On the death of Hans Magnus Enzensberger: A life as a work of art

Created: 11/25/2022 11:51 am

By: Alexander Altman

There will never be another such cheerful enlightener as Hans Magnus Enzensberger in German literature: Hans Magnus Enzensberger died on Thursday at the age of 93.

© Nicolas Armer/dpa

The poet, pioneer and master thinker Hans Magnus Enzensberger has passed away.

An obituary.

Can one imagine German literature without Hans Magnus Enzensberger?

Just difficult.

For more than half a century, this author, who was a poet and thinker in the truest sense of the word, had a decisive influence on literary life worldwide.

And unlike some of his colleagues, who were also considered beacons of post-war literature, he did not stop in this historical role, but was always very present and of today.

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, 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 unintentionally became a legend

That was: the worldwide “networked” cosmopolitan and global player of the mind, who lived in Norway, Berlin, Rome, the USA and finally for decades in Munich;

the editor of the "Other Library" or legendary magazines like "Course Book" and "Transatlantic";

the supposed leading figure of the student revolt in '68, from which he soon distanced himself;

the former harvest worker in Castro's Cuba, who approved of America's Iraq war in 2003 – and so on.

But all these biographical details are really correct: now, in retrospect, they seem almost like pieces of a puzzle in an unintentional creation of a legend, as if Hans Magnus Enzensberger were a character that he invented himself.

Not because "HME" was a calculated image, a "brand", but because this author casually succeeded or rather "happened" something that one rarely but always observes with great minds: Their lives unintentionally become one themselves Art work of art, because it takes on exemplary features in its specific, outstanding form.

Especially where it differs so individually from the average existence.

Enzensberger's "Defense of the Wolves" was a scandal

Born in 1929 as the son of a postman in Kaufbeuren, Hans Magnus Enzensberger grew up in Nuremberg.

Far away from the microphones, it still rang through when he shouted a happy "Adee".

The fact that he was already thrown out of the Hitler Youth because of rebelliousness shows how early his tendency to contradiction and individualistic distance was developed - but also his courage (better: courage to fear) and his cleverness.

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 burned to the ground.

The sensational start of his meteoric career as a writer was correspondingly non-conformist in form and content: he made his breakthrough with his first volume of poetry, “Defense of the Wolves” – a book that is still fascinating and was considered scandalous when it was published in 1957.

In the role of the “angry young man”, the author arrogantly drove all the workers and employees by the cart when he called out to them: “You,/inviting to be raped,/throw on the lazy bed/of obedience, still whining/ if you lie, you want to be torn, you/do not change the world.”

Enzensberger also criticized the “Spiegel”.

The poet thus combined a biting criticism of capitalism with a rejection of any idealistic glorification of the "proletariat".

The international fame of this pioneer and master thinker was based above all on his essays - texts which, especially in his early work, reveal influences from the Frankfurt School around Adorno.

As an essayist, Enzensberger not only took up current issues, from migration to media criticism, but often brought them into play in the first place.

For example, when he attested to television in 1970, it controls the consciousness of the masses.

Or as early as 1957 with an essay in “Spiegel”, where he dissected the language style of this news magazine and recognized it as disguised slapstick journalism that only spread the prevailing ideology under the camouflage of “critical” poses.

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Anyone who dismantles common clichés in such a clairvoyant manner necessarily applies to Brecht's dictum: "In me you have someone you cannot build on".

Enzensberger was far too clever and flexible for partisanship and rigid “opinions”.

And mobility in the literal sense is also what characterizes the most important part of his work, that which as a trace of his “earthly days will not perish in aeons”: his poetry.

Hans Magnus Enzensberger's poetry fascinates to this day

Enzensberger's poems fascinate with the gentle swaying of the sentences, that bright but sometimes pleasantly lulling sound of the dialectic that traces the movement of thought in the pendulum swing of the verses.

In this poem, the insightful intonation of the straight-A 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 staged the drama of sincerity in the cold world of competition.

That's why his poems always speak directly to us, even when they're just about air and clouds.

Hans Magnus Enzensberger died on Thursday at the age of 93.