Helmut Schmidt Fellowship

The scholarship is awarded once a year to a renowned German scientist or political expert for a stay at the GMF in Washington D.C. It promotes the research on transatlantic relations and the European Union with a focus on foreign and security policy or economic and financial issues. For the first time in 2021, an American Fellow had also the opportunity to stay at the GMF in Berlin. You can find the open Call for Applications for a German and American Fellowship 2023 here.

The journalist of the Tagesspiegel and author Christoph von Marschall had been the first Helmut Schmidt Fellow at the GMF in Washington, DC. The second fellowship has been awarded to Gerald Schneider, Chair of International Politics at the University of Konstanz. His research focused on the transatlantic partnership and the crisis of the West. The renowned international security and transatlantic relations expert Markus Kaim (German Institute for International and Security Affairs, SWP) was Helmut Schmidt Fellow in the academic year 2019/2020. Markus Ziener, author and professor of journalism and communication at the HMKW University of Applied Sciences for Media, Communication and Management in Berlin, had been in Washington, DC, from September 2021 until January 2022. Foreign policy and transatlantic expert Scott Cullinane had been as first American Fellow in Germany at GMF in Berlin from October 2021 to February 2022 and focused his research on Germany’s economic and political relationship with Visegrád countries. He is the executive director and co-founder of the U.S.-Europe Alliance and also a visiting fellow at the National Security Institute at George Mason University’s Antonin Scalia Law School.

The Helmut Schmidt Fellowship 2022 has been awarded to the director of AGORA European Green Deal Verena Ringler and to foreign and transatlantic policy expert Dr. George Bogden. He will be joining GMF in Berlin from summer to fall 2022 and is strategy and policy fellow with the Smith Richardson Foundation, senior visiting researcher at Bard College, and a law clerk at the U.S. Court of International Trade in New York. He will focus on the legacy of the Budapest Memorandum on security assurances and connect this historical chapter to wider debates about the future of the international order under the leadership of the transatlantic community. Verena Ringler will be joining GMF in Washington, DC, from spring to summer 2023. She is a European and transatlantic strategy expert and developer of projects at the intersection of diplomacy and society. She will examine ways to advance cross-sectoral green transition and identify hands-on opportunities for transatlantic climate action leadership.“