Hans Magnus Enzensberger, great German intellectual of the 20th century, dies

Germany says goodbye to one of its last great intellectuals of the 20th century.

The poet, essayist and translator Hans Magnus Enzensberger has died this Thursday in Munich at the age of 93, as reported by the Suhrkamp publishing house, citing the family.

Enzensberger was one of the most influential authors of postwar German literature and thought.

Author of more than 70 volumes, he was also an editor and journalist and a reference in all the intellectual debates on the social and political transformations of the last decades.

More information

Enzensberger, the eye that saw everything in Nazi Germany

Born on November 11, 1929 in Kaufbeuren, in Bavaria, Enzensberger lived in his youth in socialist Cuba, Norway, Italy, Mexico and the United States until he settled in Munich in 1979. Throughout his career he received numerous awards, Among them, the Prince of Asturias Award for Communication and Humanities in 2002. He wrote poetry and essays, but also children's books, plays and outreach.

"As a poet, essayist, biographer, editor and translator, he was one of the most influential and world-renowned German intellectuals," the publishing house said when announcing his death.

German Culture Minister Claudia Roth has praised Enzensberger as "one of the most versatile and important German intellectuals."

“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,” she added.

"Germany is going to miss him," said the German government spokeswoman after the news broke.

Interviewed by EL PAÍS on the occasion of the publication in Spain of his first autobiographical novel,

, Enzensberger downplayed his consideration as a "great intellectual of the 20th century" in Germany, a label he shares with Günter Grass, Jürgen Habermas or Ernst Jünger.

“All these old gentlemen who have spent decades in the world of culture are a bit annoying to others.

Ortega y Gasset was someone!

I have the impression that there was a time when the critics wanted to get rid of us.

But in the end they saw that it didn't make sense because it was a matter of time.

They just had to wait, ”he told this newspaper in 2015.

Enzensberger studied German, Literature and Philosophy at the universities of Erlangen, Freiburg and Hamburg, in Germany, and at the Sorbonne in Paris.

For a time he dedicated himself to radio journalism.

He began his literary career in 1957, at the age of 27, with the publication of the book of poems

which was translated into English and garnered good reviews outside of Germany

magazine

and in the early 1980s he directed the publication

His essays show that he had very varied interests, from the German political system to the media to contemporary history.

His essay

, published in Spain in 1989, one of his most famous works, combines the chronicle with sociological radiography and historical analysis to delve into the reality of seven European countries: Sweden, Italy, Hungary, Portugal, Norway, Poland and Spain.

Spain also occupied a good part of their interests.

He dedicated a biography to the guerrilla of the Civil War Buenaventura Durruti,

(1972), and in his essay on terrorism

(2006) reflected on the attacks in Madrid in 2004. A good connoisseur of Europe, he launched a dart against the bureaucracy of Brussels in

(2012), suspicious of its —in his opinion— distance and opacity.

His chronicle

(1981) collected dozens of testimonies (Bakunin, Hess, Kautsky, Lafargue) and historical documents to reconstruct in a kaleidoscopic way the life and work of the two German thinkers who marked the history of the 19th and 20th centuries. .

His works include

(1975), a series of 37 ballads about modern heroes (revolutionaries, engineers, astronomers, mathematicians, officials) who warn about the contradictions of progress;

(1978), an epic poem about the tragedy of the famous ocean liner;

(1984), which is inspired by Diderot's life to reflect on the social function of the intellectual;

the popular essay

(1997), and

(1998).

Already in the new century, he published

(2002), which delves into the fertile relationship between poetry and science, and

(2015), in which a loquacious

of Enzensberger himself, among Stoic and eccentric, he shares his highly critical views on institutions, religion (and atheism), totalitarianism, neoliberal economics, art and poetry, among other issues, with whoever wants to listen.

"The encyclopedist", headlines his obituary this Thursday in the newspaper

which recalls how

Enzensberger cultivated all genres and wrote on all issues that affected Germany and Europe.

She did it, for example, with the migratory crisis that her country experienced in 2015 after the arrival of a million refugees fleeing the war in Syria.

But she was no longer able to write, regrets the Munich newspaper, about the last major European crises, the pandemic and the Russian invasion of Ukraine.

Also very interested in spreading the most diverse subjects, Enzensberger's greatest sales success —it sold more than a million copies in 30 languages— was

, a volume of spreading on mathematics for children that he himself defined in another interview with EL PAÍS as "a book against the way of educating boring the whole class".

With it he wanted to "show that mathematics could be not only accessible, but also fascinating for seven-year-olds."

“Hans Magnus Enzensberger was in all facets and over the decades not only the intellectual pulse of a more interesting Federal Republic;

he was the most cosmopolitan representative of him and often far ahead of his own country, ”says Paul Ingendaay, the European culture correspondent for the

, in the obituary dedicated to the German essayist.