SOURCE: “Hans Magnus Enzensberger,” in Postwar German Literature, Pegasus, 1970, pp. 92-7.

In this essay, Demetz surveys the themes and subjects of Enzensberger's firsth three volumes of poetry.

When Hans Magnus Enzensberger first published his poems he was immediately cast in the welcome role of the angry young man, but the fixed public image has tended to obfuscate the changing concerns of a highly gifted intellectual. He is more learned, cosmopolitan, and restless than any of his contemporaries; essentially unwilling to settle down in any place or way of thought, intent on radical doubt, he does not participate in collective stances for very long. …

Enzensberger, like Brecht, wants his reader to think, and it is difficult to isolate his poetry from his bitter polemics against the German mass media (including the August Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung), from his translations, and his editorial projects. His three volumes of poetry, verteidigung der...