Enzensberger and the critical distance

They received training, they exercised their gifts, they worked tenaciously in what they were passionate about and they lived long years.

Such propitious circumstances allowed a rather reduced number of individuals to complete a successful life cycle.

One of those favored by fortune (with Goethe, with Picasso, with Borges...) was Hans Magnus Enzensberger, a kind of modern encyclopedist who dealt with a wide variety of disciplines, never resigning himself to triviality.

Born in a small town in Bavaria, he died last week at the age of 93.

His versatility has been associated with the exercise of free thought.

Lucid to the end, he avoided serving a hegemonic ideology.

He thought that the intellectual should get away from wherever the unanimous mass is and be honest and courageous to change his views.

He stated that he would dislike being right all the time.

In his traveling attitude (he lived in various countries) they wanted to see a reflection of his intention not to settle on fixed convictions.

He was equally attracted to politics and poetry, and he came to mix them during the dialectical fights of his early years in poems that he called "objects of use", in the manner of Gabriel Celaya's urgent or circumstantial poetry.

From the angry protests of youth he later moved on to ironic and calm tones, and at all times advocated the "critical distance",

to the irritation of those who would have preferred to keep him still in their ranks.

Decades of prolific activity left an enormous body of work that crossed borders.

In addition to literature, he cultivated essayism and scientific dissemination, translated and edited.

He wrote: "When I eat a blood orange, I think that the world has given me more than I have given it."

It is not easy to pinpoint what Enzensberger gave to the world.

What he gave to the rest of us was much and meritorious.

Subscribe to continue reading

Read without limits

Keep reading

I'm already a subscriber