Board of Regents of the University of Oklahoma

The Commitment and Contradiction of Hans Magnus Enzensberger

Author(s): Reinhold Grimm and David Bathrick
Source: Books Abroad, Vol. 47, No. 2 (Spring, 1973), pp. 295-298
Published by: Board of Regents of the University of Oklahoma
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/40127064
Accessed: 05-02-2016 13:33 UTC

Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at http://www.jstor.org/page/
info/about/policies/terms.jsp
JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content
in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship.
For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org.

Board of Regents of the University of Oklahoma is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to Books
Abroad.

http://www.jstor.org

This content downloaded from 132.174.255.116 on Fri, 05 Feb 2016 13:33:13 UTC
All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

commentaries

The Commitment and Contradiction

of Hans Magnus Enzensberger
By REINHOLD GRIMM
When criticizing the critic one can always take the easy way out. Thus, for instance,
when Hans Magnus Enzensberger decided to turn down his position at Wesleyan
University to go to Cuba, the novelist Uwe Johnson noted that in Cuba "children
over 13 no longer receive milk; let us hope the poet Enzensberger has been properly
weaned." Certainly no insight is gained through remarks of this sort. However, it is
equally dangerous to apply a clear-cut formula to such a provocative critic. Given
Enzensberger'smost formative influences,one is tempted to trace a line of development
from Brentano (the subject of his doctoral dissertation) to Adorno (for whom he was
star pupil among the poets) on down to Castro (in whose island he beheld the "crossroads" of world history)- in short, a development from dandyism and intellectual
snobbishnessvia the bold dialecticsof the Frankfurt school to the direct political action
of the guerrillas and Tupamaros. But this would be a vast simplification.
Granted, definite changes have occurred during the past decade; and they can be
traced in the very titles of Enzensberger's books. From the "Museum of Modern
Poetry" (1960) and "Odds and Ends" (Einzelheiten) dealing with the mass media
and poetry and politics, his development as a critic of his age extends to volumes of
essays such as "Politics and Crime" and "Germany, Germany among Other Things"
{Deutschlandf Deutschland unter anderm) ; and it continues in his editing of such
works as Bikhner's "The Hessian Messenger" and Las Casas's famous report on the
West Indies through the collection "Acquittals: Revolutionaries on Trial" and the
documentary play "Hearings from Havana" up to "Conversations with Marx and
Engels" (1973) and the documentarynovel "The Short Summer of Anarchy: Life and
Death of Buenaventura Durruti" (1972).
It does in fact appear that Enzensberger's interests have not only shifted from
poetry to politics and from specifically German problems to those of a global nature,
but more generally from the media to those who manipulate it, i.e., from the superEd. Note: This paper was deliveredat the Boo\s Abroad symposium, "The Writer as Critic of his Age,"
at the MLA meeting in New York, December 1972. For other papers of this symposium see BA 47:1, pp.
26-53.
The author would like to express his gratitude to his colleague Evelyn T. Beck, for many valuable
suggestions in the preparationof this paper, and to ProfessorMark Boulby (University of British Columbia) for drawing attention to Johnson's attack on Enzensberger.
A much larger version of this paper- some seventy-odd pages- will be published in German in the
yearbook Basis 4 (1973).

This content downloaded from 132.174.255.116 on Fri, 05 Feb 2016 13:33:13 UTC
All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

296

BOOKS ABROAD

structure to the base. Looking at his shorter pieces we note a similar development:
essays dealing with dramaturgicalproblems, film and even an obligatory piece about
the backward state of modern Danish poetry give way to pamphlets concerning "The
Interlocking Nature of Capital in the Federal Republic/' the emergency laws and the
Communist Party of Cuba. One can trace in Enzensberger a growing political commitment paralleled by an increasingly intensive study of the theory and history of
socialism and revolution; all of this is revealed not only in his choice of subject matter,
but in its treatment as well- that is, his work becomes a collective effort involving
several writers.
Enzensberger'spronouncementsover the last twelve years underscoreand strengthen this impression. In 1959 he stood up to his mentor Adorno who, as is well known,
had stated that after Auschwitz it was no longer possible to write poetry: "If we want
to keep on living," said Enzensberger, "then this sentence must be proven wrong."
Conversely, in 1971 he declared in an interview: "For me literature was never the
most important thing. It was never the most important thing in my life and hopefully
never will be." Halfway between these two statements is an essay by Enzensberger
which appeared in Paris entitled "La litterature en tant qu'histoire," which clearly
reveals a kind of looking back and a tentative summing up. Similar transitions can
be found in his political writings. "Let's cut out the nonsense! Please don't talk to us
about democracy, and least of all about our constitutional rights!" So reads an open
letter of October 1967 to the Minister of Justice at that time, Gustav Heinemann. In
the same vein, Enzensbergercontinues, "I know from my own experiencehow difficult
it is to rid oneself of such phrases.Yes, too much optimism, too much hope for reform
and a blind faith in the legitimacy of the state- that is what I myself am guilty of."
At one time Enzensbergerhad actually publicly supported Heinemann's Social Democratic Party, but "without enthusiasm, and yet without hesitation." As late as 1964,
he had explicitly stated that his intention was "revision, not revolution."And yet the
following pronouncement of May 1968 is just as emphatic: "Misgivings are not
enough, suspicion is not enough, protest is not enough. Our goal must be to create
even in Germany conditions as they now exist in France."The speech entitled "Emergency" (Notstand) ends in an open call for revolution. Its goal is absolutely identical
to that of the above interview, which places literature in its proper perspective,but at
the same time wants to refashion it (sie umzufun\tionieren) and assign it the "sole
task ... of making socialism a reality."
The roots of this development are already clearly discernible in the fifties. It was
no
means simply "odds and ends" of art or the cultural industry that first excited
by
the young critic at this early stage, but rather the "rituals"of the "unconquered past"
and that fatal "German question." The nuclear threat, the cold war and the iron
curtain overshadowed everything in a divided Germany. Germany was for Enzensberger so much "the unholy heart of all peoples" (an inversion of the famous line by
Holderlin) that he saw it as both the main perpetratorand chief victim of destruction.
"The Germans today are much like hostages of world politics," he wrote. "If anyone
is to be shot, they will be the first."The tremendous effort it cost him to overcome this
obsession is apparent in titles such as "Attempt to Take Leave of the German
Question"and "Am I a German?,"an essay written for Encounter and later on retitled

This content downloaded from 132.174.255.116 on Fri, 05 Feb 2016 13:33:13 UTC
All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

GRIMM

297

"Concerningthe Difficulty of Being a Native" ("Uber die Schwierigkeit, ein Inlander

zu sein"). It was only in 1967,under the shock of the Grand Coalition and the threatening growth of the National Democratic Party, that he finally recognized this fixation
as a "dangeroushandicap,"indeed "boring to the point of nausea." One will become
blind to the future, Enzensberger says, if one gets too caught up "in this alone." The
change in him becomes abundantly clear in an essay entitled "European Periphery,"
which was leveled not only at Germany but at all of Europe. His broadening perspectives on national issues correspondto his growing concern over social questions. This
is best seen in his reworking of a quotation from Biichner as well as the closing words
of his remarks in an edition of the Communist Manifesto. In his commentary to "The
Hessian Messenger" he makes the following statement: "The relationship between
poor and rich peoples is the only revolutionary element in the world." No more can
we speak of "proletariansof the world," Enzensberger admonishes, but only of "the
proletarian world." No longer are the struggle between "communism and anti-communism, fascism and anti-fascism"and the notion of class antagonisms and "ideological
differences"the determining factor, but rather it is the contradictionbetween the two
halves of the world. The block of rich nations and large powers from New York to
Moscow stands on one side; while opposed to them stands the third world of the
oppressed and exploited nations which one really ought to call the "second"or "impoverished" world. For this macabre grouping only the one "seemingly most antiquated" concept is suitable: namely, "colonialism."
No doubt, Hans Magnus Enzensbergerhas changed. He himself has recently indicated quite clearly that a development has taken place; indeed, he has even been
practicing self-criticism. Thus his own assessment and that of an overwhelming
majority of his critics would seem indisputable. But is this really the case? Has not
much, or even most of what marked Enzensberger's early work remained the same?
Do we not find that with him, as with so many of his generation, the thought patterns
of the fifties are being perpetuated? One need only consider the pervading sense of
doom, so prevalent at that time, which comes through not only in "Odds and Ends"
and the early poems but throughout his later essays and even in his most recent poetry.
In spite of his attempts at mockery, there emerges in almost all of his writings a
paralyzing sense of catastrophe and doom. It finds brutal expression in the essay
"World of Shambles" ("Scherbenwelt"),in which Enzensberger unfolds a typology of
newscasts ranging from "an idiotic idyll to cosmic insanity," i.e., the explosion of the
atomic bomb, declared to be the actual telos of all images. He denounced this "apotheosis of destruction"as early as 1957.But even a full decade later we read the following in "Attempt to Take Leave of the German Question": "There is no longer
any mediation between reason and material violence." Day-to-day politics are bluntly
described as "crassstupidity" not to be reconciled "with productive thought." In one
of his latest poems, "The Real Knife" ("Das wirkliche Messer"), politics is mythologized as hopeless carnage: "And they helped themselves and they were right / And
they could not help one another."
At the heart of these verses lies a thought pattern characteristicof the fifties which
is typical of Enzensberger'sentire work. Uwe Johnson, in the only bright moment of
his attack, recognizes this and defines it as "dualism."Closely related to Enzensberger's

This content downloaded from 132.174.255.116 on Fri, 05 Feb 2016 13:33:13 UTC
All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

298

BOOKS ABROAD

sense of catastrophe,it is his obsession with the essential evil inherent in all political
forms, an obsession which constantly takes the shape of a radical dichotomy, despite
Enzensberger's insistence upon the underlying identity of states and systems, which
only in isolated cases- and then often just as radically- is broken through by an act
of affirmation.Again and again we confront such oppositional pairs as Federal Republic/German Democratic Republic, capitalism/communism, USA/USSR; repeatedly
the rulers and the ruled, the exploiters and the exploited, the rich and the poor, and
finally, rich and poor nations are juxtaposed. Certainly, there is a development from
national to social to global concerns. But the basic dualism- two states, two classes,
two systems, two worlds- is maintained. The content of Enzensberger'sthinking expands and develops, its structure however remains the same. This structure emerges
in particularlypure form in his collection of essays,"Politicsand Crime."Enzensberger
not only assures us that the dictator and mass murderer Trujillo has carried out his
liquidations "as cold-bloodedly as a world corporation or a people's democracy,"but
he also presents the shocking thesis that revolutionaryactivity is virtually interchangeable in its modes and methods with that of the counterrevolutionaries.The latest
variation on this theme is the oppressive counterpart to Western "monopoly capital- an idea which Enzensberger owes to the
ism"- Eastern "monopoly bureaucracy,"
letter
entitled
open
"Monopoly Socialism" by the two Polish writers Kuron and
Modzelewski. Enzensberger appends the following comment to it: "Their essay represents one of the first attempts to apply the revolutionary method of Marxist theory
systematicallyto one of the socialist societies of Eastern Europe."
In Enzensberger, then, it is not simply "the Manichean eye" at work- that is, the
strict separationof good and evil, as Johnson would mistakenly have us believe; instead,
there is a dualism which more often than not flips over into total monism. We should,
therefore, not be led astray by Enzensberger's commitment to revolution, socialism
and the third world, for this in no way contradicts his underlying thought pattern.
The commitment is both a part and the most logical contradiction of the thought
pattern; in many cases it is repeatedjust as compulsively as the dichotomy from which
it must extricate itself. The paradox of Hans Magnus Enzensberger as a critic of his
age lies preciselyin the fact that while he despairsof the efficacyin any political action,
he nonetheless is passionately moved to call for and commit political acts. This is a
paradox which I can only reveal, not resolve. For the moment, Enzensberger's own
answer echoes the words of Antonio Gramsci, "pessimismof mind, optimism of will."
But the question remains: Will a mere echo suffice?
University of Wisconsin
Translatedfrom the German
By
David Bathric\

This content downloaded from 132.174.255.116 on Fri, 05 Feb 2016 13:33:13 UTC
All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions