In the Forest of Metropoles

A chronicle of the diversity and wealth of cultures, predominantly from Eastern Europe, that have played a formative role in shaping contemporary Europe but now risk being forgotten.

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.

In this book, Gauss takes his readers on a thirteen-station journey across Europe. From Brussels to Istanbul and from Naples to Opole, Gauss weaves a Sebaldian web of connection and coincidence into a hybrid cultural history. Significantly, Gauss's metropoles are not the well-trodden, thoroughly explored, and minutely documented megalopolises and cultural capitals that have been mythologized by writers great and small. There are no visits to Berlin, Paris, Rome, or Madrid, although he does make time for Vienna, where he looks not for imperial remnants, but for traces of genius unrecognized by most. Gauss's lodestars are small but cosmopolitan towns on the periphery, such as Slaghenaufi, Vacaresti, Fontevraud, Dragatus, Vrzdenec, and Selestat. In these far-flung towns, Gauss assembles a canon of overlooked humanists, expelled or extinguished by political and historical forces that swept the continent.