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The Munich Security Conference Supplement
The 48th Munich Security Conference will take place at the Bayerische Hof in Munich from February 3rd to 5th, attracting a smattering of the world's top strategic defense thinkers and policy makers to discuss the most pressing topics confronting the defense policy world.
The 2012... read more >>
The American Academy in Berlin Launches New Website
The American Academy in Berlin re-launched its website after six months of close collaboration with the talented programmers and designers of the Berlin-based agency Compuccino. Over the last few years, the Academy's online presence has become an increasingly important aspect of our work vis a vis the Academy's public program and blog, online media... read more >>
What Germans Do Not Understand about America
One day after President Obama's State of the Union address, Philip D. Murphy, the US Ambassador to Germany, was at the American Academy to deliver a lively and wide-ranging lecture on "What Germans Do Not Understand about America." Americans are at root an optimistic people, Murphy noted, regardless of the nation's current economic condition. Most Americans, now as before, he said,... read more >>
Announcing the Spring 2012 Fellows
A festive January 17 evening welcomed the spring 2012 Berlin Prize Fellows to their semester on the Wannsee. Opening remarks were delivered by the United States Ambassador to Germany, Philip D. Murphy, and the welcoming talk by Klaus Reichert, honorary president of the Deutsche Akademie für Sprache und Dichtung, in Darmstadt. The American Academy in Berlin is proud to welcome the following... read more >>
Voices in the Dream Palace: Dramatic Language in Pre-Code Movies
The films made during the half decade between 1929-1934 mark the triumph of the talking picture format, which began in 1927 with Al Jolson's Jazz Singer. Films of the early talkie era were the product of a culture ravaged by the Depression, a growing sense of liberated cynicism, and, most importantly for Geoffrey O'Brien, a Bosch Fellow at the Academy, an environment prior to the enforcement... read more >>
Kindness: A Novel in Progress
Prize-winning, bestselling author Adam Haslett (You Are Not A Stranger Here; Union Atlantic) is not yet finished with the novel he has been working on while at the Academy this fall as the Mary Ellen von der Heyden Fellow in Fiction. The title of his budding book, Kindness, reflects not only an overarching narrative theme, but as well the author's willingness to share a few... read more >>
Memorial Mania!
Ten years after 9/11, and six years after the opening of the Holocaust Memorial Berlin, the American Academy in Berlin held a symposium to deliberate "the memorial" as a form of memory culture and as a site of clashing political strategies. Questions by a panel of distinguished experts included, Does a memorial heed our changing perceptions of “the event” over time, or... read more >>
The Economics of Nature
Twenty years ago, Peter Seligmann, the chairman and CEO of Conservation International (CI), visited a village of the Kayapo people, an ethnic Brazilian tribe. The Kayapo once inhabited lands that reached into the outer rung of the country, but development has pushed them ever further into the interior. Nevertheless, ten thousand ethnic Kayapo still live on an astounding 20 million acres of... read more >>
A. Michael Hoffman Elected Chairman
A. Michael Hoffman, co-founder and chairman of the London-based private equity partnership Palamon Capital Partners, has been elected chairman of the American Academy in Berlin. The Academy was founded by the legendary late diplomat Richard C. Holbrooke, who was also its longstanding chairman when not in government. Mr. Hoffman succeeds Karl M. von der Heyden and Dr. Henry A. Kissinger, who... read more >>
Returning the Past
A nineteenth-century sculpture believed to have vanished during the Second World War has been rediscovered on the grounds of the American Academy in Berlin. The sculpture, Albrecht Dürer als Knabe (Albrecht Dürer as a Boy), made by Friedrich Salomon Beer (1846-1912) in the early 1870s, became part of the Nationalgalerie der Staatlichen Museen zu Berlin in 1878, and shortly thereafter... read more >>