Kaffeepause: What's Abuzz in Berlin?

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.

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

After military service, he studied political science in Berlin. In 2004 and 2005, he was a Visiting Scholar at Columbia University in New York. He graduated in 2006 and became a freelance journalist for various media outlets. He 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 and 2016 he was a part-time student at the Wissenschaftliche Hochschule für Unternehmensführung (WHU) and the Kellogg School of Management. In 2016 and 2017, he was the Business Editor of the Frankfurter Allgemeine Sonntagszeitung. 

On this week's Kaffeepause, Dr. Steven E. Sokol is joined by Daniela Vates, Chief Correspondent in the Berlin Bureau of the RedaktionsNetzwerk Deutschland.

RedaktionsNetzwerk Deutschland is a Hannover-based corporate newsroom that provides journalistic content to more than 60 daily newspapers across the country – including Frankfurter Rundschau, Leipziger Volkszeitung, Kölner Stadt-Anzeiger, and Hannoversche Allgemeine Zeitung – and reaches nearly seven million readers daily. Before joining RND, she was a political correspondent for the Berliner Zeitung and Reuters. Ms. Vates has reported from Berlin since 1999 – and from the then German capital Bonn for a couple of years before that. She covers German domestic politics and foreign policy. She studied Journalism and Political Science in Munich and the United States and is a graduate of the Deutsche Journalistenschule (DJS) in Munich.

On this week's Kaffeepause, Dr. Steven E. Sokol is joined by award-winning journalist and moderator at Deutschlandfunk Kultur, Vladimir Balzer. 

Mr. Balzer 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 Dr. Daniel Friedrich Sturm.

Dr. Daniel Friedrich Sturm has been the head of the Tagesspiegel’s Berlin office since April 2023 and reports primarily on the German Chancellor and the SPD. Previously, he was an Editor for Die Welt and Welt am Sonntag and was their U.S. Correspondent from 2018 to 2023. Mr. Sturm began his journalistic career at the age of 15 as a local reporter for the Münstersche Zeitung. He studied political science at the University of Bonn. He was awarded the Willy Brandt Prize for his dissertation on the SPD and the unification of Germany in 1989/90. He has been observing and describing the Social Democrats for many years and has written several books about them.

On this week's Kaffeepause, Dr. Steven E. Sokol is joined by ACG Alumna Sonja Gillert, Head of Audio and Podcaster for Die Welt. 

Sonja Gillert (2019 ACG Young Leader) is the head of audio for Welt. Previously, she served as an editor in the paper’s foreign policy department in Berlin. In 2015, she spent three months in China with the Media Ambassador China Germany Program. In 2017 she was selected to attend the two-month Arthur F. Burns Fellowship for Journalists to conduct research in the United States. In 2023, she completed an ACG Kellen Fellowship during which researched the influence of school boards and politics.

She attended the journalist training program at Axel Springer Academy in Berlin and formerly worked as a freelance journalist at three of Germany’s major radio stations. She studied in Bonn and St. Andrews, Scotland, and earned her MA in Political Science and German Literature in 2009 at Bonn University. She currently sits on the Board of the Freunde des American Council on Germany e.V.

On this week's Kaffeepause, Dr. Steven E. Sokol is joined by Henrike Roßbach, Deputy Head and Correspondent for the Parliamentary Office for the Süddeutsche Zeitung.

Ms. Roßbach has been a correspondent in the parliamentary office since the beginning of 2018. She reports on the FDP and the federal government’s financial and tax policies, and (together with her colleagues) observes and describes the political landscape. Prior to this, she was an economics correspondent in the parliamentary editorial department of the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung for eight years, as well as the economics editor of the FAZ in Frankfurt. She studied economics at the University of Cologne and is also a graduate of the Cologne School of Journalism. During her studies, she spent a year in the United States as a Fulbright Scholar at the University of Colorado in Boulder, CO.