Two native Berliners, forced out by the Nazis, have returned with a $3 million gift to help open an American research academy in the villa where they met.
The money from Stephen and Anna-Maria Kellen of New York, combined with other grants, will enable the American Academy in Berlin to open its doors to inaugural fellows in March, chairman Richard C. Holbrooke, former U.S. Ambassador to Germany, said Wed-nes-day.The academy is meant to be a "living symbol" of the close ties forged between Berlin and the United States since the end of World War II, a connection that Mayor Eber-hard Diepgen noted with concern has been "getting thinner and thinner" since the withdrawal of U.S. troops in 1994.
"This is an attempt to show there is a post-Cold War relationship" based on cultural and intellectual exchange, Holbrooke said.
Before the Nazi rise to power, Berlin was considered one of the world's great centers for science and research, its universities producing numerous Nobel Prize winners including Albert Einstein and Max Planck.
"At the turn of the century, more Americans studied for their Ph.D.s at the University of Berlin (now Humboldt University) than at Harvard and Yale together," said the academy's president Everette Dennis. "That's no longer true. The idea is to try and reinvigorate some of that."
The privately funded academy will be housed in a lakeside, 40-room villa built more than 100 years ago at Wannsee.
It was owned by Mrs. Kellen's father, a prominent Jewish banker named Hans Arnhold who left Berlin with his family in 1933, just after Adolf Hitler's rise to power.
Stephen Kellen, who is not Jewish, was sent to London in the 1930s for a Berlin bank and moved to the United States in 1940 with his wife-to-be, joining her father's bank.
"Political events and fate forced me to America," he said. "I became a good New Yorker, but I remained a good Berliner. New York is a world-class city. Berlin was and will be again."
The house was confiscated by the German government and occupied by Hitler's economics minister, Walther Funk, until the Red Army arrived in 1945. The U.S. Army used it as a recreation center until the Allies pulled out of Berlin in 1994.
The city of Berlin, which now owns the building, has agreed to provide it rent-free for 35 years, Dennis said.
Modeled after similar academies in other cities, the Berlin institution will award 15 to 20 Berlin Prize fellowships annually to Americans.