Intimate Brussels. Living amongst Eurocrats.

In Brussels, tens of thousands are defining regulations for five hundred million. Civil servants, lob by ists, representatives, assistants, politicians, interns. They negotiate seventy percent of our laws, but we do not know their faces. For one year, Martin Leidenfrost explored Europe’s capital and wrote fifty personal – tender, alienated, mischievous – portraits. When he could not bear the Eurocrats, Leidenfrost escaped: to the African neighbourhood, to the Finnish sauna, to the Brussels window prostitutes and even to their Bulgarian hometown. He visited an Albanian drug dealer and discovered the happiest man in the world: a tobacco lobbyist. He follows every hint, perseveres, does not want to give up until an issue opens up well and truly. At the same time Martin Leidenfrost’s stories are always entertaining – and time and again they show us a different side of the Eurocrats.