Alfred von Krusenstiern was a distinguished newspaper journalist who covered the United States for German readers. A man of great intellect and ironic wit, he spent the last 25 years of his career in New York writing for the German newspaper group Springer News (Axel Springer AG).

He served as the Bureau Chief in New York for Springer Foreign News from 1968 until 1989 and thereafter as the special correspondent to the United Nations and Canada. Mr. Krusenstiern retired to Coupeville in 1993 with his wife Vera and died on Dec. 27, 2007. He was 78 years old. While a great patriot of his adopted country the United States, he remained by his own description a Baltic gentleman.

Born on Feb. 7, 1929, in Prague, Czechoslovakia, as Alfred Nikolai Philip von Krusenstiern, he was the eldest son of Friedrich Alfred and Dorothea Anna von Krusenstiern, both members of the Baltic German nobility in the then Russian province of Estonia. His father, a former officer in the Imperial Russian Army, and his mother fled Russia during the Bolshevik Revolution and ensuing civil war. Born in exile from his parents’ beloved Russia, Mr. Krusenstiern was raised as a Baltic German refugee.

He spent his childhood in Germany and was drafted into the Wehrmacht of the German Reich at 16 years old in 1945 during the last months of WW II. After the defeat of Germany, Mr. Krusenstiern obtained work as a copy boy with United Press International (UPI) and helped to support his parents and brother during the “Great Miracle” years of the 1950’s.

What Mr. Krusenstiern lacked in formal education he made up with an extraordinary intellectual curiosity, an insatiable appetite for books and a natural talent for expressing ideas and information both in speech and the written word. Working his way up from copy boy, he became a journalist and served in the UPI offices of Frankfurt, London, Berlin, and Washington, D.C. His first UPI assignment in the United States was from 1959 to 1962 when he worked in Washington, D.C. and covered the Kennedy White House. In 1962, he returned to Germany, and served as a Bureau Chief for UPI in Frankfurt.

In 1965 he left Europe for good and rejoined the Washington, D.C. office of UPI. Three years later, he was appointed the Bureau Chief of the New York office of the Hamburg based Springer News (Axel Springer AG). His crisp writing and tempered, cynical humor brought his German readers a candid and compelling window into America during what has come to be known as the “American Century.”

During the years before his retirement, Mr. Krusenstiern reported on the changing world order in the post cold war era as the special correspondent to the United Nations for Springer Foreign News. During this period, he also covered Canada and shared his love for that nation by writing and publishing a travel book on Canada in Germany called Kanada.

Mr. Krusenstiern served as the president of the Foreign Press Association in New York for several terms during 1970’s and 1980’s. He was appointed honorary professor at the Central Connecticut State University in 1984.

Mr. Krusenstiern is survived by his wife, Vera Elisabeth (nee’ Dohany) of Coupeville, with whom he was married for 51 years. He is also survived by his three sons, Friedrich Maria of Brookline, Maine, Johann Adam of Bellingham, and Konstantin Maria of Brattleboro, Vermont. He also leaves eight grandchildren. In addition, he is survived by his brother Friedrich Johann of Nienburg, Germany.