World

Hans Magnus Enzensberger, Leading Light in German Letters, Dies at 93


It was also in Cuba that he began his epic autobiographical poem, “The sinking of the Titanic,” explores a longstanding fascination with disaster myths and examines the weaknesses of modern society. In it, he wrote: “I saw the iceberg looming overhead / and cold, like a frozen fata morgana, / it drifted slowly, immutably, / white, approaching me than.”

Mr. Enzensberger returned to Germany in 1979 and settled in Munich, where he founded the publishing house The Other Library, helping to develop young authors, including German novelists. WG Sebald and Polish writer and journalist Ryszard Kapuscinski.

Many of his later essays and books focus on the state of Europe after the fall of the Berlin Wall and the fall of communism in the Soviet bloc. He remained fiercely political, outspoken in support of the Persian Gulf War, and shocked when he compared Iraq’s Saddam Hussein to Hitler’s.

In his book “Civil Wars” explores developing ideas about nationalism and community by comparing the bloodshed from the breakup of Yugoslavia with the urban riots in the United States in the 1990s. 1990, Mr. Enzensberger described a world defined by “the inability to distinguish between destruction and self-destruction.” In this world, he writes, “there is no longer any need to legitimize your actions. Violence has liberated itself from ideology.”

Yet even as he contemplated the worst of humanity, he infused his works with a sly wit that made them almost comical. In an essay published in The Times in 1975, “A brief note about Doom,” he considered what he calls the “secularization” of the Apocalypse in the modern world, calling Doom the “Last Word in Entertainment, or” a commodity like any other. what else.

Despite that, he concluded that Doom is still here to stay, writing, “Today things will continue, maybe a little worse than last week, but not significantly different.”

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