He shaped the intellectual landscape of the Federal Republic for decades. The writer, essayist and great intellectual has now died at the age of 93.
He was considered one of the world’s best-known German intellectuals: the publicist Hans Magnus Enzensberger died in Munich at the age of 93. This was announced by the publishers Suhrkamp and Hanser.
Enzensberger published over 100 works of prose, drama, essays, and volumes of poetry. He has received many awards for his work. Alongside Alexander Kluge and Jürgen Habermas, he was one of the most influential intellectuals in the early Federal Republic and shaped intellectual life in the country for decades.
Born on November 11, 1929 in Kaufbeuren in the Allgäu, Enzensberger leaves behind an extensive, widely ramified work. In 1957, at the age of 28, he made his debut with the book of poems “Defence of the Wolves”. The book earned him the reputation of an “angry young man”, but even then his use of language was cool and modern, the opposite of the language of Martin Heidegger, whom Enzensberger had heard as a student in Freiburg.
Enzensberger became a central figure in Group 47
In his 1955 dissertation on Clemens Brentano, he portrayed the romantic as an author whose strength grew from the virtuosic treatment of language, less from dreams and soul. When the volume of essays “Details” appeared in 1962, Enzensberger did not analyze Proust and Joyce in it, but the Neckermann catalogue. At that time, he was interested in consumer and media society.
Enzensberger advanced to become one of the main figures of Gruppe 47 – a group of writers that became an influential institution in the cultural scene in the Federal Republic and whose conferences were attended by important contemporary authors and literary critics. Enzensberger was also an orientation figure for the 1968 movement.
In 1963, at the age of 33, he received the Georg Büchner Prize. He wrote regularly for media such as FAZ and mirror, published fiction, essays and built a “poetry machine”, which is now in the Marbach Literature Archive. Enzensberger worked as an editor, publisher and author well into old age.