What makes an artist? What forces and inklings drive a young man or woman to make their own journey, and where does it begin? In imaginary childhood games? In chance encounters? At the sensitive core of the human heart?

Over the last eight years, I have tried to answer these – and other – questions in almost one hundred interviews with working German artists. I have looked at how a childhood obsession or spark of inspiration develops in the creative imagination. I have followed the journeys of a platinum rock star and a struggling caricaturist, walked beside best-selling novelists, and traced the story of the godfather of techno. I’ve tried to understand how these individuals have succeeded, where they have stumbled and fallen, and how they’ve survived.

Berlin, Europe’s capital of reinvention, is the setting for most interviews, and the ideal place in which to observe the forces and sensibilities that make and sustain (or undermine) the free thinker. After the fall of the Wall, the city became a kind of creative utopia infused with pioneering energy. In Berlin, in ‘Wunderkind’, 50 selected artists reveal their passions and doubts, their working methods, their secret struggles and – above all – show that the task of the artist truly is uncompromisingly simple; to discover what has not yet been done, and to do it.

‘Wunderkind’ is published worldwide as an ebook by wander2wonder Press.