For more than 60 years, the writer and intellectual shaped the German literary scene and the political discourse like few others. He was never above revising vehemently held positions. He has now died at the age of 93.
Hans Magnus Enzensberger was always changing. Decades ago, he wrote, he doesn’t need consistent worldviews. He prefers doubts to sentiments. “I would prefer to be myself, but of course that’s impossible.” This is what it sounds like in “Soliloquy of a Confused Man” in his volume of poetry “Rebus” (Suhrkamp 2009). As Suhrkamp Verlag announced on Friday, Enzensberger, one of the best-known German intellectuals, died in Munich on Thursday at the age of 93.
“Solitaire among Germany’s poets and thinkers”
Minister of State for Culture Claudia Roth (Greens) praised Enzensberger as “one of the most versatile and important German intellectuals.” He left an overwhelming life’s work. “With his verses and critical reflections, he accompanied the history of the Federal Republic of Germany, whose founding on the rubble of a devastated country he witnessed at the age of 20.”
For a long time, Enzensberger, who, along with Günter Grass, Martin Walser, Uwe Johnson and Heinrich Böll, was one of the most influential authors of post-war German literature, published one book after the other. It was only in 2018 that 99 “vignettes” about writers who survived the dictatorships of the 20th century were published under the title “Survival Artists”: as Wehrmacht officers like Ernst Jiinger, as Auschwitz survivors like Imre Kertesz, as inner emigrants like Erich Kästner. Followers, concrete heads and bon vivants – the author carved laconic portraits from biographical data, memories and anecdotes.
From the “Volkssturm” to the Americans
He started out like most authors: as a poet. His first poems appeared in 1955 in the magazine “Akzente”. Born in Kaufbeuren in 1929, he was drafted into the “Volkssturm” in the last winter of the war. Barely 16 years old, he learned to interpret for the Americans. After graduating from high school in Nördlingen, Enzensberger studied philosophy and literature in Erlangen, Freiburg and Paris, among other places, and did his doctorate on Clemens Brentano. World disgust and political indignation underpin his language games, he criticizes obeying authorities and prosperity thinking. Enzensberger gave language to a generation “that lives among us, speechless with anger,” said Alfred Andersch. He lived in the USA, Mexico, Cuba, Italy, married a Norwegian – it was the first of three marriages. In 1960 he went to Suhrkamp as an editor and remained loyal to the publishing house over the years, as a translator, consultant and editor, but above all as an author.
Enzensberger also made a name for himself as a publicist for children’s books. In 1997 Hanser published his world bestseller “The Number Devil – A Pillow Book for All Who Are Afraid of Mathematics” (illustrated by Rotraut Susanne Berner), which was translated into 34 languages.
Already written in 1987 by “Ossies” and “Wessies”.
As early as 1987 he used the terms “Ossie” and “Wessie” in the prose volume “Ah, Europe! Perceptions from seven countries.” One chapter of the fictional travelogue through Europe in 2006 deals with a peacefully reunited Germany, in which, however, Ossies and Wessies continue to be hostile to one another.
Enzensberger took part in several conferences of the writers’ association “Group 47”. In 1963 he was the youngest author to receive the renowned Georg Büchner Prize. From then on he also wrote regularly for the news magazine “Der Spiegel”, whose language he had previously criticized. In 1965 the first editions of his cultural magazine “Course Book” were published, which soon became the cult magazine of the student movement. Although not “throwing around confessions” was his thing, as he once explained, he became a guide for the students. Enzensberger maintained an intellectual distance: “I prefer arguments to confessions.”
“He overwrites himself on principle.”
Between political statements and media-critical essays, Enzensberger continued to write poems. Since 1979 he has lived in Munich as a freelance author. After leaving the “Course Book” team, he founded the cultural magazine “Transatlantik” in 1980 and in 1984 with the publisher and book designer Franz Greno the book art series “The Other Library”, which he published with Eichborn Verlag until 2004. Since its insolvency in 2012, the book series has been continued in an independent publishing house of the Aufbau publishing group.
Again and again Enzensberger loudly took a stand, for example when he saw a “new Hitler” in Saddam Hussein. He has openly revised this position. In the “Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung”, literary critic Felicitas von Lovenberg compared it to a palimpsest – a piece of writing from which the original writing has been removed and which is being rewritten: “As a matter of principle, it overwrites itself.”
Enzensberger has received numerous awards for his diverse literary activities, most recently the Frank Schirrmacher Prize in 2015. epd, with dpa