The American Council on Germany and the Goethe-Institut will host a discussion as part of the series Foreign Correspondent Unplugged on “The Voters Have Spoken: What Recent Elections Reveal about Germany and the United States” with Vladimir Balzer, Award Winning Journalist and Moderator at Deutschlandradio and Brigid Bergin, Senior Reporter, WNYC.
For more information and to RSVP please email events@acgusa.org by Monday, November 23.
Vladimir Balzer is an award-winning radio journalist and moderator at Deutschlandradio. He grew up in Leipzig and studied in Dublin, Venice, and Leipzig. He began his career as a presenter, reporter, and editor at Deutschlandradio and MDR. Mr. Balzer hosts, among other programs, the daily program “Fazit – Kultur vom Tage” on Deutschlandfunk Kultur. In 2022, he was selected to be a Kellen Fellow by the American Council on Germany. In 2023, he started as a correspondent at Deutschlandradio’s main studio in Berlin. He is known as a commentator for German Television, such as ZDF. He also regularly reports for his broadcaster from the United States.
Brigid Bergin is the senior reporter on the WNYC and Gothamist “People and Power” desk and host of the election series “Who’s Running This Place?” She has covered elections for more than a decade. Her reporting and analysis of early voting turnout during the 2025 mayoral primary has been credited with anticipating Zohran Mamdani’s unexpected victory. In 2016, she broke the news of a massive voter purge in Brooklyn just days before New York’s presidential primary triggering city, state and federal investigations. Her work has been recognized with awards from the New York Press Club and the New York State AP Broadcasters Association. In addition to reporting, Ms. Bergin is a regular guest host of WNYC’s The Brian Lehrer Show and All of It with Allison Stewart. She graduated from the University at Albany and the CUNY Newmark Graduate School of Journalism.
Steven E. Sokol (moderator) has been the President and CEO of the American Council on Germany since 2015. Previously, he served as President and CEO of the World Affairs Council of Pittsburgh and prior to that he was the Vice President and Director of Programs at the American Council on Germany. Earlier in his career, Dr. Sokol worked at the Aspen Institute Berlin and in the Berlin office of the German Marshall Fund of the United States. He holds a Doctorate from Northeastern University as well as an M.A. from the Johns Hopkins University’s Paul Nitze School of Advanced International Studies (SAIS) and a B.A. from Wesleyan University. He has also studied at the Ruprecht-Karls-Universität in Heidelberg and as a Fulbright Scholar at the Freie Universität in Berlin.