SOURCE: “Poetic Anarchism? The Case of Hans Magnus Enzensberger,” in MLN, Vol. 97, No. 3, April, 1982, pp. 745-58.

In this essay, Grimm argues that Enzensberger is a practitioner of poetic anarchism, citing the author's fascination with anarchic events, movements, and historical figures, as well as his extreme and sometimes conflicting statements about theoretical aspects of literature.

Und mit deinen Schlüssen, scheint mir, hast du mindestens insofern recht, als das Unvereinbare (und die Schwierigkeit, das Unvereinbare mit sich zu vereinbaren) den Grundstoff meiner Arbeit ausmacht, ob ich will oder nicht.¹

In a lengthy essay published some six or seven years ago,² I tried to sum up Hans Magnus Enzensberger's existence as a political writer by assigning him an imaginary stance which, on the one hand, would be utopian and, on the other, anarchic, but which in truth would amount to a paradoxical coincidence of both. My argument outlining this paradox...