User:Adelheid Mackensen

Adelheid Gunnhildr Louise Mackensen (born June 2, 2003) is a journalist who lives in Indonesia and known for her blog reporting on local socio-political issues in English, bringing the problems that persist Indonesian society into the international spotlight.

Early life
Adelheid Gunnhildr Mackensen was born on June 2, 2003, at the Pondok Indah Hospital. Her parents are Gerhard Siegfried Mackensen, who had immigrated alongside his parents to Indonesia during his childhood and was known to have covered the May 1998 riots in Indonesia and the following Reformasi period as a freelance journalist, and Wilhelmina Fredericka Mackensen, the daughter of a local Hanoverian politician. She grew up in the Pondok Indah suburbs of South Jakarta and attended the Deutsche Schule Jakarta from kindergarten up to twelfth grade; her current and final year. From 2018 to 2019, she served as a student council president, serving alongside three boys, one of whom is her boyfriend. Mackensen is the younger of three children, having a twin sister, Elisabeth Brünnhilde Mackensen, and an older sister, Theresia Hildebrand Mackensen, who was born in 1997. Recently finishing her written Abitur exams, she plans to enroll in Heidelberg University later this summer after completing her oral exams and receiving her certificate.

In 2015, Mackensen became interested in politics, having read countless historical Wikipedia articles and news regarding the 2016 presidential election in the United States. She then founded a nation in the political simulator game NationStates and began writing an extensive lore about its fictional political system, history, and society. Eventually, she also turned her attention to real-life politics, having become fascinated by Donald Trump's win in 2016. This culminated in 2017 when she founded a blog on WordPress and wrote her first articles detailing her life experiences and surroundings. Eventually, she started writing political pieces in relation to world developments and aspects of Indonesian society, giving English-language explanations to a foreign audience regarding socio-political issues that persist in Indonesia.

Apart from her political journalism, she also started engaging with politics proper, starting with her appointment as a delegate from her school to a cultural festival in Kuala Lumpur and eventually peaking with her election as a student council president in September 2018 for a single school year term. During her tenure, she not only organized traditional school events such as Halloween, Christmas, and Valentine's Day, but also implemented school-wide reforms such as the reorganization of the student council's laws and structure, the introduction of environmentally-friendly plastic straws to the cafeteria, and the opening of relations between other schools. She initially considered running for a second term in 2019 but declined, citing her need to "concentrate" on the Abitur, and followed suit with two of her fellow presidents, including her boyfriend, by retiring from the student council leadership upon the term's expiration in August 2019. A little over a year later however, she was elected class vice-representative in September 2020, once again becoming a member of the student council and currently serving under her boyfriend who is the class representative.

Family
Mackensen's father, Gerhard (born 20 April, 1971), immigrated to Indonesia with his parents in 1974. Previously his father had been to the country several times since 1959 initially as a tourist but later on as a businessman and eventually stayed. Initially settling in Menteng, where Gerhard attended the Deutsche Schule Jakarta (then known as the Deutsche Internationale Schule Jakarta), the family was well-off by expatriate standards and frequently hosted parties which sometimes saw well-known local figures such as New Order cabinet members attend. In 1995, shortly after graduating from the University of Hanover the previous year, Gerhard married a distant relative, Wilhelmina Fredericka Löwenmarck, the daughter of a local Hanoverian politician, and returned to Indonesia. That same year, the couple bought a house in the Pondok Indah suburbs and, aside from helping run the family business before eventually taking it over from his retiring father, Gerhard began engaging in investigative journalism covering the collapse of the New Order regime in 1998 and the subsequent reformation period. He was also one of the first few journalists in Indonesia to build a website, thus helping him reach a wider audience. Since then however, he has mostly withdrawn himself from journalism after covering a variety of dramatic corruption cases in the early 2000s, though he has returned on several occasions, sometimes with his reports co-written by one of his daughters, usually Elisabeth or Adelheid, to cover notorious events such as the murder of Wayan Mirna Salihin in 2016. His youngest daughter has since taken a more active role in journalism while he works with his eldest daughter, who had recently graduated from the University of Hanover, to run the family business.

Mackensen plans to marry her longtime boyfriend, whom she has dated since 2015, and has said on her blog that she "plans to have two children with him".