Hans Magnus Enzensberger: 90th Birthday on November 11, 2019

»One of Germany‘s leading public intellectuals.« London Review of Books

»If Enzensberger didn’t exist, he’d have to be invented.« Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung

On November 11, 2019, Hans Magnus Enzensberger is celebrating his 90th birthday. The author of poetry, non-fiction works and novels, he is one of the most influential and internationally renowned German intellectuals. Born in the Bavarian Allgäu in 1929, Enzensberger studied languages, philosophy and literary studies at universities in Freiburg and Paris, among others. In 1955, he completed a doctoral thesis on Clemens Brentano’s poetics. Two years later, he published his first book, a volume of poetry entitled verteidigung der wölfe.

From 1965 onwards, Suhrkamp Verlag published the magazine Kursbuch, which Enzensberger co-founded and which added an important voice to the discours on Germany‘s self-understanding. Ever since then, a great number of works have been published by Suhrkamp Verlag, including the volume Mausoleum (1978), which he portrays the contradictions of »progress« in 37 ballads, or Ach, Europa! (1989), in which Enzensberger takes a look onto our continent from the margins. Tumult, in which Enzensberger deals with his own past, received great response in 2015. Beyond that, Hans Magnus Enzensberger rendered outstanding services to Suhrkamp Verlag by becoming a member of the supervisory board in 2013.

For his various literary activities, Enzensberger has received numerous accolades, including the Georg-Büchner-Prize in 1963 and most recently the Frank-Schirrmacher-Prize in 2015. This year, Suhrkamp Verlag is going to publish the works Gedichte 1950-2020, an entertaining tour of his poetic oeuvre and Fallobst, in which Enzensberger confronts us, sharp-tongued, outright and resolute, with zeitgeist and mainstream. Hans Magnus Enzensberger’s works have been translated into more than 50 languages.

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