ABSTRACT
Enzensberger grew up in Bavaria, studied in Germany and France from 1949 to 1954 and worked under Andersch for South German Radio. He has lived as a free-lance writer or as a lecturer in Norway (which inspired some bleak nature poems), Rome and the USA. A stay in Cuba prompted an interest in the Castro revolution and the attempt to reverse it in the Bay of Pigs invasion, which bore fruit in Das Verhör von Habana (1970), one of the last of the documentary plays which dominated the West German stage in the late 1960s. After writing a doctoral dissertation (1955), which was eventually published as Clemens Brentanos Poetik (1961), he came to the attention of the public with the poetry collections verteidigung der wölfe (1957), landessprache (1960) and blinden-schrift (1964), which combine a Brechtian intellectual delight in and exposure of contradiction and paradox with an emotional reaction to hated phenomena in the West German and world scene in which rage and arrogance find expression in elaborate imagery sometimes reminiscent of Gottfried Benn. The poems in the first collection were introduced as ‘Inschriften, Plakate, Flugblätter, in eine Mauer geritzt’ and divided into sections entitled ‘Freundliche Gedichte’, ‘Traurige Gedichte’ and ‘Böse Gedichte’, while the polemical note reached its climax in the long poems ‘landessprache’ and ‘schaum’ in the second collection. Mausoleum. 37 Balladen aus der Geschichte des Fortschritts (1975) presents portraits of major politicians, revolutionaries, scientists and inventors in a survey of the contradictions inherent in the development of humanity towards greater freedom and control of the environment, the darker aspect of which receives allegorical treatment in Der Untergang der Titanic (1978); here the threat to civilization in the twentieth century is explored on three time-levels, 1912 when the ship sank, 1969 when Enzensberger visited Cuba and 1977 when the book was composed. Gedichte 1955-1970 (1971) adds to the first three collections thirty-three poems; the contents of this volume, together with Die Furie des Verschwindens (1980), fifteen poems previously published in book form and ‘zehn Lieder für Ingrid Caven’, are assembled in Die Gedichte (1983).
