The lakeside villa that now houses the American Academy in Berlin was once the home of distinguished banker Hans Arnhold, his wife Ludmilla, and their family. Their home had served in the 1920s as an important salon for many Berlin artists, musicians, intellectuals, and members of the beau monde. The history of the estate mirrors Berlin’s own tumultuous experience during the twentieth century.

Forced to emigrate in the 1930s, the Arnhold family moved to New York City, where Hans Arnhold re-founded his banking partnership, Arnhold & S. Bleichroeder.

The villa in Berlin was then appropriated by Walther Funk, the Third Reich’s Minister of Economics and later the Reichsbank’s president.

In 1953 the city of Berlin used the Arnhold estate to house refugees from the east. After the Arnhold family regained legal ownership of the property, the house was sold to the Federal Republic of Germany, in 1958.

From the 1960s until after the fall of the Berlin Wall, the residence was used by the US Army as a recreation center, and for decades it was a lively meeting point for political officials and Americans living in Berlin.

When Ambassador Richard C. Holbrooke proposed the idea of an American Academy in Berlin, he went to see Stephen and Anna-Maria Kellen about the home in which Mrs. Kellen (a daughter of Hans Arnhold) had grown up.  

It was through a generous founding gift from Anna-Maria and Stephen M. Kellen and the family of Hans and Ludmilla Arnhold that the estate could be beautifully renovated. The Academy opened its doors in September 1998.

The Hans Arnhold Center continues the tradition of intellectual and cultural discourse begun by Hans Arnhold and his wife Ludmilla.

The back of the Hans Arnhold Center overlooks the Wannsee and is situated next to the American International Yacht Club of Berlin. Photo: Hornisher

The Fall 2010 Berlin Journal

The fall 2010 issue of the Berlin Journal features Martin Indyk on President Obama’s foreign policy; an early draft of Rivka Galchen’s opening to her novel Atmospheric Disturbances; James Wood on atheism in the modern novel; original photographs by Camilo José Vergara; H. C. Erik Midelfort on the Enlightenment’s inroads into Protestant Germany; David Gelernter on the “e-book plague”; Todd Gitlin on journalism’s current crisis; Stanley Corngold on the interplay of Kafka’s legal and literary writings; Brigid Cohen on composer Stefan Wolpe’s early advocacy of cross-cultural education; David Abraham on attitudes toward immigration in Germany and the US; and Martin Jay on the intersection, via Marcel Duchamp, of the practice of photography and the medieval philosophical concept of Nominalism.

Print copies magazine are available free of charge in the reception area of the Hans Arnhold Center.

Please click here for more information about the Berlin Journal.

Getting to the American Academy

The American Academy in Berlin is located in Berlin's Wannsee district. S-bahns (S7 and S1) and regional trains run regularly throughout the day. The Academy is located in five-minute walking distance of the Berlin-Wannsee train station. For a map of the area or directions to the American Academy, located Am Sandwerder 17-19, please click to a Google map here.