The Robert Bosch Fellowship Alumni Association publishes quarterly newsletters to celebrate alumni milestones, publicize events & share transatlantic news. You’ll find the most recent edition below. If you’re not getting the newsletter and want to, please email and we’ll update our distribution list. To access our archive of newsletters, please click here.
Autumn in New York
Hallo ihr Lieben! Our annual event in NYC is right around the corner and we look forward to seeing many of you there. This newsletter is packed with info about the event, including a Q&A with our keynote speaker Kevin Czinger, Bosch VIII. We also highlight the latest in our discussions with the American Council on Germany and some fun alumni news – including cool new books from folks in Bosch XXXIV. Finally, there’s no shortage of transatlantic topics in the news and we’ve included a few to whet your appetite for our NY discussions. Bis hoffentlich bald!
Annual Event Update
The Annual Event committee has been hard at work creating an amazing gathering in NYC from October 2-4. A special thank you to Committee Chair Maggie Monahan-Bopp, Bosch I, for her hard work. In case you missed it, the reservation website is now live! Space is limited for some events so don’t delay. We’ve also reserved a block of hotel rooms at the Paramount Times Square. The RBFAA group rate now expires on September 7. Should you encounter problems making a reservation with our rate, please let us know ()!
We’re still finalizing the agenda but are thrilled that three alumni so far have agreed to lead sessions.
- On Friday, October 2, we’ll hear from Jim Freis, Bosch XII, a veteran financial regulator who has led compliance and anti-fraud efforts at major U.S. and German institutions. He’ll discuss Wirecard: Uncovering the Biggest Scandal in German Financial History.
- On Saturday, Joseph Yackley, Bosch XVIII — a Foreign Service Officer with postings in Europe and the Middle East, now teaching diplomatic statecraft at Georgetown University and the Department of State’s training institute — will lead a small-group discussion on Diplomacy in the Trump Era.
- And read on for a taste of the fascinating story that Kevin Czinger, Bosch VIII, will tell as our Keynote Speaker Saturday night.
We’ll continue to update the RBFAA website Events page with the latest and greatest.
5 Questions For Kevin Czinger, Bosch VIII
In this edition of “Five Questions For …” our Annual Event Keynote Speaker sat down with us for a chat.
What are you up to these days? Right now I’m celebrating my 39th anniversary with my wife, who grew up in West Berlin. We met at Yale and had our first child during the Bosch fellowship. Alongside that, my main focus is rapidly scaling the company I founded 13 years ago, called Divergent. My son joined me about eight years ago, and as of last year, he’s the CEO.
Divergent does AI-based engineering and fully digital manufacturing. We have an AI front-end that enables small, focused engineering teams to generate the design for perfectly optimized mechanical structures within hours, using enormous computational power. It works like this: You put in a set of requirements. The system takes those requirements and grows a structure around them out of various materials, then sends the design to a printer we’ve built. Every printer can print every metal object the front-end can design. Right now we’ve got about 40 different products for more than 25 customers, ranging from the chassis and suspension for Bugatti’s new hypercar to the fuselage of the Tomahawk missile system.
What was the most influential memory or event of your Bosch year, and how did it shape your life or career after that? Having a child during that year was huge, obviously. But my Bosch fellowship was also the first time I’d lived outside the US. One of the places I worked that year was the Treuhandanstalt (the German government agency tasked with privatizing East Germany’s economy after reunification). For me, growing up working-class in Cleveland, that was my first real exposure to people who’d grown up in East Germany. Hearing their day-to-day concerns, even small things like worrying whether a hang-up phone call meant someone was checking on them, opened my eyes to the need for patience. I learned to listen and understand before jumping in with American drive and logic to “get things done.” That was the first time I really had to engage with people who’d grown up in a completely different culture and saw the world differently. It shaped my listening skills and my understanding of what diplomacy actually requires in an international context.
How much contact do you still have with Germany? Personally, because my family is German, we still have strong ties. We had a place on Sylt for many years and have just bought one in Mallorca, where there’s a thriving German community. Professionally, over the course of my career I’ve done business in different ways with various German companies. I work now with German auto and defense companies. Recently, the George C. Marshall European Center for Security Studies — a joint German-American center in Garmisch-Partenkirchen — invited me to present to German military leadership, so I’ve maintained business and policy contacts there as well. So between family, business, and now policy work, I’ve stayed connected to Germany in a lot of different ways.
The transatlantic relationship is currently fraught. Where do you see it going? On the institutional side — particularly in defense, on both the policy and commercial side — everyone understands we can’t function without each other. Those relationships are critical and, frankly, indissoluble. Despite everything happening geopolitically, that institutional continuity remains strong.
What’s your next big thing? Continuing to scale this company. The core idea is to remove the capital barrier to engineering and producing things — the way cloud computing removed the barrier to building software. In the ’90s, you had to build your own data center and your own tools to write software. Once hyperscalers like AWS started providing fungible processing and storage, tens of thousands of new software companies emerged. I think the same shift is coming to the physical world, and as it scales, America is going to start building things again — built by small, geographically dispersed teams, because this kind of factory network can be set up economically almost anywhere. It’s about digitizing and distributing production to democratize how things get made.
From the Board
Annual Gathering: This is our final year of Bosch Stiftung funding so let’s make wonderful memories in the Big Apple! Please also note that our Annual Meeting, where we specifically discuss RBFAA strategic and organizational business, is planned for Saturday, October 3 from 9 to 11:30 a.m. There will be a virtual option for all to attend.
Potential ACG Partnership: Our Partnership Committee is implementing the strategic direction that members decided on at last year’s Annual Meeting, namely exploring a partnership with the American Council on Germany. Here’s where we stand:
- We listened and explored: We’ve spent the past eight months carefully evaluating how best to sustain the RBFAA community if we were to consolidate with ACG.
- We found a promising path: Both organizations have been working together to develop a structure that would preserve our community while giving it greater institutional capacity and sustainability. From those discussions, we’re finalizing the outline of a Letter of Intent to detail the benefits to both organizations.
- We’re now working out the details: The next phase is about finalizing the framework, governance and member experience – and you will have a chance to weigh in before anything is finalized.
- Next steps: In the coming weeks, we’ll share the Letter of Intent and a summary of the draft operational agreement we’ve explored with the ACG, and give you opportunities to share your thoughts.
Regional Events: We still have regional events funding available. Please apply here!
Alumni Updates
Bosch XXXIV has been on a book tear! Pull up a chair and get reading.
- Melissa Chan is on a global tour for her debut graphic novel, You Must Take Part in the Revolution. The book, co-authored with Chinese activist and artist Badiucao (who worked at Ai Weiwei’s Berlin studio), was published in the US last year to high praise. A fictional work imagining the US and China at war, MS NOW called it “a salient warning and a welcome addition to the increasingly popular dystopian literary canon in America,” while NPR put it on its annual book list. This year, it’s being released in the UK and Australia. A Chinese-language edition for Taiwan is forthcoming.
- Amy Nelson‘s book, The Arms Control Paradox, comes out from Stanford University Press on September 15, 2026. It argues that while the world needs weapons agreements more than ever, they’ve become harder to reach because software-based systems, unlike missiles, can’t be verified by an inspector walking around a base. Amy argues that the field has spent decades trying to engineer away uncertainty rather than examining what it actually is and how much of it an agreement can tolerate. She contends that negotiators need to accept uncertainty rather than waiting for it to disappear. Amy welcomes hearing from anyone in the network working on these questions. Email her at .
- How We See It: The World Looks at America in the Age of Trump, edited by Madeleine Schwartz, came out in June to rave reviews. The book’s 12 writers, who are located everywhere from Argentina to Ukraine, look at how the world is reacting to the changing politics in the United States, and what Americans can learn from civil society abroad. Publishers Weekly called the book “fascinating” and “a much needed reality check.”
Transatlantic Topics in the News
A selection of our top transatlantic reads – all without paywalls
1. The Widening Atlantic
Robert Cox & Kees Rietveld | American Diplomacy | August 2026
This essay, written by two veterans of European multilateral institutions, argues that the transatlantic crisis is structural, not Trump-specific. They claim American unilateralism toward its European allies has been consistent across administrations for decades, with Trump merely manifesting a more provocative version of the pattern. The authors close with a call for a return to genuine transatlantic dialogue: more diplomacy, more listening, and fewer top-down demands from DC.
2. Talk is Cheap: Europe’s Defence Promise Meets the EU Budget
Chantal Kopf | European Council on Foreign Relations | August 27, 2026
Written by a sitting member of the German Bundestag, this piece argues that European leaders left the NATO Ankara summit having accepted the need to shoulder more of their own defence, but that turning that political commitment into actual money requires winning a bruising fight over the EU’s next seven-year budget. Germany is caught in a particular contradiction: Chancellor Merz has publicly committed to strengthening European security and competitiveness, while resisting the larger overall EU budget those ambitions require. Kopf concludes that joint EU borrowing, on the model of the COVID recovery fund, may be the only realistic way to close the gap between Europe’s security promises and its fiscal reality.
3. Why MAGA’s Far-Right European Ties Will Endure
Armida van Rij | Carnegie Europe | August 27, 2026
This author, a senior research fellow at the Centre for European Reform and a nonresident senior fellow at the Chicago Council on Global Affairs, argues that MAGA and Russia both want a weaker EU, with Europe’s far-right parties serving as their proxies. Personal ties within the “MAGA international” have frayed in 2026, but the network is far more durable than any individual relationship. The hard question is how Europe defends itself without abandoning the openness these forces exploit.
Last But Not Least
- If you haven’t already, please pay your dues!
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