A renowned university president becomes the new American envoy in Berlin. The Germans are unlikely to be any more comfortable with her than with their predecessor, Richard Grenell, because they will have to deal with her arguments more seriously.
Amy Gutmann, the new US Ambassador to Berlin, here at a panel discussion on January 15, 2016.
It has been known since last summer that US President Joe Biden wants to send her to Berlin as ambassador. The Senate in Washington has now confirmed the personnel: 54 senators voted for Amy Gutmann, 42 against her. Political Berlin awaits her arrival with some anticipation: the noisy provocateur Richard Grenell sent by Donald Trump is now generally expected to be followed by a sensitive intellectual. The 72-year-old is still President of the University of Pennsylvania; business in Berlin is currently managed by career diplomat Clark Price.
Gutmann’s curriculum vitae and her personal environment are almost ideal for the academic milieu that Trump and many of his supporters are so suspicious of: After studying at the London School of Economics and Harvard, the political scientist taught at Princeton before she became the head of the university in 2004 of Pennsylvania, an Ivy League college. Her husband is a professor of law and international relations at Columbia University and her daughter is a professor of chemistry at Princeton.
Flawless academic career
As president, Gutmann managed to double her university’s assets to over ten billion dollars; In 2015, her annual salary is said to have been $3.3 million, reports the Philadelphia Inquirer. In the ideological battles that have roiled American universities for several years, Gutmann has come under fire from both sides: in the past she has been criticized by members of the campus police for lying on the ground with students to protest police violence protest. On the other hand, faculty members at the Faculty of African Studies complained that it failed to include people from ethnic minorities in its leadership team.
Ever since he took office, there has been talk of Amy Gutmann taking on a position in Biden’s administration. Among other things, she was under discussion as Minister of Education. From 2009 to 2018 she was chair of the US President’s Bioethics Commission; Barack Obama had appointed her to this office.
Gutmann is linked to Germany through her family history: in 1934 her father Kurt persuaded his parents and siblings to flee from Feuchtwangen in Franconia to what was then British India. In Germany, Kurt’s parents, who owned a shop, had been forced to hang a yellow Star of David in shop windows. The business was then boycotted. It was thanks to her father’s foresight – then a student in his early twenties – that her family was not wiped out, Gutmann told the student newspaper The Daily Pennsylvanian in 2013.
Central issues remain
The Germans shouldn’t necessarily have it any easier with Gutmann than with Grenell, because nothing will change in the central issues between the two allies. The biggest challenge facing both sides is the Ukraine crisis. Traditionally, Germany has taken a softer stance on Russia than many of its Western allies. Berlin is not only met with understanding in Washington.
Gutmann is likely to view the Nord Stream 2 pipeline, which is intended to bring gas from Russia to Western Europe, as critically as its predecessor Grenell. The fact that America holds its allies to account when it comes to opposing China is also unlikely to change. Trump’s bullies were able to declare the Germans unsatisfactory and thus ignore his demands. They will have to deal more seriously with the arguments of his successor.