U.S. President Barack Obama may be in trouble at home but he has improved trans-Atlantic relations. A recent survey shows an improvement in German-U.S. relations and indicates that Germans are becoming more popular in the U.S., after a major dip during the Iraq controversy.

Around a year after Barack Obama took office, the number of Germany fans in America has risen significantly. "We have seen the best survey results since we started conducting them," the German ambassador to the U.S., Klaus Scharioth, said as he presented a survey on American views of Germany conducted by the German Information Center, a liaison and information center in the U.S. run by the German government.

The survey has been carried out regularly since 2002 and the latest results released this week show that 48 percent of Americans who took part had an "excellent" or "good" general impression of Germany. That good impression was particularly high among college students. The survey questioned 1,051 Americans in the first half of December in 2009.

The study found that Germany was no longer associated with old clichés - instead, it is seen as a modern, high-tech country and as an important international partner for the U.S. Respondents saw Germany as a leader in issues of environmental protection and in the development of renewable energies.