Adrian Geiges
Adrian Geiges is a German writer and journalist born in Basel, Switzerland.
Life
Adrian Geiges is a journalist from the Black Forest in southern Germany. In his autobiography, “How the World Revolution Once Accidentally Started in the Black Forest“, he describes how he transformed from a West German communist to a capitalist, ironically in the People’s Republic of China. He had a year-long training at a secret cadre school in former communist East Germany.His autobiography describes moral conflicts, typical of the many in his country of his generation who started as extreme leftists and evolved at breakneck speed into aggressive capitalists. These developments in Geiges’ political and work commitments led to far-reaching changes in his personal life, including in his love and sex life.
In German media his book has been seen as a biography of a lost generation that dreamed of a better future without noticing the present. The leading German newspaper Sueddeutsche Zeitung calls it a book "that sometimes lets you roar with laughter and sometimes makes you sad." Der Spiegel wrote: “In a funny book, the former communist describes what incentives East Germany offered a young West German.“
Since the summer of 2004 Adrian Geiges has been the Beijing Correspondent of the leading German weekly news magazine Stern. Before that he founded the Chinese enterprise of G+J, the Bertelsmann corporation’s magazine division. In the 1990s he had worked as a television reporter for Spiegel TV and RTL in Moscow and New York. He has studied Chinese and Russian.
In early 2013 he moved to Rio de Janeiro and worked there as a documentary filmmaker. He lived in a favela and wrote about his experiences in his book "Brazil is Burning".
Together with Stefan Aust, the longtime editor-in-chief of the German weekly news magazine Der Spiegel, Geiges wrote the biography “Xi Jinping: The Most Powerful Man in the World“, which reached the top 20 of the German bestseller list. It has been published in several languages, including in English.