On the Death of Hans Magnus Enzensberger

Suhrkamp Verlag mourns the loss of Hans Magnus Enzensberger, who died on November 24, 2022, at age 93 in Munich.

As a poet, essayist, writer, biographer, publisher and translator, he was one of the world’s most influential and internationally renowned German intellectuals.

Born in 1929 in the Bavarian Allgäu, Enzensberger studied literature, languages and philosophy in Freiburg and Paris, among other places. In 1955, he obtained his doctorate with a thesis on the poetics of Clemens Brentano. Two years later he published his first book, Verteidigung der Wölfe, a volume of poetry. In the 1950s, he became a member of the Gruppe 47. The members of this legendary writers’ group joined forces to revive German literature in the post-World War II years. The correspondence between Enzensberger and Ingeborg Bachmann, »Schreib alles was wahr ist auf« (2018), is a fascinating testament to the intellectual-literary debates of that time. From 1965 onwards, Enzensberger published Kursbuch, a journal he co-founded, with Suhrkamp Verlag, which added an important voice to the discourse on the self-image of the Federal Republic. Since then, many of his works have been published by Suhrkamp Verlag, including the volume Mausoleum (1978), which talks about the contradictions of »progress« in 37 ballads, or Ach Europa! (1989), in which Enzensberger looks at our continent from the margins.

Going beyond just Germany, his many travels, including to the USA, Mexico, Norway and Italy, provided him with more diverse cultural insights and contributed to the internationality of his thought and writing. Tumult, in which Enzensberger deals with his own past, was met with great critical acclaim in 2014. Beyond that, Hans Magnus Enzensberger rendered outstanding services to Suhrkamp Verlag as a member of its supervisory board from 2013 to 2015.

Hans Magnus Enzensberger has received numerous national and international awards for his various literary activities, including the Georg Büchner Prize in 1963, the Heinrich Böll Prize in 1985, the Premio d’Annunzio in 2006, the Sonningprisen in 2010 and most recently the Frank Schirrmacher Prize in 2015.

After the publication of his collected Poems 1950-2020 as well as the volume Fallobst – Nur ein Notizbuch on the occasion of his 90th birthday in 2019, the volume of poetry Wirrwarr was published most recently by Suhrkamp Verlag in February 2020.

»one of Germany's leading public intellectuals«
London Review of Books

»As a critical observer, Enzensberger always had the catastrophe in mind, but he did not sit before it like a rabbit before a snake; rather, he remained an optimist.«
Paul Jandl, Neue Zürcher Zeitung

»Enzensberger had an instinct for social processes, cultivated a diagnosis of contemporary history that merged inseparably with literary imagination.«
Helmut Böttiger, Zeit Online

»In all his facets, Hans Magnus Enzensberger was not just the intellectual heartbeat of a more interesting Federal Republic over the decades; he was its most worldly representative and often far ahead of his country.«
Paul Ingendaay, Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung

»We might call out a ›Thank you‹ to him, for his keen eye, for course and counter-course – and wonderful verse.«
Christian von Rechenberg, ZDF

»He was and is a lone fighter as a critical European, one who has so far most powerfully executed the tasks of the intellectual in dealing with the realities of Europe – Hans Magnus Enzensberger. It was and is the same Enzensberger who, in turn, was one of the very few thinkers of public authority to warn against ›terror’s men‹ of religious fundamentalism.«
Martin Meyer, Neue Zürcher Zeitung

»There is hardly a socio-political topic that Hans Magnus Enzensberger has not dealt with, no literary genre in which he has not been active ...«
Katja Gasser, 3sat

»Like no other in the history of Germany, he represents common-sense thinking.«
Moritz von Uslar, Zeit Online

»We know of no one with whom we would rather make sense of this world.«
Andreas Isenschmid, Neue Zürcher Zeitung

»But precisely because he was so present, so utterly contemporary, it could be that we, the descendants, will miss his voice very quickly, perhaps already from this moment.«
Jochen Schimmang, taz. die tageszeitung

»For more than 60 years he supplied the international literary world with thoughtful, poetic and highly sophisticated works. Alongside Günter Grass and Martin Walser, Enzensberger made up the power trio of German postwar literature.«
Heike Mund / Verena Greb, Deutsche Welle