grasp of the somersault ahead –
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He was one of many brightest minds within the semi-darkness of post-war Germany, within the twilight of many cultural-political debates, within the sharp brilliance of the worldwide literary and media scene. The phrase twilight was favored by Hans Magnus Enzensberger, who used the English variant twilight much more elegant, as a result of he knew that mild and shadow are siblings.
On the age of 33 he acquired the Georg Büchner Prize in 1963, when Magnus, as his mates in all probability referred to as him not and not using a double that means, was already a star: like at the moment nearly solely Ingeborg Bachmann, with whom not solely mixed the early poetic expertise and the power to carry out in a surprisingly fascinating manner. Each had been discreetly lovers for a short time – as revealed by some jealous remarks by Max Frisch in his not too long ago printed correspondence with Bachmann.
The younger Enzensberger was as sharp-witted as he was sharp-tongued
Hans Magnus Enzensberger, who died this Thursday in Munich shortly after his 93rd birthday, shaped the Dioscurian trio of German poets and thinkers along with the thinker Jürgen Habermas of the identical age and Alexander Kluge, who was solely three years his junior. And Habermas and Enzensberger each had their first huge journalistic impression precisely sixty years in the past. Habermas together with his sociological “Structural Change within the Public Sphere” and Enzensberger together with his assortment of essays “Particulars” illuminated the “consciousness business” nearly concurrently in 1962: a time period from the Frankfurt Faculty of the remigrants Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno. Right here their finest college students instantly wrote and set non secular milestones.
Whereas Habermas analyzed the transition of part of the press to commercialized mass leisure in a relatively dry, educational method, the younger Enzensberger etched as sharply as he did pointedly in opposition to the language of the “Spiegel” or the “journalism as a dance on the ball” of the then old-conservative “FAZ”. The truth that Enzensberger later favored to look in each media, even often in “Spiegel”, performed no function. Or quite: HME simply performed it seine Position. It additionally included the mental somersault ahead (by no means backward). He was a quicksilver head, a thinker, formulation dancer.
However first a poet. In 1957 Enzensberger’s lyrical debut “defence of the wolves” was printed. Within the small quantity printed by Suhrkamp Verlag, he asks the readers and lambs, the lamb pious, within the then trendy small letters: “Shall the vulture eat forget-me-not? / What do you ask of the jackal / that he pores and skin himself, of the wolf?”
Within the nonetheless cheeky Jungbrechtian tone, there's already a component of irony, which, with age, is joined by a high-quality melancholy that by no means drifts into self-pity. Proper from the beginning he was a poetic thinker. With an exceptional sense for themes and types of the zeitgeist and the myths of on a regular basis life. One in every of his essayistic “particulars” was a evaluation of the Neckermann catalogue, wherein he noticed the needs and goals of the miraculous financial system mirrored and understood the quantity as the brand new chapbook of the Germans on the time.
1 / 4 of a century after the “Particulars”, Enzensberger’s combination of essays and tales within the quantity “Ach Europa!” additionally turned well-known. Throughout this psychological journey via the previous continent, he already foresees the autumn of the Berlin Wall and coquettishly provides an “epilogue from 2006”. One other somersault ahead.
Born within the Allgäu, grew up in Nuremberg, which was all the time heard from him, who learn and spoke greater than half a dozen languages, he labored as a bartender for the Royal Air Power as a youngster. On the similar time, on the black market he not solely realized fortunate strikes, but in addition find out how to commerce in necessities for survival. As one of many first German scholarship holders, Enzensberger thenstudied on the Sorbonne in Paris and acquired his doctorate in Erlangen on Brentano’s romantic poetics – as a result of he was nonetheless forbidden from writing a dissertation on Hitler’s rhetoric within the Nineteen Fifties.
This different between the gorgeous and the horrible alone signifies Enzensberger’s monumental vary. Along with poetry, he has labored in all genres, was radio editor for Alfred Andersch within the legendary, demanding evening program of the Süddeutscher Rundfunk in Stuttgart and lecturer for Suhrkamp in Frankfurt, belonged to Gruppe 47, had a Norwegian, a Russian and eventually his German spouse; he nomadized via the USA, Cuba, Mexico, the Soviet Union, lived in Scandinavia and Italy. At all times been a citizen of the world.
He was a guide and subject fisherman
From 1965, in its extra radical and later extra camouflaged section, HME printed the journal Kursbuch, which had grow to be a compass for the student-revolutionary New Left, and later the good journal Transatlantik together with his buddy Gaston Salvatore. He additionally based the fabulous “Different Library” with the printer and writer Franz Greno, which nonetheless thrives in Berlin right now as a chunk of particular guide tradition.
As a fabulously well-read guide and subject fisherman, as a translator and editor, Enzensberger was the incarnation of the sentence that the pinnacle is spherical in order that it will possibly suppose in all instructions. Even earlier than the Büchner Prize, he had truly earned a Nobel Prize for literary discoveries and editions when in 1960 he offered the “Museum of Trendy Poetry” with a lot of his personal translations as a paperback on dtv. An anthology of 351 poems from each continent, the pioneering work of a common spirit. The guide mustn't solely be reissued in his honor.
After all he was an important poet himself. He would have favored to have been an equally nice playwright and novelist, however he didn’t succeed. However the totally dramatic poetic versepos concerning the “Sinking of the Titannic”, his splendidly poetic “Historical past of the Clouds” or the quantity of poems “Music of the Future” stay. Ceaselessly. Even when it says within the “Music of the Future” on the finish of the final century: “The twenty first century now not counts / It’s already going black earlier than your eyes…”
This slender, first blond, then silver-haired man was an mental flâneur, a sensible fanatic and a unbelievable realist. Dreamer and actuality detective, actually a scout. It's no coincidence that Voltaire, Diderot and the cosmologist Alexander von Humboldt had been function fashions for him. To nearly the tip he was one thing of a youth who had simply aged. His world bestseller, his vademecum for youngsters and all adults who in any other case have nightmares all their lives about having to relive the mathematics Abitur, additionally matches in with this: “The quantity satan”, subtitle “A pillow guide for everybody who's afraid of arithmetic”.
Enzensberger might rely. May greater equations. In the long term, that counts for various (admitted) misconceptions concerning the world revolution, concerning the supposed “loss of life of literature” or the legendary miscomparison between Saddam Hussein and Adolf Hitler that was as soon as printed in “Spiegel”. As a substitute of mistaken solutions, it's the proper questions that rely. Hans Magnus Enzensberger offered them.
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