The Nashville Warburg Chapter and the Sister Cities of Nashville will host a discussion and reception with David Gill, German Consul General in New York on “The Path to Freedom and German Unity: The Peaceful Revolution and the Fall of the Berlin Wall 30 Years On.”
David Gill was born in 1966 in Herrnhut, Saxony, in former East Germany. He was denied a higher education by the Communist regime for political reasons. Instead, he trained and worked as a plumber before joining a preparatory protestant school and later the theological seminary of the Protestant Church in Berlin-Brandenburg. In 1990, he was the chairman of Normannenstrasse Citizens’ Committee which initially oversaw the dissolution of the Ministry of State Security at the Stasi headquarters and then served as the secretary of the Special Committee for the dissolution of the Stasi of the East German Parliament.
After Germany’s unification, Mr. Gill became spokesman and head of the research division of the Federal Commissioner for the Stasi-Files before studying law in Berlin and Philadelphia. After holding positions in the Federal Ministry of the Interior and at the Commissioner for Data Protection and Freedom of Information in Berlin, he served as the Deputy Representative of the Council of the Protestant Church in Germany to the Federal Republic of Germany and the European Union. During Federal President Joachim Gauck’s term from 2012-2017, he was state secretary and chief of staff to the President. Since August 2017, he has been the German Consul General in New York.
On Mr. Gill’s first visit to the United States in 1992, Mr. Gill participated in the American Council on Germany’s American-German Young Leaders Conference in Nashville.