Personnel confirmed: Gutmann wants Biden as an ambassador in Berlin


Status: 03.07.2021 00:08

The White House has officially confirmed: University President Gutmann is to become the US ambassador in Berlin. Great importance is attached to the personality of the German-American relations.

The US government has officially confirmed that University President Amy Gutmann is to become the new ambassador to Germany. The White House announced that President Joe Biden would nominate the 71-year-old political scientist for the post of ambassador in Berlin.

The personnel has yet to be confirmed by the US Senate, which could take a few more weeks or even a few months. Gutmann would then be the first woman to be sent to the Federal Republic as a US ambassador. Great importance is attached to the personality for the new beginning in German-American relations. The ratio had reached a low point under ex-President Donald Trump.

Post vacant for over a year

Gutmann is the daughter of a Jewish father who fled Nazi Germany in 1934 and has been president of the elite University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia since 2004. She studied at Harvard and the London School of Economics and later taught at Princeton University. In 2009 the then US President Barack Obama appointed her chairman of a bioethics commission. In 2018, Fortune magazine named her one of the “50 Greatest Leaders in the World”.

The media had already reported in the middle of the week that Biden wants to make the university president the new ambassador in Germany. This was then confirmed by Berlin government circles. Since taking office as president, Biden had not yet announced a nomination for a US ambassadorial post in a G7 country.

The ambassadorial post in Berlin has been vacant since the controversial ambassador Richard Grenell left in June 2020.

Grenell, an ardent supporter of the former President Trump, was always offended in Germany with his often brash announcements and his confrontational demeanor. He regularly angered his host country with sharp criticism, including the nuclear deal with Iran and German defense spending.



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