New Center to Promote U.S.-German Ties

Four years after U.S. troops departed this no-longer-divided city, the Yanks came back Friday to secure one last beachhead with the inauguration of the American Academy in Berlin.

Although the cultural center in an elegant lakeside villa was envisioned more as a meeting place for writers and artists, the academy’s politically minded founders swiftly established their intention to use it as an instrument of the U.S.-German strategic alliance.

American soldiers are no longer needed to police the Cold War frontier that ran through this city less than a decade ago, but collaboration among politicians and strategists from the most powerful countries in Europe and the world will always be necessary to tackle regional threats.

“How do we visualize the future of Russia? We can’t have a black hole at our border,” former Secretary of State Henry A. Kissinger, the academy’s German-born honorary chairman, observed in his enumeration of the security risks still threatening Europe.

Richard C. Holbrooke, the special U.S. ambassador for the smoldering conflicts in the former Yugoslav republic, pointed to the recent NATO threat of airstrikes against Serbian forces in Kosovo province as a demonstration of the concerted U.S.-German commitment to peace.

The Kosovo crisis called on Germany’s new Social Democratic government under Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder to back up its election promises of continuity in foreign relations even before Schroeder took office. Because former Chancellor Helmut Kohl was still in power a month ago when the North Atlantic Treaty Organization sought a go-ahead from its member nations to threaten Belgrade, the Yugoslav capital, Holbrooke had to work the important back channels to ensure support from Schroeder.

The academy was inspired by fears that U.S. influence would erode in Germany and in a Europe intent on unifying.

Holbrooke was ambassador to Germany in 1994, when the last U.S. troops patrolling Berlin as part of the Allied postwar agreements pulled out. Their departure, though heralded as evidence of the new Germany’s reliability and independence, removed a nearly 50-year-old bridge of friendship and cooperation with the Berlin public born of the emotional intensity of the 1948-49 airlift.

Although Germany and the United States remain linked in NATO and other organizations, the founders felt that an institution committed to nurturing social ties was needed.

Schroeder’s chief cultural advisor, Michael Naumann, illustrated the American diplomats’ fears that mutual German-American interest has faded.

Not only do American newspapers and television carry little news about this European powerhouse, but there are less than 600 graduate students of Germanic studies at U.S. universities, Naumann said. German language study has fallen dramatically, even among the 54 million Americans of German descent, he added.

Naumann said the academy also was needed to counter a new wave of anti-American sentiment among Germans fostered by “cultural American imperialism” delivered through vapid television programming and distorted media focus on President Clinton’s sex scandal.

The academy occupies an estate that was seized by the Nazis when its owner, Hans Arnhold, fled with his family to the United States in the 1930s. It housed Adolf Hitler’s finance minister and, after the war, Russian troops. Later, it was used by U.S. servicemen for rest and recreation.