The literary journal, this well-tempered mixture of diary, essay, aphorism and commentary, is Karl-Markus Gauss’ preferred genre. He also proves to be a master of this form of writing with his new publication “The Seasons of Eternity”, for which Gauss was awarded the Leipzig Book Prize for European Understanding 2022 in March.
The range of his topics is large, ranging from everyday perceptions worth considering in the private sphere to reflections on language and literature to cultural-critical and political interventions. An advantage of this stylistically elegant prose is that its author does not present finished results of thought, but lets us watch the “gradual development of thoughts while writing” (Kleist). Whether it’s about education, migration, language diversity, identity politics or old age, Gauss’ texts are a beneficial alternative to the blatant simplifications that “social” media inundate us with.
There is no other Austrian writer who was as knowledgeable and sensitive to “small” languages and cultures on the fringes of Europe as Gauss. However, he does not hide the fact that the self-restraint of cultural minorities can also have problematic side effects, above all national narrow-mindedness. He criticizes the factually unfounded, mostly speculative scaremongering about migration, but also the correctness phrases in which everything foreign is euphorically stylized as a source of goodness. He expresses himself in a similarly differentiated manner on the topics of atheism and faith, bourgeoisie and education. Karl-Markus Gauss also fulfills the philosophical claim that knowledge of the world is only half the battle without self-knowledge. He directs his critical and ironic gaze not only at his fellow human beings, but also at his own weaknesses.
Last but not least, it is the challenges of growing older that provide him with the material for this. And if you have to say goodbye to more and more people of the same age, you start to think anyway. Karl-Markus Gauss is a skeptical humanist of the sense of possibility. His thinking moves in the grammatical field of one side and the other. He says how he sees things, but doesn’t rule out the possibility that it could be different.
He invites you to think along and think further, because only one imperative is categorical with him, which I want to call Gaussian: Express your thoughts openly and clearly, but in such a way that you can see their provisional nature and refutability.
Karl-Markus Gauss: “The Seasons of Eternity”, Journal, Zsolnay, 310 pages, 25.70 euros
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