Full Bio

 

Born roughly seventy years ago in Winterthur, a city in the northeastern part of Switzerland, I grew up in fairly modest circumstances. My father was an accountant, and not a happy one; my mother was a homemaker, who never got over mostly not having been able to choose her own way in life. I was the first person on my father’s side to go to university. I graduated with a Master of Arts in German Language and Literature, with a minor in Modern and Contemporary History. Thanks to some merit and a lot of luck, I entered journalism at the “Neue Zürcher Zeitung” (www.nzz.ch) in 1980 - and I never left until retirement. I was their correspondent on three continents, based in half a dozen countries, consecutively, starting in Africa, ending in the U.S.A.

 

When I started reporting from Africa, in 1986, I enjoyed as big a freedom as anyone fully employed could ever expect. I could literally roam most of a whole continent – three times the size of the U.S., without much guidance, let alone orders, from headquarters. There was no internet, no mobile phones, no Twitter – which meant, I mostly wrote long features and news analysis, and relatively few short pieces of current affairs.

 

Everything was different when I happily retired on my 65th birthday... I had covered military coups, famines, floods, victims and perpetrators, film festivals, bicycle races, wildlife safaris, several crisis in the banking sector, countless elections, even more press conferences, the economic collapse of a whole country (Argentina), international conferences, the Euro crisis, Islamist terror, Obama’s election and, yes, Donald Trump, too.