Private pain and public hopes came together in a Berlin mansion last week when the new American Academy was opened on a site marked by Nazi terror and now dedicated to the trans-Atlantic partnership that raised Germany from the ruins of war.

Speaking at what was once the lakeside house of a prominent Jewish banking family, former Secretary of State Henry A. Kissinger described Hitler's rule as ''an aberration, but not an organic aspect of German society'' and said the academy's existence showed how the wounds of ''the 12-year interregnum'' could be overcome.

Much of the founding grant for the academy was provided by the descendants of Hans Arnhold, a Jewish banker who fled the mansion before it became the wartime home of Hitler's chief economic adviser, Walther Funk, and later a recreation center for Americans stationed on the cold war's eastern frontier.

Richard von Weizsacker, the former German President, called the Arnhold family's endowment of the academy an act of ''unbelievable magnanimity,'' dedicated to overcoming ''the evil of the past'' through ''a generous gift for the future.''

Behind Mr. von Weizsacker, sailboats passed on the waters of the Wannsee lake, on whose banks stands another villa where the destruction of European Jewry was decided by Nazi bureaucrats on Jan. 20, 1942, a decision later described by Adolph Eichmann as ''the final solution of the Jewish question.''

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The Arnhold family escaped, but as she recalled the lost places of her childhood, Anna-Maria Kellen, Mr. Arnhold's daughter and now a New York philanthropist, battled her emotions. The staircase where she once played was gone, she said, but not her hope that the mansion would now be a ''staircase leading to higher levels of understanding and closer degree of cooperation.''

The academy was conceived four years ago as a symbol of enduring American commitment to Germany after the end of the cold war, a demonstration that even in the absence of a common enemy a relationship at the heart of the NATO alliance would not be allowed to erode.

But Mr. Kissinger, an honorary chairman of the academy, and Michael Naumann, the chief cultural official in Germany's new Social Democratic Government, both expressed concerns about the state of German-American relations.

''A new generation of German and American leaders must redefine the creative purpose of this period,'' Mr. Kissinger said. ''America and Europe no longer have clearly defined common paths.''

Mr. Naumann, a former chief executive of the publisher Henry Holt in New York, lamented a loss of ''Germany's political importance in the United States'' and said he detected the ''quiet emergence of a cultural anti-Americanism'' in Europe driven by negative reaction to ubiquitous American television and the effects on incredulous Europeans of the Clinton sex scandal.

By holding seminars and by awarding fellowships to American, German and central European scholars in the fields of the arts and humanities, the academy aims to promote understanding between Germany and the United States.

While Richard C. Holbrooke, chairman of the academy, talked of Mr. Funk and the Nazis, who built a bunker in the basement of the house, a sudden gust blew in from the Wannsee. It forced open the glass door behind Mr. Holbrooke and sent a sudden rush of cold air through the house. ''The ghost of our former occupants,'' Mr. Holbrooke said.

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