Margins
1995
First Published
3.61
Average Rating
106
Number of Pages

As well as being Germany's most important poet, Hans Magnus Enzensberger is a provocative cultural essayist and one of Europe's leading political thinkers. In Kiosk, his latest collection, he draws on his wide knowledge of the scientific and technical developments of the last half-century, yet comes out on the other side of extreme scepticism - on the side of poetry and poetry's 'negative capability', a kind of unknowing. Though never a confessional poet, he has won through to the freedom to draw on intimate experience too. However disillusioned now about public issues, he remains a poet of defiancé, as intelligent, compassionate and trenchant as ever.

Avg Rating
3.61
Number of Ratings
18
5 STARS
22%
4 STARS
28%
3 STARS
39%
2 STARS
11%
1 STARS
0%
goodreads

Author

Hans Magnus Enzensberger
Hans Magnus Enzensberger
Author · 24 books

See also: Cyrillic: Ханс Магнус Енценсбергер Hans Magnus Enzensberger was a German author, poet, translator and editor. He had also written under the pseudonym Andreas Thalmayr. Enzensberger was regarded as one of the literary founding figures of the Federal Republic of Germany and wrote more than 70 books. He was one of the leading authors in the Group 47, and influenced the 1968 West German student movement. He was awarded the Georg Büchner Prize and the Pour Le Mérite, among many others. He wrote in a sarcastic, ironic tone in many of his poems. For example, the poem "Middle Class Blues" consists of various typicalities of middle class life, with the phrase "we can't complain" repeated several times, and concludes with "what are we waiting for?". Many of his poems also feature themes of civil unrest over economic- and class-based issues. Though primarily a poet and essayist, he also ventured into theatre, film, opera, radio drama, reportage and translation. He wrote novels and several books for children (including The Number Devil, an exploration of mathematics) and was co-author of a book for German as a foreign language, (Die Suche). He often wrote his poems and letters in lower case. Enzensberger also invented and collaborated in the construction of a machine which automatically composes poems (Landsberger Poesieautomat). This was used during the 2006 Football World Cup to commentate on games. Tumult, written in 2014, is an autobiographical reflection of his 1960s as a left-wing sympathizer in the Soviet Union and Cuba. Enzensberger translated Adam Zagajewski, Lars Gustafsson, Pablo Neruda, W. H. Auden and César Vallejo. His own work has been translated into more than 40 languages.

548 Market St PMB 65688, San Francisco California 94104-5401 USA
© 2025 Paratext Inc. All rights reserved