It is a personality with symbolic power: Amy Gutmann, daughter of a Jewish father who fled Nazi Germany, becomes the new US ambassador to Germany.
According to information from SPIEGEL from circles of the federal government and the US administration, US President Joe Biden will propose the current President of the University of Pennsylvania for the top diplomatic job in Berlin.
Federal President Frank-Walter Steinmeier is responsible for the personnel; the so-called agrément is a matter of form.
The State Department initially left an inquiry unanswered.
Gutmann has to be confirmed by the US Senate.
She would be the first woman to serve as the US ambassador to the Federal Republic.
With the decision, Biden obviously also wants to send a political signal and distance himself from his predecessor Donald Trump, who with Richard Grenell had sent a highly controversial figure to Berlin.
Grenell attracted attention in Berlin primarily through his provocative interviews and vacated his post early to serve Trump in Washington as intelligence coordinator.
Gutmann is an expert in political theory
Gutmann has a flawless biography as a scientist.
She studied at the London School of Economics and received her PhD from Harvard University in 1976.
Since 2004 she has been president of the University of Pennsylvania, an Ivy League university.
A month-long search comes to an end with Personalie Gutmann.
Within the Biden administration, many European experts had urged Grenell - who speaks no German - to send a proven German expert to Berlin.
The names mentioned included Biden's former Deputy Security Advisor Julianne Smith and the President of the German Marshall Fund, Karen Donfried.
However, Biden is now sending Smith to Brussels as a NATO ambassador, while Donfried becomes State Secretary for Europe in the Washington State Department.
The 71-year-old political scientist Gutmann taught before her tenure as President of the University of Pennsylvania at Princeton and is an expert on political theory.
Barack Obama appointed her in 2009 as chair of the government commission on bioethics.
Gutmann had already made public appearances with Biden in the past.
Great tasks await the ambassador
In Berlin, however, Gutmann will first have to deal with tangible political issues. The German-American relationship is strained by the dispute over the Nord Stream 2 pipeline, which is supposed to bring Russian gas to Europe and which the US government vehemently rejects. Even a visit by US Secretary of State Tony Blinken to Berlin last week could not resolve the dispute. After talks with German Foreign Minister Heiko Maas and Chancellor Angela Merkel, Blinken told SPIEGEL that sanctions were still on the table.
Relations with China are another sensitive point in German-American relations.
Biden has made it abundantly clear that he regards the Beijing regime as a rival.
Together with the Europeans, he wants to ensure that Chinese companies respect patent law and adhere to competition rules.
At the same time, he wants to prevent Chinese companies - and thus also the regime in Beijing - from gaining access to information networks in the West.
Biden and his team were therefore deeply upset when the EU Commission concluded a trade agreement with Beijing shortly before he took office on January 20.
In Washington this was seen as an unfriendly act to the new administration.
Relations suffered under Grenell
Gutmann, who was also acted as a possible education minister in the Biden cabinet, will also be busy fixing the atmospheric disturbances left by her predecessor Grenell.
Above all, he used his office to make a name for himself as a critic of the federal government and particularly sharply attacked Merkel's refugee policy.
He also called for a kind of conservative survey in Europe.
As soon as he was in office he gave an interview to the ultra-right online portal Breitbart and said: "I really want to strengthen other conservatives all over Europe." Former SPD leader Martin Schulz said that Grenell behaved like a "right-wing extremist colonial officer."
This danger does not exist with Gutmann. Her father Kurt was born in Bavaria and, as a young student, moved his siblings and parents to flee the Nazis to India. He later moved to the USA. "It is true that my entire family would have been wiped out had my father not done what he did," his daughter Amy said in a 2013 newspaper interview. On her initiative, one of the largest Holocaust archives in the world was set up at the University of Pennsylvania.