History

Horst Köhler, former German Federal President and IMF Managing Director, was born during World War II in German-occupied Poland (22 February 1943). His family fled the Red Army in 1944 and came to Markkleeberg (close to Leipzig), which was located in the Soviet occupation zone after the end of the war. In 1953, Horst Köhler’s family escaped via West Berlin to the Federal Republic of Germany where Horst Köhler passed through various refugee shelters before his family found a home in Ludwigsburg, Baden-Württemberg (1957).

Köhler graduated in economics (1969), began working for the Federal Ministry of Economics (1976), and earned a PhD (1977). Later, (1990) he became State Secretary and participated in negotiations such as the Maastricht Treaty. 

From 1993 to 1998 Horst Köhler was President of the German Association of Savings Banks. Thereafter (1998 - 2000), Horst Köhler served as the President of the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development. As Managing Director of the International Monetary Fund (2000 - 2004), he focused on debt relief and macroeconomic stability for African countries. Dr. Köhler was elected twice as President of the Federal Republic of Germany (2004 - 2010). He promoted a comprehensive approach to sustainability, including partnerships with African nations. 

Köhler attended the High Level Panel of Eminent Persons on the Post-2015 Development Agenda (2012), which nominally shaped the Sustainable Development Goals. Today, Horst Köhler is an active speaker and publicist, advocating for global changes in sustainability and economy, specifically the importance of a rules-based and equitable global economy.

Further Information at: https://www.horstkoehler.de/

Photo credit: https://www.bundespraesident.de/DE/amt-und-aufgaben/ehemalige-bundespraesidenten/horst-koehler/horst-koehler_node.html

State Secretary of the chancellor's office Jörg Kukies studied Economics at Harvard and received his Ph.D. of Finance in 2001 from the University of Chicago, Graduate School of Business. Beginning in 2001, Jörg Kukies worked at the leading global investment bank Goldman Sachs, holding the position of Co-CEO and Managing Director of the bank's Frankfurt branch from 2014 to 2018. Later in the same year, Dr. Kukies began his role as State Secretary in the Federal Ministry of Finance, working with management of the European market and the finance market. There, Dr. Kukies helped shape German fiscal policy and was involved in developing banking and financial regulations. 
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In December of 2021, Jörg Kukies took the position of State Secretary in the Federal Chancellery, specifically working in the Department of Economic, Financial and Climate Policy. Furthermore, he is part of the German delegation representing the Federation at the international G7 and G20 summits. Dr. Kukies is an active public speaker on economic sustainable development through current topics such as European integration.

Photo credit: https://x.com/joergkukies/photo

Ambassador Gutmann assumed her position as the U.S. Ambassador to Germany in February 2022. She was previously the University of Pennsylvania’s longest serving President from 2004-2022. She was appointed in 2009 by President Obama to chair the Presidential Commission for the Study of Bioethical Issues, a role she held for seven years.

Dr. Gutmann has championed life-transforming access to education along with innovative research leading to life-saving discoveries. She also has published widely on the practical value and the ethics of constitutional democracy, education, health care, and human rights. Her 17th book, co-authored with Jonathan Moreno, is on bioethics with an Afterword on “Pandemic Ethics” (2020).

Named by Fortune magazine in 2018 as one of the “World’s 50 Greatest Leaders,” Dr. Gutmann also has been honored with the Harvard University Centennial Medal (2003), the Carnegie Corporation Academic Leadership Award (2009), was named one of the “150 Women Who Shake the World” by Newsweek (2011), and received the Anti-Defamation League’s Americanism Award (2014), the Urban Affairs Coalition’s Doer Award (2015), the Lucretia Mott Award from Women’s Way (2017), the Philadelphia Chamber of Commerce’s William Penn Award (2018), the Philadelphia Inquirer Industry Icon Award (2018), and the Pennsylvania Society’s Gold Medal (2019).

Prior to her appointment at Penn, Dr. Gutmann served as Provost at Princeton University, where she was also the Laurance S. Rockefeller University Professor of Politics. She was Founding Director of the University Center for Human Values, a multidisciplinary center for teaching, scholarship, and public discussion of ethics and human values. At Princeton, she also served as Dean of the Faculty and was awarded the President’s Distinguished Teaching Award.

Dr. Gutmann graduated magna cum laude from Harvard-Radcliffe College. She earned her master’s degree in Political Science from the London School of Economics and her doctorate in Political Science from Harvard University. She is married to Columbia University professor Michael W. Doyle, and they have one daughter, a son-in-law, and two grandchildren.

Source and Photo Credit: https://de.usembassy.gov/ambassador/

Mr. Grossi assumed office as Director General of the International Atomic Energy Association (IAEA) in December 2019. He is a diplomat with over 35 years of experience in the field of non-proliferation and disarmament.

In 2013, he was appointed Ambassador of Argentina to Austria and Argentine Representative to the IAEA and other Vienna-based International Organizations.In 2019, Mr. Grossi acted as President Designate of the 2020 Review Conference of the Parties to the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons (NPT), and from 2014 to 2016 he served as president of the Nuclear Suppliers Group. In 2015, he presided over the Diplomatic Conference of the Convention on Nuclear Safety, securing unanimous approval for the Vienna Declaration on Nuclear Safety – a milestone in international efforts in the wake of the 2011 Fukushima Daiichi nuclear accident.

Mr. Grossi was Chief of Cabinet at the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW) in The Hague from 2002 to 2007. Prior to this, he held several positions within the Argentine Foreign Ministry after joining in 1985, including Chief of Embassy in Belgium and Luxembourg from 1998 to 2002, and Argentine representative to NATO from 1998 to 2001 and Argentine Alternate Representative to the Conference on Disarmament in Geneva. Ambassador Grossi led several UN Groups of Governmental Experts on Conventional Arms. Mr. Grossi is married and has eight children.  

Source and Photo Credit: https://www.iaea.org/about/rafael-grossi

Jürgen Trittin is a German Green politician. He was Federal Minister for the Environment, Nature Conservation and Nuclear Safety in the government of Chancellor Gerhard Schröder from 1998 to 2005 in Germany.

Jürgen Trittin was born in Bremen, Germany and graduated from the University of Göttingen with a degree in social economy. While he was a student, he was involved in the department of social economy with other students who were interested in Communism and Marxism. In 1980, he became a member of the Green Party and four years later he was appointed Minister for European Affairs in Lower Saxony. In 1998, he was appointed Federal Minister for Environment, Nature Conservation, and Nuclear Safety. He pushed the decision to abandon nuclear power by 2020. Following the 2013 national elections, he became a member of the Committee on Foreign Affairs in the German Bundestag and a member of the German delegation of the NATO Parliamentary Assembly. Jürgen Trittin has published a position on the Human Rights concerns in China’s Xinjiang region. He urges the Human Rights Council to use the newly published Assessment of Human Rights Concerns from the Office of the High Commissioner on Human Rights to investigate the suppression and mistreatment of Uyghurs.

Photo Credit: Wikipedia

Dr. Mounk is an Associate Professor of the Practice of International Affairs at Johns Hopkins University and a Senior Fellow at the Agora Institute. Dr. Mounk formerly lectured on Political Theory at Harvard University’s Government Department. He received his BA in History from Trinity College, Cambridge and his PhD in Government from Harvard University.

Liberal democracies across the globe are in serious decline, while far-right groups and authoritarian leaders—populists—are on the rise. Keynote speaker Yasha Mounk is a Johns Hopkins professor and go-to authority on why democracy is in perilous danger (or the forces behind “democratic deconsolidation”—his own term). His third book, titled The People vs. Democracy: Why Democracy Is in Danger & How to Save It offers a critically important rationale for this seismic change, weaving together historical, economic, and cultural analysis. While offering a grim diagnosis, Mounk is also hopeful—in engaging talks, he offers practical methods for everyday citizens to combat this trend, and rediscover why our rights, freedoms, and protections are worth fighting for.

His forthcoming book, The Great Experiment: How to Make Diverse Democracies Work, will draw on history and comparative politics to offer an unflinching analysis of why it is so hard to build fair, diverse democracies. It’s not an easy task to undo centuries of inequality, but, ultimately, The Great Experiment is optimistic: if we embrace the right principles and policies, we can build a truly common life.

Writing regularly for The Atlantic, The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Foreign Affairs, CNN, The Nation, and Die Zeit—and appearing on radio and television in over ten countries—Mounk also writes “The Good Fight” column: articles on populism, resistance, activism, and the changing face of democracy for Slate magazine. He’s also the host of a podcast, also called “The Good Fight,” which interviews political luminaries such as George Packer, Mark Blythe, Brian Klaas, and more.

Mounk’s second book, The Age of Responsibility: Luck, Choice, and the Welfare State, explores how our conservative embrace of ‘personal responsibility’ has actually prevented us from empowering individuals—and achieving greater equity. His first book, Stranger in My Own Country: A Jewish Family in Modern Germany, “started as a memoir of his experiences growing up as a Jew in Germany, but became a broader investigation of how contemporary European nations were struggling to construct new, multicultural national identities,” according to The New York Times. It was also translated into German (Echt, du bist Jude?).

Photo Credit/More information at https://www.yaschamounk.com/

Steven Klein was a fellow at the American Academy in Berlin and an assistant professor of political science at the University of Florida. He received a B.A. from the University of British Columbia and a Ph.D. from the University of Chicago. His work addresses questions about the nature of social domination in contemporary societies as well as the relationship between democratic action and the institutional structure of the welfare state and capitalism. His first book, The Work of Politics: Making a Democratic Welfare State (Cambridge, forthcoming), draws on the work of Max Weber, Hannah Arendt, and Jürgen Habermas to examine how social movements can use welfare institutions to transform structures of domination in society. His articles have appeared in Sociological Theory, American Political Science Review, American Journal of Political Science, and Journal of Politics, as well as the Washington Post and The Baffler. Klein has held fellowships from the European University Institute, Mellon Foundation, Canada Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council, and the “Transformations of the State” research cluster at the Universität Bremen.

Photo Credit/More information at: https://stevenmklein.com/

Joshua Yaffa is a journalist based in New York and Moscow. He completed his bachelor’s degree at Georgetown University’s Edmund A. Walsh School of Foreign Service, and holds master’s degrees injournalism and international affairs from Columbia University, where he was a visiting scholar at the Harriman Institute and taught at the journalism school for several years. Mr. Yaffa has been the Moscow correspondent for the New Yorker since 2016. He was formerly a fellow at New America. He has written for the Economist, New York Times, National Geographic, Bloomberg Businessweek, New Republic, and Foreign Affairs, where he was also an associate editor. For his work in Russia, Mr. Yaffa received a grant from the Pulitzer Center for Crisis Reporting and was a finalist for the Livingston Award, the largest all-media general-reporting prize in American journalism. He was a fellow at the American Academy in Berlin.

Photo credit/More information at: https://www.joshuayaffa.com/

Kimberly Marteau Emerson is a lawyer and civic leader. She is currently involved in promoting integration efforts in Germany, where she lives with her husband, the U.S. Ambassador to Germany, John B. Emerson. She also addresses the role of gender there by creating conversations around bringing women to the economic and political decision- making table. Mrs. Emerson sits on the Board of Directors of Human Rights Watch, where she takes an active role in its international governance, as well as its growing presence in Germany. She travels the world extensively for HRW-related issues.

Mrs. Emerson worked in President Clinton’s Administration as a senior political appointee and spokesperson for the U.S. Information Agency, now part of the State Department. She was twice an election observer in Nigeria, and has worked on relief projects in Sri Lanka post-tsunami and in New Orleans post Katrina. She serves on the Advisory Board of the USC Center on Public Diplomacy, is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations and the Pacific Council on International Policy, and serves on the Program Committee of Sunnylands. Mrs. Emerson has been deeply active in U.S.Presidential politics advising, staffing, and raising support for many Democratic candidates on the local, state, and federal levels. She has also received several awards for her civic engagement. Previously, Mrs. Emerson practiced law with Tuttle & Taylor, and worked in Hollywood as a businessand creative executive with Savoy Pictures and Sony Entertainment.

She holds degrees from UCLA (B.A.), UC Hastings College of the Law (J.D.) and l’Universite de Droit d’Aix-Marseille (D.E.S.U.). Mrs. Emerson speaks high-level French and conversational German. She is an avid tennis player, skier, and runner. She and her husband have three young adult daughters. 

Photo credit: https://www.berlin-losangeles.com/story/kimberly-emerson