The most beautiful anecdotes, memorabilia and portraits from Berggruen's three books, which are now out of print, are collected here. In them, Berggruen wrote down what went through his wise mind, experienced in life and art: experiences with unusual people, with Pablo Picasso, Henri Matisse, Gianni Agnelli, Frida Kahlo, Juan Gris, Gertrude Stein or the Giacometti brothers. In addition, there are always stories from old, long-gone times, when Uncle Sally still had his pub in Landsberg an der Warthe and was suddenly no longer allowed to go to the swimming pool, when the strict Mrs. Edelheim was still the editor of the CV newspaper and Berggruen was her apprentice , and when the bourgeois dreams culminated in the maternal admonition: "Become a lamp!"
