German-Jewish roots. Gutmann is the daughter of a Jewish father who fled Nazi Germany in 1934. Since 2004 she has been president of the private university in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, which is considered one of the best universities in the country. The UPenn abbreviated university belongs to the so-called Ivy League of prestigious universities in the northeast of the USA such as Harvard, Princeton and Yale. Gutmann would be the first woman to be sent to the Federal Republic as a US ambassador.
Amy Gutmann succeeds the controversial US ambassador Richard Grenell
The post of ambassador in Berlin has been vacant since the departure of the controversial ambassador Richard Grenell in June 2020. In July 2020, then President Donald Trump announced that he would make the retired Army Colonel Douglas Macgregor as Grenell’s successor. Macgregor was never confirmed by the US Senate. The embassy at the Brandenburg Gate has been temporarily headed by the ambassador Robin Quinville as chargé d’affaires since last year.
The appointment of a new ambassador is therefore almost eagerly awaited by the foreign politicians in Berlin. Trump supporter Grenell was always offended in Germany with his often brash announcements and his confrontational demeanor. In any case, the relationship between Washington and Berlin had deteriorated significantly in the Trump years.
Trump’s successor Joe Biden has made improved relations with the US’s traditional western allies such as Germany a core concern of his foreign policy. Among other things, Biden put Trump’s decision to withdraw thousands of US soldiers from Germany on hold.
One of the “50 Greatest Leaders in the World”
Gutmann’s contract as President of the University of Pennsylvania officially runs until 2022. She has received numerous awards. In 2011 Newsweek magazine named her one of the “150 women who move the world” and in 2018 Fortune magazine named her one of the 50 greatest leaders in the world.
Her father comes from Feuchtwangen in Bavaria and fled to India with his family as a student after the Nazis came to power in Germany in 1934. He later moved to New York, where he got married. Amy Gutmann was born in Brooklyn, New York in 1949, later studied political science at the elite Harvard University and taught at another elite university, Princeton, New Jersey, for almost three decades before moving to Pennsylvania.
The request for consent to Gutmann was submitted a few days before US Secretary of State Antony Blinken’s visit to Berlin last week. During the two-day visit, Blinken praised the partnership with Germany in the highest tones: “The United States has no better partner, no better friend in the world than Germany,” he said. In the past, the US would have said something like that about Britain.
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