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.
“It was like living with an enormous corpse in the cupboard,” he once said. Like his British contemporaries John Osborne, Kinsgley Amis and Harold Pinter, he was branded an angry young man, though being German, Enzensberger had, arguably, more to be angry about: “You had all these professors, judges and chiefs of police who were old Nazis, and you had to get rid of them, and a certain violence was necessary to clear up the mess. For a few years we worked in an intellectual sanitation department.”
Enzensberger’s first published collection of poems, Verteidigung der Wölfe Gegen die Lämmer (Defence of the Wolves Against the Lambs, 1957) was Nieztschean in its transvaluation of prevailing values: his verses raged against the conformist “sheep” who had followed Hitler and now abased themselves before the similarly gimcrack promises of consumerism, and paradoxically took the side of the oppressive “wolves” since the sheep were both masochists and politically feeble: “you’d love / to be torn limb from limb. you / won’t change the world” he wrote.
This was typical early Enzensberger in its maverick Marxism. In truth, despite the fact that after the second world war he ran an anti-bourgeois collective called Kommune 1 from his Berlin flat and was a member of the Gruppe 47 of disaffected intellectuals that included Heinrich Böll and Günther Grass, there was more of the Groucho than the Karl Marx about him.
Like Groucho, he was not clubbable: “‘I have always been incapable of being a good comrade. I can’t stay in line. It’s not in my character. It may be a defect, but I can’t help it,” he told Philip Oltermann in an interview for the Guardian. Like Grass and the philosopher Jürgen Habermas, he was a member of the Hitler Youth near the end of the war, and deserted. He did not venerate Gruppe 47, and in later life disavowed its significance for Germans, calling it “a historical myth”.
“It just so happened that after the war there were a few guys who felt uneasy about the country, to put it mildly.”
Typical of his admirably deflationary spirit was how in 2010, when awarded the University of Copenhagen’s Sonning prize for “commendable work that benefits European culture”, in his acceptance speech he railed against the EU’s “limitless megalomania”.
Like Socrates, he had a problem with authority and with intellectual systems, be they religious or philosophical: “I can never quite believe that they are meant seriously,” he said.
Enzensberger’s verse masterpiece, The Sinking of the Titanic (1978), was off message. The epic consisted of 16 poems and 33 songs, inspired by Dante, in which the ship hit by an iceberg in 1912 becomes emblematic of a human world bent on progress but consumed by fate.
The poem was inspired by his year in Cuba in 1969, where he had sought a Marxist paradise only to be disabused and accused by Fidel Castro of being a CIA agent. “They had botched it completely,” he said of Castro’s Cuba. “Cuba was a one-man show. For me, this experiment was over then.”
Not that his homeland was outside Enzensberger’s crosshairs. Around the same time as his great poem, he wrote an incendiary essay called Am I German? In it he argued “as a form of organisation, the nation has become obsolete” – making him, despite his later misgivings about the EU, a prophet, like Habermas, of the virtues of European integration.
For all that, his most popular book, at least in Germany, was The Number Devil, his 1978 volume explaining mathematics for children and numerically challenged adults. He detested the separation of arts and science, arguing that it was “intellectual castration” not to understand equations and theorems.
Born in Kaufbeuren, Bavaria, Hans Magnus came into the world four years before Hitler became Führer. “At the time he just wasn’t old enough to be involved in the crime,” he wrote in the autobiographical Eine Handvoll Anekdoten (A Handful of Anecdotes, 2018).
He was the eldest of four sons of Leonore (nee Ledermann), who worked initially as a teacher, and Andreas Enzensberger, a telecommunications engineer: “I was lucky with my parents. They weren’t resistance fighters, but they weren’t Nazis either. That gave me a different view of the so-called National Socialist community from the start,” he observed.
Raised in the Nazi spiritual home of Nuremberg, he was educated at what is now the Willstätter gymnasium (1940-44). He went on to study literature, philosophy and languages at the universities of Erlangen, Freiburg im Breisgau and Hamburg, and in Paris at the Sorbonne, completing his doctorate in 1955 with a thesis on the German Romantic poet Clemens Brentano.
At Freiburg, Martin Heidegger was an influential figure, but Enzensberger found the disgraced former Nazi philosopher “disagreeably authoritarian”. He worked as a radio editor in Stuttgart until 1957.
His first literary efforts, ironic and deceptively light, were damned by one critic as an “unintentional parody of poetry”, while another thought they were “the first great political poetry since Brecht”. Enzensberger appreciated the passionate disputes over his work’s value: “I would be disappointed if there were a lukewarm, benevolent indifference.”
In 1960 he published his pioneering anthology, Museum der Modernen Poesie (Museum of Modern Poetry), introducing German readers to writers such as William Carlos Williams, Fernando Pessoa and Lars Gustafsson. From 1961 he spent many years abroad, in Norway, Italy and the US before finally settling in Munich in 1979.
As well as writing poems and essays, he was an influential editor at the German publishing house Suhrkamp. The Polish author and journalist Ryszard Kapuscinski was among his discoveries, and he was instrumental in helping writers such as WG Sebald, Raoul Schrott, Irene Dische and Christoph Ransmayer to achieve prominence.
In 1965, he founded the radical periodical Kursbuch (Railway Timetable), which became a must-read for Germany’s student revolutionaries.
He also wrote, under the pseudonym Andreas Thalmayr, The Watermark of Poetry, Or The Art and Enjoyment of Reading Poems (1985) and Poetry Gets on My Nerves! First Aid for Stressed Readers (2004).
Enzensberger was the father of two daughters. Tanaquil was born in 1957, from his first marriage, to Dagrun Kristensen. Theresia was born in 1986, from his third marriage, to the journalist Katharina Bonitz. His second wife, in the late 60s, was Maria Makarowa; his first two marriages ended in divorce.
With the contrariness typical of a man who venerated fellow writers throughout his life, who wrote more than 70 books himself and was garlanded with awards, he was bracingly sceptical about his vocation: “A pathological business, writing, don’t you think? Just look what a writer actually does: all that unnatural tense squatting and hunching, all those rituals: pathological!”
He is survived by Katharina and his daughters.
• Hans Magnus Enzensberger, poet, essayist and editor, born 11 November 1929; died 24 November 2022
