Adrian Geiges

Life

Adrian Geiges, born September 3, 1960, is a journalist from the Black Forest in southern Germany. He became the CEO of the Chinese subsidiary of the German publisher Bertelsmann. 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."

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 (Brazil) and has been working there as a documentary filmmaker. He is living in a favela and has written about his experiences in Brazil in his book "Brazil is Burning".

Works