On this week's Special Edition of the regular Kaffeepause, Dr. Steven E. Sokol is joined by Cameron Abadi, deputy editor at Foreign Policy, and Rüdiger Lentz, senior political advisor for the firm of Rud Pedersen. The two experts discussed the first three years of the Ampelkoalition and the outlook for Germany’s snap election in February.

Cameron Abadi is a deputy editor at Foreign Policy and co-host of FP’s Ones and Tooze podcast. He previously worked at the New Republic and Foreign Affairs and as a correspondent in Germany and Iran. His writing has appeared in Bloomberg Businessweek, the New Yorker, the New Republic, and Der Spiegel. He lives with his family in Berlin.
 
Rüdiger Lentz is currently working as a senior political advisor for the Nordic public affairs firm of Rud Pedersen in Berlin. Before that, he was the Executive Director of the Aspen Institute Germany from 2013 to 2020. From 2009 until 2013, he served as the Executive Director of the German American Heritage Foundation and Museum in Washington, D.C. Prior to that, he worked as a TV correspondent and magazine journalist for Der Spiegel, ARD Television, Rias Berlin, and Deutsche Welle for over three decades. During his tenure as Bureau Chief for Deutsche Welle in Washington, D.C., he was a Visiting Lecturer at Harvard University, the School of Foreign Service in Washington, and a regular guest on BBC, CNN, and C-Span. Mr. Lentz has been a long-time member of the Atlantik-Brücke and is a member of the German Council on Foreign Relations. He is also a founding member of the German American Business Council (GABC) in Washington, D.C., and the Chairman of the Shepard Stone Foundation in Berlin.

On this week's Kaffeepause, Dr. Steven E. Sokol is joined by ACG Fellowship alumna Miriam Hollstein, Chief Political Reporter for Stern.

Before this, Ms. Hollstein was the Chief Report from January 2022 to Septepmber 23 at T-Online in Berlin. Prior to this position, she served as the Chief Political Reporter for FUNKE Zentralredaktion from November 2020 to December 2021. She wrote for the Berliner Zeitung while still a student and worked as an editor for Internationale Politik. She worked as a foreign reporter for the Welt am Sonntag, and from 2006-2014 was a WELT-Gruppe’s domestic policy editor and reporter. From 2015 to 2020, she worked for the Bild am Sonntag, first as a domestic policy and then from 2018 as chief reporter of politics. Her reporting brought her into regular contact with the office of the German Chancellor. Since March 2020, she has worked as a freelance writer and moderator.

In 2009, she published the first graphic biography of Angela Merkel, entitled “Miss Tschörmanie,” together with illustrator Heiko Sakurai. She appears regularly on the German news program “Phoenix,” where she speaks on political and societal issues. She regularly travels internationally for reporting assignments. In addition, she was a 2005 Marshall Memorial Fellow, a 2008 ACG McCloy Fellow, and was recognized in 2015 by the DEFA Stiftung (German Film Corporation Foundation) for her contribution to preserving German film heritage.

On this week's Kaffeepause, Dr. Steven E. Sokol is joined by Melissa Eddy, Berlin Correspondent for the The New York Times. Ms. Eddy spoke in her own personal compacity. 

Melissa Eddy is a correspondent based in Berlin who covers German politics, social issues, and culture for The New York Times. Her most recent work has delved into the challenges of integrating one million refugees, the spate of Islamist terror attacks, and the legacy of a trove of Nazi-looted art.She has covered Germany’s green energy transformation and Chancellor Angela Merkel since she entered office in 2005. A Minnesota native fluent in German and French, she came to Germany as a Fulbright scholar in 1996. Before joining The International Herald Tribune, now the international edition of The New York Times, in 2015, she was a correspondent for The Associated Press in Frankfurt, Vienna, and the Balkans

On this week's Kaffeepause, Dr. Steven E. Sokol is joined by Malte Lehming, Opinion Writer for Tagesspiegel. 


Malte Lehming works as a writer for the Tagesspiegel, where he heads the opinion page. From late 2000 to 2005, he was the newspaper’s Washington bureau chief. He joined the Tagesspiegel in 1991 as foreign policy editor — focusing on security policy, transatlantic relations, and the Middle East. From 1989 to 1991, he worked as a personal assistant and speechwriter for former German Chancellor Helmut Schmidt. Mr. Lehming studied philosophy, German literature, and European history in Hamburg.

On this week's Kaffeepause, Dr. Steven E. Sokol is joined by Marc Felix Serrao, Editor-in-Chief in Germany for the Neue Züricher Zeitung.

Mr. Serrao has been the Head of the Berlin office since July 2017 and Editor-in-Chief of the Neue Züricher Zeitung in Germany since 2021. After military service, he studied political science in Berlin. In 2004/05, he was a Visiting Scholar at Columbia University in New York. He graduated in 2006.

Mr. Serrao worked for the Süddeutsche Zeitung from 2007 to 2016 - first as a trainee, then as deputy head of the society and style department. In 2015, he began a part-time Executive MBA at the Wissenschaftliche Hochschule für Unternehmensführung (WHU) and the Kellogg School of Management. From 2016 to 2017, he served as the Business editor of the Frankfurter Allgemeine Sonntagszeitung.

On this week's Kaffeepause, Dr. Steven E. Sokol is joined by Stephan Detjen, Chief Correspondent for Deutschlandradio. He also heads the station's capital city studio in Berlin. Previously, he worked as Deutschlandfunk's Editor-in-Chief in Cologne and as a legal policy correspondent in Karlsruhe, among other positions.
 
Mr. Detjen is a member of the board of the Bundespressekonferenz and was a member of the foundation board for the Peace Prize of the German Book Trade from 2013 to 2018. He studied Law and History in Munich, Aix-en-Provence, and Speyer.

On this week's 50th episode of the Kaffeepause podcast, Dr. Steven E. Sokol is joined by award-winning journalist and ACG fellow Vladimir Balzer. 

Mr. Balzer is a moderator at Deutschlandfunk Kultur. He grew up in Leipzig and studied German, art history, and journalism in Dublin, Venice, and Leipzig. He studied abroad in Italy and the United States. He began his career as a presenter, reporter, and editor at Deutschlandradio and MDR. Mr. Balzer hosts, among other programs, the daily programs “Fazit – Kultur vom Tage” and “Studio 9” on Deutschlandfunk Kultur. In 2022, he was selected to be a Kellen Fellow by the American Council on Germany.

On this week's Kaffeepause, Dr. Steven E. Sokol is joined by Anja Wehler-Schöck, Head of International Politics at Der Tagesspiegel since August 2022.

Prior to that, she worked as editor-in-chief of the IPG Journal, a debate platform for issues of international and European politics. She previously worked as a social affairs officer at the German Embassy in Washington and headed the Friedrich-Ebert-Stiftung’s office for Jordan and Iraq in Amman from 2012 to 2017.

On this week's Kaffeepause, Dr. Steven E. Sokol is joined by Steven Erlanger, Chief Diplomatic Correspondent in Europe for The New York Times.

As of earlier this year, he is based in Berlin. In over 40 years of career as a journalist, he has covered news in over 120 countries, from the war in Kosovo to Brexit. In 2002, Mr. Erlanger shared the Pulitzer Prize for reporting on his work on Al Qaeda and again received the prize in 2017 for a series on Russia.

Between 1975 and 1983, he was a Teaching Fellow at Harvard University. Beginning in 1976, he also worked as an Editor and Correspondent at the Boston Globe. From 1983 through 1987, he was the Globe’s European Correspondent in London. Beginning in 1988, he served as Bureau Chief for The New York Times in London, Paris, Jerusalem, Berlin, Prague, Moscow, and Bangkok.

In addition to the Pulitzer Prize, Mr. Erlanger has received numerous awards and recognitions, including the Robert Livingston Award for international reporting for a series of articles about Eastern Europe in 1981, the German Marshall Fund’s Peter Weitz Prize for excellence and originality in reporting and analyzing European and transatlantic affairs in 2000, and the Karl Klasen Journalists Prize for coverage of Germany and Europe and promoting trans-Atlantic understanding in 2017.

Mr. Erlanger’s writing has been featured in many publications such as The Economist, The Spectator, The New Statesman, The New Republic, The Financial Times, Foreign Policy, The National Interest, and the Columbia Journalism Review.

On this week's Kaffeepause, Dr. Steven E. Sokol is joined by Paul-Anton Krüger, Parliamentary Correspondent in the Berlin Bureau of the Süddeutsche Zeitung. 

Previously Mr. Krüger reported on political affairs and served as Deputy Head of the Foreign Policy Department, focusing on the Middle East and international security for three years. Before that, he spent four years in Cairo and was a correspondent covering large parts of the Arab world and Iran. After graduating from the Alte Landesschule in Korbach, he studied journalism in Berlin and Munich. In August 2005, he joined the Süddeutsche Zeitung as a volunteer, worked as an editor from 2008, and as head of the foreign policy department from 2011. In the fall of 2007, Mr. Krüger was a guest editor at the Chicago Tribune as part of the Arthur F. Burns Fellowship, the German-American journalism scholarship of the International Journalism Programs e.V.