Berlin and the Artist, by Robert Walser, is an author with a work that other greats love, people like Franz Kafka, Robert Musil, Elias Canetti, Thomas Bernhard and Walter Benjamin. This book brings together several essays that talk about his relationship with literature, with the city in which he lived and his position in front of life. Thomas Hirschhorn selected the texts for this volume.

"When the weak think they are strong." Walser not only wrote that sentence, he lived it. He lived it in a rebellious and joyful way, no doubt as a form of resistance in failure and, no doubt, rebelling also against success. Not being successful is not synonymous with being a victim, failing can be a heroic act. Robert Walser is a hero. In his radicalism and his willingness to pay the price of his work, he is an example for every artist, every philosopher, every writer.

From the prologue

The figure and work of Robert Walser have been inspiring writers and readers around the world for decades, including Thomas Hirschhorn, one of the most innovative contemporary visual artists, for whom the Swiss author is a capital figure, a writer who resists being labeled "writer", someone for whom the concept of art is always connected with a very personal point of view, systematically removed from the establishment. Berlin and the Artist is an attractive and provocative selection of Walser's most defining texts, a perfect journey through the trajectory of an unrepeatable creator.