Martin Klingst

Martin Klingst is a former visiting senior fellow.

Klingst was the news editor and a political journalist at the North German Broadcasting Corporation (NDR),  and he also served as the domestic and foreign affairs reporter, senior political editor, head of the political department, and US correspondent at the German weekly DIE ZEIT. At the Office of the Federal President of Germany,  he headed the strategic communications and speeches department.

During his career, Klingst reported from the war in the former Yugoslavia, and from India, China, the Middle East, and the United States. His work has taken him to domestic and foreign conflict hotspots and places wherever democracies and human rights were in danger. He chronicled some of these experiences in the books “Menschenrechte” (Human Rights) and “Trumps Amerika. Reise in ein wei�es Land” (Trump’s America. Journey to a White Country). In 2020, Klingst wrote a biography of Guido Goldman, the founder of major transatlantic institutions such as GMF. Its English edition was published in September 2021 by Berghahn Books under the title “Guido Goldman. Transatlantic Bridge Builder”.

Relations between Europe and the United States have long been at the core of Klingst’s interests. In 1971, aged sixteen, he flew across the Atlantic for the first time and spent a year as an exchange student in Colorado. He has since researched how, in times of growing authoritarianism and rapidly changing demographics, the intrinsic values of the transatlantic relationship—democracy, the rule of law, free trade, and civil and human rights—can be preserved.