Gutmann becomes US ambassador in Berlin | Current America | DW
The post of US ambassador to Germany has been vacant since the departure of former President Donald Trump’s Richard Grenell in June 2020. Now the Senate in Washington gave the green light by a vote of 54 to 42 for President Joe Biden’s nomination of Amy Gutmann. He had already decided in July last year in favor of the renowned political scientist, who has headed the elite University of Pennsylvania (UPenn) in the east coast metropolis of Philadelphia since 2004. Instead of a quick move by the 72-year-old to Berlin, a stalemate followed.
The opposition Republicans in the Senate blocked Gutmann’s confirmation for months. The background was in particular the dispute over the Baltic Sea pipeline Nord Stream 2, which is supposed to bring Russian gas to Germany. Biden is an opponent of the pipeline, which is once again the focus of attention in the current Ukraine crisis. According to his own statement, he does not want to burden the relationship with ally Germany, which has been shaken under Trump, with sanctions.
Gets a boss: the US embassy, located directly at the Brandenburg Gate in Berlin (archive)
Gutmann becomes the first woman to become the United States Ambassador to Germany. Your official accreditation will be carried out by Federal President Frank-Walter Steinmeier.
German-Jewish roots
For Gutmann, her posting to Germany is, so to speak, a return to her roots: her Jewish father, who came from Feuchtwangen in Franconia (Bavaria), fled Nazi Germany with his family to India in 1934. He later moved to the USA, where Gutmann was born in November 1949 in New York.
You may be at Harvard and the London School of Economics – and prevent you from pursuing an academic career. She taught at the elite Princeton University for three decades before becoming President of UPenn in 2004, which, like Harvard and Princeton, belongs to the so-called Ivy League of prestigious universities in the north-east of the USA.
The professor has published on topics such as democratic theory, identity politics, political ethics, education and healthcare. In 2009, then-US President Barack Obama appointed her to chair a bioethics committee. In 2018, Fortune magazine named her one of the “50 Greatest Leaders in the World”.
wa/rb (afp, dpa, rtr)