
To answer these and other questions, I have met more than one hundred working German artists over the last eight years. I have traced how childhood obsessions and a spark of inspiration develop in the imagination. I've walked beside a platinum rock star and a struggling caricaturist, followed the process of best-selling novelists, tracked the life stories of top film makers, sculptors and painters, shared coffee with the godfather of techno. I've seen how political rebellion, English punk, Pershing missiles, Joseph Beuys, even Elvis Presley has awoken the creative spirit. I've learnt that art is a weapon, that art can heal, and that art deals with the mysteries that lie in the spaces between the words. I've tried to understand how these individuals have succeeded, where they have stumbled and fallen, and how they've survived.
Most of the interviews took place in Berlin, Europe's capital of reinvention. This city's identity has always been based not on stability but on change. Over the centuries Berlin recreated itself from a mean and artless outpost to Hohenzollern garrison town, Hitler's capital of war and then the flash point of the nuclear age. The divided city emerged from the Cold War as a virtual blank canvas. After 1989 thousands of German and foreign artists aspired to create a new artistic life here, a kind of 'artsy communism: a creative utopia of collaboration and acceptance infused with a pioneering spirit', according to the writer, critic and cultural journalist Kimberly Bradley. In its crumbling tenements and vast, peanut-priced studios, they embarked on an experiment in the power of the imagination.
That phenomenal time – and the speed of Berlin's subsequent embrace of gentrification – has made the city an ideal place in which to observe the forces and sensibilities that make and sustain (or undermine) an artist.
Now – in cooperation with the Goethe-Institut – I have selected the finest interviews for Wunderkind: Portraits of 50 Contemporary German Artists, bringing together the stories of some of the remarkable men and women who during those years chose to follow their passion, to break rules and make new ones, to reinvent themselves like the city itself. In this new ebook the musicians Campino and Shantel, actors Clemens Schick and Sibel Kekilli, painters Jorinde Voigt and Michael Müller, film maker Uli Gaulke, author Thomas Brussig and many others reveal their passions and doubts, their working methods and their secret struggles. Above all they show us that the task of the artist truly is uncompromisingly simple; to discover what has not yet been done, and to do it.
I hope that you'll have a chance to read Wunderkind, and share with me the stories of these individuals for whom creative work is the very point of being alive. It's now available from all ebook distributors including Amazon UK, Amazon US and Amazon Germany as well as the iBookstore.
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