He had an Apollonian character and a prodigious mind capable of always maintaining a broader vision of the whole.
Hans Magnus Enzensberger (who died at the age of 93), that man of enviable intellectual energy, small in stature and eyes as clear as they were curious, was interested in everything and knew a lot, as his books on high mathematics prove, astrophysics, historical figures or the memory of the past.
He cultivated all genres —poetry, novel, essay, theater or opera script— and almost always with success, since he was a kind of Picasso of German literature: enormously productive, always to the point, although perhaps more eclectic than original.
Like the precocious “postmodern” that he was, he declared himself—confidently—a skeptic of originality: “It is known that one does not start from scratch,
that was an illusion of the avant-garde that tried to write in a tabula rasa.
Not only contemporary voices are heard, but also past ones, each word has many layers, a complex history of meanings.
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'The political expropriation of the Europeans', by Hans Magnus Enzensberger
From very early on, from the fifties, this polyglot born in a Bavarian town looked beyond the German borders, discovering poets like Nelly Sachs, Tomas Tranströmer, Czeslaw Milosz or Eugenio Montale for German readers.
He edited all of their books and sometimes even translated them.
Hence, he is not surprised that in his work he anticipated many trends and changes, whether literary, social, technological or atmospheric.
Well, at the same time he was involved in political movements, in Cuba and in the European left, from Norway to Spain, where he had arrived for the first time by
hitchhiking,
in 1953. Important incursions in this field were the essays from the 1990s to purpose of the Gulf and Bosnian wars.
Luckily for German readers, the literary connoisseur Enzensberger satisfied a few of his very sweet tooth in that wonderful publishing project Die andere Bibliothek (The Different Library), where he unveiled everything from forgotten classics to bibliophile curiosities by Curzio Malaparte, John Reed or Enrique Vila-Matas.
And especially in poetry he had a preference for paradoxical projects: he created a
Museum of modern poetry
(title of the great anthology of contemporary universal poetry) and wrote a
History of the clouds.
His work, which covers more than a hundred titles, is widely distributed in Spain, where he was awarded the Prince of Asturias Award in 2022.
Undoubtedly, the one who marked German intellectual life for seventy years was a provocateur of fertile polemics, a literary activist who moved agilely between political fronts and countries, with the versatility of a boxer.
“I do not cultivate a taste for fixed positions, I usually say that I am not a tree;
The trees do have fixed positions, they are immovable, they grow where they are, but we are mobile beings”, he said in an interview that I did with him regarding the publication of his collection of poems on the clouds.
With just turned 93, Hans Magnus Enzensberger left the ring yesterday.
Cecilia Dreymüller is a literary critic, translator and specialist in German and Central European literature.
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