Eva C. Schweitzer, Ph.D.

Eva Claudia Schweitzer is a seasoned journalist with more than twenty years’ experience, though somehow she hasn’t aged past thirty-five. Originally based in Berlin, she has spent most of the last ten years writing about New York and the United States. She divides her time between Berlin, various international airports, and New York City, where she lives in a former Times Square hotel that once housed Lee Harvey Oswald.

She covers media, entertainment and Broadway, but also Wall Street and the aftermath of 9-11. She has traveled to places like New Mexico, California, also to New Orleans and Miami. She writes for Die ZEIT and ZEIT Online, Berliner Zeitung, Frankfurter Rundschau, Kölner Stadtanzeiger, Hannoversche Allgemeine, Baseler Zeitung from Switzerland, Kleine Zeitung from Austria and Jüdische Allgemeine, Berlin‘s biggest Jewish Newspaper. She has also written occasional stories for American papers, such as The Advocate and Metropolis.

Before coming to New York, she was a metro editor at Der Tagesspiegel, covering real estate and city planning, as well as the relocation of the Federal Government to Berlin. She began her career at two small papers in Kreuzberg, went on to Zitty, a city magazine, wrote for Wirtschaftwoche and Stern, but mainly for taz, die tageszeitung, a leftwing daily. She earned the prestigous Theodor-Wolff-Award for a story about a murder in Berlin’s real estate circles.

Having grown up in Bavaria, she attended the Ludwig Maximilian University in Munich, and later the Free University in Berlin (where she joined the squatter movement until she developed an allergy to tear gas). At FU, she earned her Masters in German Literature, Journalism, and American Cultural History. She completed her Ph.D. at Humboldt University in Berlin, with a dissertation on the redevelopment of Times Square, published by Leue Verlag. Altogether she has written six books, among them Großbaustelle Berlin, the novel Hauptstadtroulette, America and the Holocaust, and most recently, Manhattan Moments.

She is a member of the Overseas Press Club, the ACLU, the Theatre Development Fund, the women-journalists network W.I.R.E, the German journalist union Verdi, and AAA.