The poet, pioneer and great thinker Hans Magnus Enzensberger has passed away. An obituary.
Can one imagine German literature without Hans Magnus Enzensberger? Just hard. For more than half a century, this author, poet and thinker in the truest sense of the word has had a decisive influence on world literary life. And unlike some of his colleagues, who are also considered beacons of post-war literature, he didn’t stop at this historical role, but was always very present and current.
Such a cheerful enlightener, who combined unpretentious gestures of superiority with coquettish modesty, will soon not be found a second time, and not only in German literature. Hans Magnus Enzensberger was such a celebrity in international intellectual life that his activities, his statements and his position in the literary world seemed to have been transported into the mythical even during his lifetime. Even his name had the effect of a fanfare: Enzensberger!
Hans Magnus Enzensberger has unwittingly become a legend
That is: the cosmopolitan and global actor of the worldwide “networked” mind, who lived in Norway, Berlin, Rome, the United States and finally for decades in Munich; the publisher of the “Altra Biblioteca” or of legendary magazines such as “Libro di corso” and “Transatlantico”; the alleged protagonist of the student revolt of ’68, from which he soon distanced himself; the former harvest worker in Castro’s Cuba, who endorsed America’s war in Iraq in 2003 – and so on.
But all these biographical details are indeed correct: now, in retrospect, they almost look like puzzle pieces in an unintentional creation of a legend, as if Hans Magnus Enzensberger were a character he invented himself. Not because “HME” was a calculated image, a “brand”, but because this author accidentally succeeded or rather “happened” something that is rarely but always observed with great minds: their lives involuntarily become one Art work of art, because it assumes exemplary characteristics in its specific and exceptional form. Especially where it differs so individually from the average existence.
Enzensberger’s “Defense of Wolves” was a scandal
Born in 1929 as the son of a postman in Kaufbeuren, Hans Magnus Enzensberger grew up in Nuremberg. Away from the microphones, he was still ringing as he yelled a happy “Adee.” The fact that he had already been expelled from the Hitler Youth because of the rebellion shows how early his tendency to contradiction and individualistic distance had developed – but also his courage (better: courage to fear) and his intelligence. Because when the high school student was drafted into the “Volkssturm” at the end of the war, he preferred to throw himself into the bushes instead of being heroically razed to the ground.
The sensational beginning of his meteoric writing career was correspondingly maverick in form and content: he made his breakthrough with his first volume of poetry, ‘The Defense of Wolves’ – a book which is still fascinating and was considered scandalous when it was was published in 1957. In the role of the “angry young man”, the author arrogantly drove all the workers and employees into the cart when he shouted at them: “You,/inviting to be raped,/thrown on the lazy bed/of obedience , still whining / if you lie, you want to be torn apart, you / don’t change the world.”
Enzensberger also criticized Spiegel.
The poet thus combines a sharp criticism of capitalism with the rejection of any idealistic glorification of the “proletariat”. The international fame of this pioneer and master thinker rested above all on his essays, texts which, especially in his early works, reveal influences from the Frankfurt School around Adorno. As an essayist, Enzensberger not only dealt with current issues, from immigration to media criticism, but often brought them into play in the first place. For example, when he witnessed television in the 1970s, he controlled the consciousness of the masses. Or already in 1957 with an essay in “Spiegel”, where he dissected the language style of this news magazine and recognized it as disguised farcical journalism that spread the prevailing ideology only under the camouflage of “critical” poses.
Anyone who so clairvoyantly dismantles commonplace platitudes necessarily applies to Brecht’s saying: “In me you have someone on whom you cannot build.” Enzensberger was far too intelligent and flexible for partisanship and rigid “opinions”. And mobility in the literal sense is also what characterizes the most important part of his work, the one that as a trace of “his earthly days will not perish in eons”: his poetry.
Hans Magnus Enzensberger’s poetry still fascinates today
Enzensberger’s poems fascinate for the gentle swaying of the sentences, that luminous but sometimes pleasantly lulling sound of the dialectic that traces the movement of thought in the swing of the pendulum of the verses. In this poem, the insightful intonation of the high school graduate collides with the tender melancholy with which something like “the snowflake / flake on a woman’s downy arm” is sung.
In the lyrical interweaving of dominance attitude and vulnerability denomination, this author has staged the drama of sincerity in the cold world of competition. That is why his poems always speak directly to us, even when they speak only of air and clouds. Hans Magnus Enzensberger died on Thursday at the age of 93.
