In the Forest of the Metropoles, Karl-Markus Gauß
Seagull Books, December 2024
The Austrian writer Karl-Markus Gauß has distinguished himself as the foremost literary cartographer of a vanishing Europe. His wide-ranging essays chronicle the diversity and wealth of languages and cultures, predominantly in Eastern Europe, that have played a formative role in shaping contemporary European identities but now risk being forgotten.
Gauß’s lodestars are small but cosmopolitan towns on the periphery, such as Slaghenaufi, Vacaresti, Fontevraud, Dragatus, Vrzdenec and Sélestat. In these far-flung towns, Gauß assembles a canon of overlooked humanists, expelled or extinguished by political and historical forces that swept the continent. With such figures as Janus Pannonius, aka Ivan Česmički, a fifteenth-century “Italian scholar, Croatian humanist, Hungarian bishop, Austrian writer and outlaw refugee” to the exceptional twentieth-century Flemish writer Louis Paul Boon, Gauß tracks the desire to make familiar “a European culture on the same level as that of classical Greece,” a desire repeatedly thwarted both by international political movements and surges of nationalism.
A Herodotus of Mitteleuropa, cultural historian Karl-Markus Gauß is essential reading for anyone trying to understand the breadth and complexities of cultures and societies in Europe before, during, and after its decades of division in the twentieth century. His books in general, but In the Forest of the Metropoles in particular, are animated by the conviction that it is necessary to understand a region’s traditions and history to understand its place in the world at present. This view is central to the evolving idea of Europe as a whole and the European Union in particular: Gauß assembles here a study of figures who pursued in their lives and works the ideal of a progressive, enlightened, diverse, and unified Europe.
Praise for Karl-Markus Gauß
The jury for the 2018 Jean Améry Essay Prize praised Gauß as “a writer, who takes the idea of a borderless Europe literally and crosses imaginary borders between East and West with consummate ease in order to explore a continent that is still unknown to most of us. In his essays . . . he brings the margins to the center of attention . . . subjects reality to an analysis both critical and benevolent and traces the continued ramifications of traditions and contradictions. In doing so, he demonstrates that the wealth of our continent lies in its multiplicity.”
‘The Cemetery Goer’ a profile of KMGauß by Walter Grünzweig in The European Review of Books
