Hans Magnus Enzensberger
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Hans Magnus Enzensberger CRITICAL ESSAYS The German Library : Volume 98 Volkmar Sander, General Editor EDITORIAL BOARD Peter Demetz (Yale University) Reinhold Grimm (University of Wisconsin) Jost Hermand (University of Wisconsin) Walter Hinderer (Princeton University) Victor Lange (Princeton University) Frank Ryder (University of Virginia) Volkmar Sander (New York University) Egon Schwarz (Washington University) Peter Wapnewski (Institute for Advanced Study, Berlin) A. Leslie Willson (University of Texas) Hans Magnus Enzensberger CRITICAL ESSAYS Edited by Reinhold Grimm and Bruce Armstrong Foreword by John Simon CONTINUUM • NEW YORK The Continuum Publishing Company 575 Lexington Avenue, New York, NY 10022 Copyright © 1982 by The Continuum Publishing Company Foreword © 1982 by John Simon Introduction © 1982 by Reinhold Grimm All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the written permission of The Continuum Publishing Company. Printed in the United States of America Library o f Congress Cataloging in Publication Data Enzensberger, Hans Magnus. Critical essays. (The German library; v. 98) Includes bibliographical references. I. Grimm, Reinhold. II. Title. PT2609.N9A24 834'.914 81-19612 ISBN 0-8264-0258-5 A ACR2 ISBN 0-8264-0268-2 pbk For acknowledgments of previously published material, see page 250, which constitutes an extension of the copyright page. Contents Foreword: John Simon vii Introduction: Reinhold Grimm xi Part One : Literature and the Media 1 1. The Industrialization of the Mind 3 Translated by the author 2. Poetry and Politics 15 Translated by Michael Roloff 3. Commonplaces on the Newest Literature 35 Translated by Michael Roloff 4. Constituents of a Theory of the Media 46 Translated by Stuart Hood Part Two : Politics and History 77 Translated by Michael Roloff 1. Toward a Theory of Treason 79 2. Reflections before a Glass Cage 94 3. Las Casas, or A Look Back into the Future 116 4. Berlin Commonplaces 138 Part Three : Sociology and Ecology 157 1. Tourists of the Revolution 159 Translated by Michael Roloff 2. A Critique of Political Ecology 186 Translated by Stuart Hood vi • Contents 3. On the Inevitability of thie Middle Classes: A Sociological Caprice 224 Translated by Judith Ryan 4. Two Notes on the End of the World 233 Translated by David Fernbach Notes 243 Foreword enaissance men (or women) are in short supply these days. R Rare indeed is the writer who can hold his own as poet, translator, critic, playwright, polemist, anthologist, and editor of two remarkable— and very different— periodicals. But Hans Mag nus Enzensberger is all of those things (and probably a few others I forgot to mention), and manages them with a wit and polish that belie their profundity. Yet what makes him so extraordinary is that even within each individual field he is a bit of a Renaissance man. Thus there is no end to the themes and forms that Enzensber- ger’s poetry, for example, has espoused; yet from volume to vol ume, and even from poem to poem, it is able to be as various as verse can get, without losing, however, the feel and scent of its author’s unmistakable identity. There seem to be, as when a ball of mercury is rolled across a smooth surface, a great number of glittering little Enzensbergers that in the end coalesce all the same into one dazzling mind and sensibility. We are presented here with a selection of Enzensberger’s essays that, of necessity, cannot encompass the full range of the man. Even so, they do give a generous inkling of his diversity, and attest to the benefits of a complex literary sensibility’s latching on to political matters, and, conversely, of a historically and politically astute mind’s addressing itself to our arts and culture. As Reinhold Grimm points out in his Introduction, Anglo-American reference books— and, presumably, the English and American readership— vii viii • Foreword seem to consider this sort of searching, far-ranging, well-informed, intellectually and morally challenging essay the monopoly of French literature and blithely ignore the contribution of such distin guished German essayists of all periods as Professor Grimm ad duces. But much as I deplore the other omissions, the absence of Enzensberger from Anglo-American awareness seems to me partic ularly unfortunate. The reason is plain enough. In fact, it is plainness itself. For Enzensberger knows how to deal with complicated ideas and fine discriminations in a style that, though anything but inelegant, is nevertheless stunningly straightforward and plain. We live in an age— need I remind you of this melancholy truth?— when plain statement in any field, but particularly in the critical, cultural, or political essay, is extremely hard to come by. For this, the French and their Anglo-American emulators are especially to blame. Not so Enzensberger. He may have begun as an adherent of Marxism, but by now even that -ism— at least in its doctrinaire form— has been left behind. With the more modish and obscurantist ones he never had any truck. The only -ism that persists in his work is humanism. There are no hobby horses; only horse sense. What Enzensberger can do with the essay, you will find out as you turn the pages. Here, however, I should like to quote a poem of his; partly in order to remind you of a very important other aspect of his talent, but even more so as to give you a sense of the essential Enzensberger expressed most tersely, yet with those per sistently, understatedly reverberating ironies that I urge you to no tice in the prose as well. The poem is called “Remembrance.” Well now, as concerns the seventies I can express myself with brevity. Directory assistance was always busy. The miraculous multiplication of loaves was restricted to Diisseldorf and vicinity. The dread news came over the ticker tape, was taken cognizance of and duly filed. Unresisting, by and large, they swallowed themselves, the seventies, Foreword • ix without guarantee for latecomers, Turkish guest workers and the unemployed. That anyone should think of them with leniency would be asking too much. The tone, mutatis mutandis, is very much the one of Enzensber- ger’s best essays: the chiseled mockery of a civilized man who has not given up the fight, but who chooses his weapons fastidiously: the implication-drenched detail, hearty irony, incitement to thought. This is in the best tradition of the German essay. Besides the authors with whom Professor Grimm brackets Enzensberger, we should also invoke Heine and Kleist, Karl Kraus and Frank We dekind. Their mode, except for Heine’s, may be harsher than that of Enzensberger, but they are ironists all, and quite as much his ancestors or mentors. And here it behooves us to recognize how few of our English and American essayists had this kind of sar donic acumen to apply equally to culture and politics: George Or well, of course, and Edmund Wilson, and doubtless a few others. But they are precious few, and Hans Magnus Enzensberger, in good English translations, readily assumes a place beside them as their equal. For what gives him the finishing touch of the Renais sance man is his internationalism. However much we might wish, defensively, to relegate him to otherness— to being German, Euro pean, Continental, or whatever— it won’t wash. He stands right beside us, whoever we are. He is one of us. J o h n S i m o n Introduction t happened nearly two decades ago, yet I can recall it as vividly Ias if it had occurred yesterday. The scene: Frankfurt University; the year: 1964. A slender, fair-haired, almost boyish-looking man of thirty-five was mounting the rostrum. He was greeted with a veritable uproar of applause. His first public address as the newly appointed poet-in-residence had been the talk of the town; in fact, town and gown— both students and scholars, critics and fel low writers, the representatives of the big publishing firms and of the mighty media, as well as the city’s dignitaries— all were in at tendance. Not even the largest lecture hall could hold this crowd: the event had to be broadcast by short-circuit to an adjacent hall. The late Theodor W. Adorno, editor of Walter Benjamin and West Germany’s leading philosopher, sociologist, and aesthetician, had volunteered to present the speaker. Adorno declared, to cheers: “All we have in German literary criticism, nay, in criticism as such, is Hans Magnus Enzensberger . and a few scattered attempts” (Wir haben ihn und Ansatze). This is precisely what the great scholar Ernst Robert Curtius had once stated in regard to the sem inal critic and essayist Friedrich Schlegel, and what Schlegel him self had said of Gotthold Ephraim Lessing, founder of a compa rable literary criticism. When Enzensberger was hailed in the mid-sixties as a latter-day Lessing or Schlegel by his friend and mentor, only two volumes (albeit weighty and sizable ones) of his critical and essayistic out put had appeared, but he had already brought out three volumes xi xii • Introduction of poetry, containing some of the finest post-war verse written in German. His lyrical breakthrough in 1957 had been likened to the meteoric rise and lasting fame of Heinrich Heme, and in 1963 he had been awarded the prestigious Buchner Prize which commem orates Heine’s contemporary, Georg Buchner. More achievements were to follow: a documentary play and a documentary novel, a pair of libretti, an epic, another three volumes of poetry, and two more volumes of essays and criticism. Enzensberger was also ac tive as a prolific and conscientious editor who enjoyed that rarest of editorial gifts: serendipity.