Dr Michael Stürmer

German historian and chief correspondent for Die Welt

Michael Stürmer was educated at the University of Marburg, the Free University of Berlin and the London School of Economics before being appointed to the chair of modern history at Friedrich Alexander Universität Erlangen-Nürnberg. During the 1980s he served as an advisor and speechwriter for German chancellor Helmut Kohl. A research fellow at Harvard and a member of the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, N.J. he was elected director of the Stiftung Wissenschaft und Politik (Research Institute for International Affairs), the government’s foreign policy thinktank in Ebenhausen/Isartal which he ran from 1988 to1998. Since 1998 he has been chief correspondent at WELT-Gruppe Berlin, and adjunct professor of international affairs at the Paul Nitze School for Advanced International Studies (SAIS), Bologna Campus.

Stürmer is the author of books on the material culture of the 17th and 18th centuries, a history of Imperial Germany (Das ruhelose Reich), and, more recently, Allies Divided (on the Greater Middle East), Die Kunst des Gleichgewichts, Welt ohne Weltordnung, and Putin and the Rise of Russia.

He is a member of the IISS, Officier de la Legion d’Honneur, Comité de patronage Commentaire, advisor to Bankenverband and Wirtschaftsrat.