Eleanor Lansing Dulles

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Eleanor Lansing Dulles with the Mayor of Freiburg, Eugen Keidel , 1982

Eleanor Lansing Dulles (born June 1, 1895 in Watertown , New York , † October 30, 1996 in Washington, DC ) was an American diplomat and economist . As the person responsible for Berlin at the Foreign Ministry, she played a key role in building the city and was known as "Mother Berlin" at the time of her work.

Live and act

1895–1945: First political steps

Eleanor Dulles came from a Presbyterian family who at that time already had extensive political contacts. Her brothers Allen Dulles and John Foster Dulles also had successful political careers.

In June 1917 she received her diploma from Bryn Mawr College . She then worked for an aid organization in France for two years. Dulles also studied for a year at London Business School around 1922. During this time she visited Germany for the first time for a vacation in the Black Forest . After two Master of Arts degrees, she did her doctorate in 1926 with a thesis on the French franc . Eleanor Dulles then initially embarked on a university career. So in 1930 she finally came to Bonn and Berlin to study . A year earlier, she had received a scholarship to write a book about the Bank for International Settlements .

After her return to the United States, she married David S. Blondheim (1884–1934) in late 1932, who died of suicide almost two years later. After his death, she gave birth to a son in autumn 1934, and in 1937 she adopted a girl. Dulles gave up her college career in 1936 and instead began a six-year tenure in the finance department of the Social Security Board in Washington. After the USA entered the war , Eleanor Dulles moved to the German department of the State Department in 1942 .

1945–1959: Politics in Berlin

Immediately after the end of the war, Dulles was sent to Vienna by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and listed in the State Department as a “senior economic analyst”. From May 1945 to October 1948 she worked there as a financial advisor on the staff of the US Commander in Chief General Mark W. Clark . From there she traveled several times to Hungary, Italy, Germany, Czechoslovakia and Switzerland. In the early 1950s, Dulles was also a member of the CoCom .

In 1952 Eleanor Dulles took over the management of the Berlin Desk , the Berlin department, in what was then the Bureau of German Affairs of the Foreign Ministry. The job was offered to her by James Riddleberger, whom she met by chance in 1952. From 1952 to September 1959, until she left the service, Eleanor Dulles made outstanding contributions to her service in Berlin. Its main tasks were to expand the aid programs and coordinate the cooperation between the Marshall Plan authorities and the Allied and German authorities. Their first important and spectacular action was the provision of food parcels to the East German population in July 1953, for which 15 million dollars were made available. Dulles also built the congress hall . In this context, the Benjamin Franklin Foundation was also established, which had the Steglitz Clinic built.

The student village in Schlachtensee was also built on Dulles' initiative. She was able to persuade the US State Department to donate 7.5 million  DM to Freie Universität . In October 1957 the foundation stone was laid by the governing mayor Willy Brandt and Eleanor Lansing Dulles.

1959–1996: Always connected with Germany

Dulles was forced to leave the State Department in September 1961 under pressure from John F. Kennedy . Her brother, Allen Dulles , had previously been fired from the CIA . At 67, however, she found it difficult to find a new job. She was advised to retire, which she vehemently declined. So Dulles initially undertook diplomatic trips to seven countries on his own behalf and at his own expense. Then she was finally appointed as a lecturer and completed a lecture tour through 20 countries.

As a guest at the Free University , however, she returned to Bonn and Berlin in 1967, where she found the opportunity to speak to the then Federal Chancellor Kurt Georg Kiesinger and the Governing Mayor Heinrich Albertz . She also represented the United States at Konrad Adenauer's funeral .

Eleanor Dulles died at the age of 101 in a Washington retirement home .

Awards

Works

  • The Bank for International Settlements at Work
  • Berlin - The Wall is not forever , 1967 (in the German edition as Berlin and the Americans )
  • Chances of a Lifetime (in the German edition as Hier ist Eleanor , preface: Richard von Weizsäcker .)

literature

Web links

Individual evidence


personal data
SURNAME Dulles, Eleanor Lansing
BRIEF DESCRIPTION American diplomat and economist
DATE OF BIRTH June 1, 1895
PLACE OF BIRTH Watertown , New York
DATE OF DEATH October 30, 1996
Place of death Washington, DC
  1. ↑ Department of State: Foreign Service List , Department of State Publication 2517, United States Government Printing Office, Washington 1945, p. 4 ( link to digitized version ), accessed on May 10, 2020
  2. ↑ Berlin and the Americans. Verlag Wissenschaft und Politik, Cologne 1976, p. 31
  3. ↑ List of all decorations awarded by the Federal President for services to the Republic of Austria from 1952 (PDF; 6.9 MB)