Thomas Kielinger OBE (born July 1940 in Danzig) is a German journalist and publicist. Since 1988 he has been the London correspondent for Die Welt.
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Kielinger was born in 1940 in Danzig (modern day Gdańsk in Poland), the last of six children. He studied at the University of Cardiff, and on graduation stayed for three years as a lecturer in the Germanic department.[1]
By 1971 he was deputy editor to Herbert Kremp at Die Welt in Hamburg. In 1977, he was made Die Welt's chief correspondent in Washington DC to coincide with the inauguration of the United States President Jimmy Carter, and later in the era of Ronald Reagan.
In 1988, he was invited by new editor-in-chief Mathias Döpfner to be Die Welt's correspondent in London, a position he still holds.[1] While in London, he also served as chief editor of Rheinischer Merkur 1985 to 1994.
In 1994 Kielinger became freelance, concentrating mainly as an author, guest speaker and consultant for political foundations. He wrote Crossroads and Roundabouts: Junctions in German-British Relations. As a result, at the suggestion of then British ambassador in Bonn, Sir Nigel Broomfield, in a diplomatic note to Buckingham Palace, Kielinger was appointed Officer of the Order of the British Empire (OBE).
Kielinger was for many years on the jury of the Theodor-Wolff-Prize, and a jury member of the Lenkungsaussschusses at the Königswinter Conference. He is a regular panelist on the BBC News weekly foreign-correspondent programme Dateline London.