US Ambassador Philip D. Murphy talks about what an average week looks like, his personal ties to Germany and his quest to reach out to German youth. (Jiffer de Bourguignon, freelance author from Hamburg talked to Ambassador Murphy for Amerika Haus NRW.)

JB: You are not new to Germany - you were in Frankfurt from 1993-97 with Goldman Sachs. How does it feel to be back?

Amb. Murphy: Great. We love it. We lived in Frankfurt in the 90s and had an extraordinary experience.   For years afterwards, we hoped to find some way to come back to Germany with our kids so that they could experience it firsthand. We had no options on the table that made any sense and then the opportunity to be Ambassador here came out of the blue.  It’s fantastic to be back.

JB: You have brought your entire family - your wife and four children - with you to Berlin.  How are they settling in?

Amb. Murphy: We are settling in great. We travel a lot in Germany. We love Berlin, but we also love the rest of Germany.  We travel around the country as much as we can.  I obviously do a lot of traveling in Germany for my job. My wife Tammy comes with me frequently when I am working and all six of us do a lot of things together as a family throughout Germany. 

JB: Speaking of closer to home, I understand that you and your family are soccer aficionados. Are you able to attend many games?  You must be enjoying being in a country where soccer is such a beloved sport.

Amb. Murphy: We go to a ton of games.  We love the sport.  In fact my wife and I own the women’s champions team in the US, the New Jersey/New York Sky Blue.  I was on the board of the US Soccer Federation and am very involved on a range of things relating to soccer.  The kids all play it.  We play as a family.  We go to a lot of games, both men’s and women’s soccer.  We certainly go to games in Berlin, but we also go around the country.  In March, for instance, we went to a game in Wolfsburg.  We are going a game in Frankfurt in April.  So we get around and we love it.

JB: Who are you rooting for?

Amb. Murphy: We have a rule: we root for the home team. My son reminded me that I was getting in trouble by getting too Berlin-centric. So, wherever we are, we root for the home team, that is our ironclad rule.

JB: That sounds very diplomatic. Which leads me to my next question: your career up until this point has primarily been in the financial sector. How are you handling the transition into the diplomatic corps?

Amb. Murphy: I left Wall Street many years ago and since then I have done some private investing and some philanthropic work and then I was the Finance Chair for the Democratic National Committee. It’s been a while since I was in the financial sector. Having said that, certainly there are basic things that you deploy as part of your skills and judgment in the private sector that are relevant to my current position.  Common sense – how do you find common ground with individuals and then make use of the common ground to your mutual advantage.  On the other hand, the issues I’m dealing with here are dramatically more profound.  They tend to be in the context of the great relationship between the US and Germany.  They tend to be issues that face all of mankind,  not just the US and Germany.  The importance of the issues -- that is a big difference.

JB: You have said that you consider yourself an "ambassador to ALL of Germany" and you maintain a pretty hectic travel schedule - I have been told you are on the road 3 out of 5 days in the workweek. Can you describe what a typical week is like for you - where might you be, speaking with whom, what sorts of engagements do you have here, etc.

Amb. Murphy: Three days out of five is a bit overstated; it’s probably more like two out of five. For instance this week I am largely in Berlin. I will be in Munich over the weekend but that is a personal trip -- I am going to see my son play in a basketball tournament.  When I travel outside Berlin, a typical day would involve visiting one of our American consulates if there is one in the city I’m visiting. I often do town hall discussions, where I would talk to people about some of our initiatives and answer their questions. I do a lot of student outreach and I typically meet with members of the business community. I try to see representatives of labor unions.  In Berlin and elsewhere, I meet with political leaders whenever I can, both those in office and those in opposition. I often attend cultural events and I often give speeches. Anything that has a connection to the German-American relationship has a particular appeal for me. Our military plays into that frequently.  I do a mix of things.  In Berlin, I spend an enormous amount of time with the Ministries, the Chancellery, and the Bundestag.  Also when I am in Berlin I have a lot of internal meetings in the Embassy. I take German lessons frequently. I do speech practice. I carve out as much time as humanly possible for family. Our kids are young and they are only young once.  I take that very seriously as does Tammy.  That is a huge priority for us. 

JB: You just mentioned your family as an important personal focus for you. On the professional side, is there one special focus or topic that you have brought with you or that you plan to engage in more deeply in your position as Ambassador? 

Amb. Murphy: In addition to all of the issues that are before us -- Afghanistan, Iran, Middle East peace, economy, climate change, energy security etc. -- I am focusing on youth.  If you were to follow me around, I think you would be struck by how much time I spend personally reaching out to youth.  My simple theory is that, as good as relations are now between Germany and America, a young person in western Germany 50 years ago would have had a very vivid and I think almost overwhelmingly positive sense of America -- through our military presence, through the Amerika Hauses, through reading rooms.  In short, through our widespread presence in Germany and in Berlin specifically.

Thankfully, the threat level that existed during the Cold War is gone, and the Wall has disappeared – that is one of the great developments in modern history.  But that positive change brings with it a challenge: now we don’t operate as many Amerika Hauses, there are no reading rooms, there is no vivid threat and there is no, “I grew up in a neighborhood living beside an American military family and their kids were my best friends,” a story that I hear all the time.  The German-American official relationship today is as strong as it’s ever been.  My job, our job, is to create the sense of relevance, to create that vividness in eyes and minds of young people today.  So that when they grow up and they are 70 years old they will look back and say, “Man, we have great memories of Germany and America working together and solving difficult the challenges that confronted the world.”  One surefire ways to keep that freshness alive is exchange programs.  So we spend a lot of time thinking about who should go on those programs and finding ways to broaden them.  And it works both ways – it’s important for Americans to come to Germany and for Germans to go to America. So that is what I focus on - reaching out on many levels and in many ways to the German youth.