Alexander Görlach

Biography

Alexander Görlach is the founder of the debate magazine The European, whose publisher and editor-in-chief he was from 2009 to 2016. He holds a Ph.D. in theology and a Ph.D. in linguistics. In both academic works Alex deals with the relations of the Muslim and the Western World. He studied in Italy, Egypt and Turkey for this enterprise. As a journalist Görlach worked for German Television, serving in the studios of this television outlet in New York and London. Görlach also wrote for several German national newspapers, Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, Süddeutsche Zeitung und Die Welt and Focus Magazine.

Prior to founding The European he served as head of the online edition of the political magazine Cicero. For a period of time Görlach worked as a deputy spokesman of the Christian Democratic Union in the Bundestag, the German parliament. He was also a scholar of the Adenauer Foundation for talented students and later held teaching assignments, among others, at the Freie Universität Berlin. Today he is a member of the Liberal Party (FDP) in Germany. In 2014, Görlach became a John F. Kennedy Memorial Fellow at the Minda de Gunzburg Center for European Studies at Harvard where he held a series of lectures on debates in Germany and its influence on Europe. In 2015, he was invited as a Visiting Scholar at Harvard's Divinity School. Görlach researches in the field of politics and religion.

He is a Senior Advisor to the Berggruen Institute and The World Post, a distinguished columnist for Die Wirtschaftswoche, and an op-ed contributor to the New York Times. In his last book, We want to see you fail, Görlach examines the reasons of mediocrity and malice in German society. During his stay at CES, he will work on his book project on "The Future of Secularism in Europe and the US."

This information is accurate for the time period that the scholar is affiliated with CES.