In one of his last works, a collection of essays entitled Fallobst (“Fallen Fruits”), he briefly abandoned his usual blunt style to write that he now feels “like a car tire slowly losing air”, but also to emphasize the importance of “the art of saying goodbye to life as slowly as possible”. “. and carefully.” Did he know something? What else, besides the fact that he had just entered his ninth decade of life? The inevitable finally arrived yesterday: as announced by Suhrkamp, ​​the German poet, essayist, author and publisher Hans Magnus Enzensberger died at the age of 93.

Born in the small Bavarian town of Kaufbeuren, he was the eldest of four children of a communications technician and kindergarten teacher. The family soon moved to Nazi-loved Nuremberg, and the teenage Enzensberger was recruited into the Hitler Youth, but as he was more fond of writing and reading, he was expelled. “I’ve always been incapable of being a good fellow warrior, I can’t follow the line. It’s not in my nature. Maybe it’s a disadvantage, but I can’t help it,” he told The Guardian in 2010.

German thinker and publisher Hans Magnus Enzensberger has died at the age of 93.

The reason for this interview was “Hammerstein, or On Peculiarities” (published by Kastaniotis), a hybrid of a novel and a documentary film that analyzed German and European pathology from the rise of Hitler to the end of the Cold War by X-ray. Enzensberger used a similar method of writing decades ago in the classic A Short Summer of Anarchy (published by Hestia), a biography of the anarchist hero of the 1936 Spanish Revolution, Buenaventura Durruti. And although these two works may have a distinct political imprint, things have never been easy with Enzensberger, starting with his first collection of poetry, Defense of Wolves from Lambs (1957), which, in addition to ironic allusions and strong metaphors of her language, she stubbornly remained unclassifiable. Enzensberger then vilified his country because instead of confronting the Nazi past, it was celebrating its post-war economic miracle. He then became a member of the literary group “Group 47” and founder of the radical periodical Das Kursbuch, and when he went to live in Cuba for a while, he discovered that “they had gone offshore” and thus “this experiment was over for me.” then”. And about ten years ago, he expressed his mature Euroscepticism in “Sweet Monster Brussels” (Nefeli publishing house).

In any case, he was already one of the most important voices in German post-war literature, along with Ginder Grass, Martin Walser, Uwe Jonsson and Heinrich Bell. But what set him apart may have been discerned by Florian Illis, the literary critic for the newspaper Die Zeit, who wrote a few years ago: “Each time Germany began to dream, Enzensberger was already waking up again. He participated in all the great German illusions and utopias, but most quickly realized their limits. Of course, there will always be those who prefer to continue dreaming and will not forgive him for his talent to capture reality.”