There was a touch of Socrates about the German poet Hans Magnus Enzensberger, who has died aged 93. While Socrates was a gadfly, disrupting Athenian status quo by asking embarrassing questions, Enzensberger was one of postwar West Germany’s so-called Schmeissfliegen (blowflies), writers whose mordant attacks on its political institutions were bent on stopping the country from ignoring its Third Reich past.
While the Frankfurt School philosopher Max Horkheimer described West Germany as a “ghost sonata”, with ex-Nazis still in positions of power, Enzensberger attacked his country’s erasure in the 1950s of its Nazi past.
