From Islamist terror to pandemic: for five years Mühleis explored the European capital, with observations of street life, descriptions like sketches of perceptions, spontaneous, precise, free-associative. The German-Belgian author shows Brussels away from the headlines and news, he does not report, but rather opens the view, in an intimate, familiar way, to discover the city again and again in a new and different light. After his Diary of a Wind Traveller described a journey around the world under the most modern auspices, with his Brussels Diary he delves into the heart of Europe, with its multilingualism and cultural diversity, colonial past and surrealist tradition that still resonate today. What may be the epitome of excessive bureaucracy to some and a chaotic reflection of the Belgian mishmash to others turns out to be a dazzling conundrum of the foreign in the own, the own in the foreign, in literarily drawn images.
Passagen Verlag, Vienna, 2022
112 p., 14 EUR