Authors in Conversation: Melissa Eddy and Alexander Osang
In cooperation with the Goethe-Institut Boston 
Thursday, March 25, 2021
12-1:30pm Eastern Daylight Time (US) / 5-6:30pm German time
Zoom Webinar
You can watch a recording of the complete event by clicking the button above.
About the Event
In the next installment of our series “Authors in Conversation,” Melissa Eddy, the Berlin Correspondent for The New York Times, will meet Alexander Osang who was the New York Correspondent for the German magazine Der Spiegel for eight years.
When Melissa Eddy, a native of Minnesota, moved to Berlin in 2005, Angela Merkel was sworn into office. Alexander Osang was born in East Berlin and covered the events in the years after the reunification for the Berliner Zeitung, where he swiftly became chief reporter. By the time Melissa Eddy arrived in Berlin, he was already reporting from New York and later from Tel Aviv. Since Osang returned to his hometown in 2020, both authors have been living there but never met.
Based on their intertwined biographies and writing, Melissa Eddy and Alexander Osang will talk about experiencing history on an individual level as well as reporting about it from a journalist’s perspective. Or, as Alexander Osang has done in his latest book Fast hell ("Almost light," published January 2021 in German), about describing history in an individual biography.
About the Speakers
Melissa Eddy is the Berlin Correspondent for The New York Times, a position she has held since January 2012. Before that, she covered Germany for The Associated Press, arriving in Frankfurt in 2000.
She moved to Berlin the year that Angela Merkel was sworn into office and has documented all four of her governments. In addition German politics, she has focused on Europe's debt crisis; the Energiewende, migration and immigration, the rise of anti-Semitism and the strains in the transatlantic relationsihp.
Melissa launched her career in journalism at the AP's Vienna bureau in 1997, covering the crisis in Kosovo. She is a native of Minnesota and holds an M.S. in journalism from Columbia University, a B.A. in English and French from Bucknell University. She was named a 1996-7 Fulbright Fellow for Young Journalists in Germany. From 2016-2019 she served as a member of the board of the RIAS Berlin Commission.
Alexander Osang, born in 1962 in East Berlin, studied journalism in Leipzig. After the wall fell, he started working for the Berlin newspaper Berliner Zeitung and became the paper's chief reporter almost instantly. Since 1999, Osang has been reporting for the German news-magazine Der Spiegel, the first eight years as the magazine's New York Correspondent. After leaving New York, he lived in Tel Aviv until his return to Berlin in 2020.
Now one of Germany’s most prominent journalists, Osang received numerous renowned awards in German journalism, among them the Egon-Erwin-Kisch-Preis (which he received three times) as well as the Theodor-Wolff-Preis. His first novel Die Nachrichten ("The News", published 2000 in German) about a television host received the Adolf-Grimme-Preis, one of the most prestigious German television awards. It was adapted for the screen and became a successful movie. His most recent novel Die Leben der Elena Silver ("The lives of Elena Silver," published 2019 in German) was nominated for the German Book Prize (Deutscher Buchpreis) for the best new German language novel of the year. In his new novel Fast hell, Osang uses the fascinating biography of Uwe, an East-German globetrotter, to reflect his own past and family history.