Martin Klingst

He 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 U.S. 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 weißes Land (Trump’s America. Journey to a White Country). In 2020, Klingst wrote a biography of Guido Goldman, the founder of major transatlantic institutions like the German Marshall Fund. Its English edition was published in September 2021 by Berghahn Books, New York, under the title Guido Goldman. Transatlantic Bridge Builder.

The subject that is closest to his heart has always been the relation between Europe and the United States. In 1971, aged sixteen, he flew across the Atlantic for the first time and spent a year as an exchange student in Colorado. The United States has stayed with him ever since. He is motivated by the question of how, in times of growing authoritarianism and rapidly changing demographics, we can preserve what constitutes the intrinsic value of the transatlantic relationship, the core of the West: democracy, the rule of law, free trade, and civil and human rights.