Gabor Steingart, 47, is an international bestselling author and bureau chief of Der Spiegel in Washington DC, where he lives with his family. He has been awarded the Economic Writer of the Year Award 2004 in Germany, and in 2007 he won the Helmut Schmidt Award for Advanced Journalism.
His op-ed pieces are published in The Wall Street Journal and European Affairs. Steingart´s weekly column West Wing – The Battle for the White House appears on Spiegel Online, BusinessWeek.com and RealClearPolitics.com. With his critical view on Democratic presidential hopeful Barack Obama he became a controversial figure in the US Media. His columns and op-eds are widely discussed in the blogosphere, from Foreign Affairs.com over myspace.com to the New Republican.com.
Steingart joined Der Spiegel in 1990 as an economic writer responsible for covering the eastern, formerly communist part of Germany. At that time he lived in Leipzig. He later served as a financial correspondent in Bonn before the capital moved to Berlin. From 1993 to 2000 Steingart headed the economic department of his news magazine in Hamburg until he took on the job as bureau chief of Der Spiegel in Berlin. In 2007 he moved to the United States as senior correspondent in Washington D.C.
He has written four books, the first one at the age of 19. His book “Germany: The decline of a superstar” (2004) published by Piper in Munich was on the German Bestseller list for nearly one year and became the 8th best selling non-fiction book of the year 2004 in Germany. The premise for the film The Fall of Germany produced by Stefan Aust and Claus Richter was based on his book. This documentary won the German TV Award of the year 2006.
The book “The War for Wealth: The True Story of Globalization”, or “Why the Flat World Is Broken” was also a bestseller in Germany and has been published in ten countries around the world, including The United Arab Emirates, South Korea and China. The English edition published by McGraw-Hill Professional in the US and the UK is an extensively updated version of the book. Dr. Henry Kissinger, the former Secretary of State, called it “a lucid and compelling reality check”. Robert Kuttner, co-founder of The American Prospect and together with Robert Reich co-founder of the Economic Policy Institute in Washington D.C., says: “Steingart challenges the naive, flat-earth mentality of the U.S. economics establishment. If you read one book on globalization this year, makes it Steingart’s “The War for Wealth”.
Steingart is the son of a German mother and a Hungarian father. His father was an armed activist against the Communist party in Budapest 1956. After the Soviet tanks invaded, he escaped to West-Berlin.
Gabor Steingart studied economics and political science in Marburg and Berlin and graduated from the Freie Universität Berlin. In his thesis he focused on the reality of the planned economy in the socialist part of Germany and predicted the breakdown of the so called German Democratic Republic, GDR. After university he attended the Georg von Holtzbrinck School for Economic Journalism. During this time at school the Berlin wall came down and Steingart got his first shot at a cover story.
