Berlin, 28 January 2019: A moving moment for Chancellor Angela Merkel: She was awarded the Fulbright Prize for International Understanding for "embodying the best of leadership in times of unrelenting global crises and challenges". She was the first German to receive the prize.
"Common understanding can be encouraged by states and programmes, but it cannot be dictated," said the Chancellor at the award ceremony. If cross-border understanding between peoples is to work, she said, "we will always need people who are open to others, with their own views and experiences".
Like the more than 46,000 Germans and Americans who have spent time in each other's countries since 1952 thanks to the Fulbright Program. The German-American Fulbright Commission awards some 700 scholarships annually for study, research, teaching and continuing education in the USA and Germany.
The Chancellor underlined the importance of the experience gained by scholarship-holders. "Every single successful exchange helps our countries to get to know and understand one another better. Every contact, every friendship, is a link in the network of international relations."
For more than 70 years, Germany has had friendly relations and intensive exchange with the United States, just as Senator J. William Fulbright would have wanted.
The Fulbright Program was launched in 1946, only one year after the Second World War ended. The Chancellor is "absolutely convinced that it is the encounters between people that make the nations of the world a genuine international community. The Fulbright Program is thus a blessing not only for the generations of scholarship-holders but also for relations between our nations."