 During their visits of a few days to a few weeks, they engage with the public and their professional counterparts in Berlin and throughout Germany on topics ranging from constitutional law and immigration policy to museum practice and art criticism.Since 1998, the American Academy in Berlin has hosted nearly 500 residential fellows and hundreds of Distinguished Visitors.The American Academy in Berlin was founded in September 1994 by a group of prominent Americans and Germans, among them Richard Holbrooke, Henry Kissinger, Richard von Weizsäcker, Fritz Stern, and Thomas Farmer.