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— Olaf Scholz, Chancellor of the Federal Republic of Germany (2021-2025)
Germany’s relationship with Russia is one of the most consequential factors in European security. Over the last three decades, Berlin’s policy toward Moscow has been shaped by deeply rooted national prejudices and misperceptions, as well as the personal convictions and predilections of German leaders and their interactions with Vladimir Putin. Katja Gloger and Georg Mascolo, two of Germany’s top investigative journalists, brilliantly lay this out in their best-selling book. Their careful analysis, firsthand observations, and sharp conclusions about their country’s missteps should resonate as strongly in the US as they did in Germany.
— Fiona Hill, senior fellow, Center on the United States and Europe, The Brookings Institution; former deputy assistant to the President and senior director for European and Russian Affairs, U.S. National Security Council.
A comprehensive critical reassessment of Germany’s Russia policy over the past decades was long overdue. The Failure meets this need with remarkable clarity and depth. In this book, Russia expert Katja Gloger and her husband, former Spiegel editor-in-chief Georg Mascolo, offer essential reading for anyone seeking to understand the ambitions, illusions, and idealistic misjudgments that shaped German foreign policy.
— Wolfgang Ischinger, Chairman of the Munich Security Conference
An extraordinarily precise and gripping account of Germany’s Russia policy … required reading.
— Markus Lanz, German TV ZDF
Katja Gloger (Author)
Katja Gloger is an award-winning journalist and bestselling author, who has spent more than thirty years covering Russia and international security policy. A historian of Eastern Europe by training, she reported for Stern magazine for many years from Moscow and Washington. Over the course of her career, she has interviewed Mikhail Gorbachev, Boris Yeltsin, and Vladimir Putin.
Georg Mascolo (Author)
Georg Mascolo is one of Germany’s leading investigative journalists and a bestselling author. He served as editor-in-chief of Der Spiegel and later headed the investigative reporting network of the major public television broadcasters NDR and WDR and the daily Süddeutsche Zeitung. The network played a leading role in publishing the „Panama Papers“. His reportage on the fall of the Berlin Wall has been included in UNESCO’s Memory of the World Register.