SOURCE: “Causes for Pessimism,” in The Times Literary Supplement, No. 4045, October 10, 1980, p. 1153.

In this review, Hamburger considers Die Furie des Verschwindens an excellent example of Enzensberger's work in poetry and politics despite its pessimistic views.

Sixteen years have passed since Hans Magnus Enzensberger last published a collection of new short poems. Although “silence” seems quite the wrong word to use of a poet who has been active and conspicuous enough in other capacities, not least as an anti-poetic, anti-literary polemicist, but also as the author of two long sequences in which the quarrel between the poet and the anti-poet was fought out, the new collection does bridge a gap of sixteen years.

Die Furie des Verschwindens links up with the volume of 1964, Blindenschrift, by finally lifting the ban publicly imposed by Enzensberger on the kind of poetry that springs from moments of intense experience—experience inevitably subjective up...