Staff confirmed: Guttmann wants Biden as ambassador to Berlin

The White House has officially confirmed that University President Guttmann will be the US ambassador to Berlin. Great importance is attached to the character of German-American relations.

The US government has officially confirmed that university president Amy Guttmann will become the new ambassador to Germany. The White House has announced that President Joe Biden will nominate the 71-year-old political scientist to be ambassador to Berlin.

The staffing has yet to be confirmed by the US Senate, which could take a few more weeks or even a few months. Gottman would then be the first woman to be sent to the Federal Republic as United States Ambassador. Great importance is attached to the new beginning in German-American relations. The ratio reached a low point under former President Donald Trump.

The job has been vacant for more than a year

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

Gottman called it “a great and extraordinary honor” to be nominated for such an “important position”. It aspires to represent the values ​​and interests of the United States vis-à-vis “one of our closest and most important European allies”. Until confirmed by the Senate, she will retain her position as university president.

And the media had reported in the middle of the week that Biden wanted to appoint the university’s president as a new ambassador to Germany. This was later confirmed by government departments in Berlin. Since taking office as president, Biden has not yet announced his candidacy for the post of US ambassador to one of the G7 countries.

The position of ambassador in Berlin has remained vacant since the departure of controversial ambassador Richard Grenell in June 2020.

Grenell, a staunch supporter of former President Trump, has long been offended in Germany with his often loud ads and confrontational behaviour. He regularly angered the host country with sharp criticism, including the nuclear deal with Iran and German defense spending.