París Berlín Nueva York

Who are we in each of the places we pass through throughout our lives? The narrator perceives the transformation that living in Paris, Berlin or New York has produced in him, to the point of thinking as one thinks of those cities, being sad as one is sad in them, walking as one walks in them and being full of their images, of its smells, of its flows. That feeling is what drives the writing of this book, which appeared for the first time in 1992, and which is endowed with a rhythm that is probably anachronistic with respect to the technified urgencies of the present, something that makes it extremely attractive for today's reader. Be bold and brash, overwhelmed or exhausted, the traveler has only the journey left. He is forced to cope with constantly changing situations, he has to approach people to stock up on the most necessary and also repeatedly falls into the maelstrom of people whose lives leave him perplexed. The hesitant has no choice but to become an active, participatory person: he has to assert himself in the piece of land on which he finds himself. A narrator who also reflects on the stillness of small places, where time and silence abound, and where one ceases to understand who one was in the metropolis, "those swamps of time in which life itself fragments and lies unrecognizable, like a puzzle of immense size that he will never be able to assemble", to which, however, he cannot help but return again and again. With this wandering, lyrical and dreamy book, Wolfgang Hermann says a beautiful prayer to the inexhaustible spirit of the big city.