Michael Banzhaf (diplomat)

Michael Banzhaf (born March 6, 1957 in Munich ) is a German diplomat . He has been the German ambassador in the Armenian capital Yerevan since September 2019 .

Life

After graduating from high school in 1976, he immediately studied history and art history at the Ludwig Maximilians University in Munich , where he received his doctorate in 1983 . In 1986 he entered the foreign service. After attending the diplomatic school there, he became an economic advisor at the German embassy in Warsaw in 1988 . From 1991 to 1993 he worked in the Foreign Office as a consultant for economic relations with the countries of the Visegrád Group and also participant of the German-Polish government commission for border-related and regional cooperation .

From 1993 to 1995 he was permanent representative at the German embassy in Hanoi . After that he moved to the post of head of the department for external relations at the State Chancellery in Thuringia until 2001 . Until 2005 he worked again in the Foreign Office, where he was the deputy head of the department for foreign trade promotion in the local economic department. In 2005 and 2006 he was the head of the Banda Aceh branch of the German Embassy Jakarta as part of the reconstruction work after the earthquake and tsunami of December 2004 . From 2006 to 2009 he was permanent representative and head of the economic service at the German Embassy in Bangkok .

From 2009 to 2012 he took over the management of the Department for Conventional Disarmament and Arms Control at the Foreign Office . From 2012 to 2015 he was permanent representative and head of the economic service at the German Embassy in Astana, Kazakhstan (since 2019 Nur-Sultan) and from 2015 to 2019 Consul General in Kaliningrad .

On September 13, 2019, he handed over his credentials to the Armenian President Armen Sarkissjan and became Ambassador of the Federal Republic of Germany in Armenia.

Web links

• Greetings and curriculum vitae on the Yerevan Embassy website