Hans Magnus Enzensberger

the long version

Hans Magnus Enzensberger was born in 1929 in Bavaria and grew up in Nazi Nuremberg. His poetry's social and moral criticism of the post-war world owes much to Marxism, yet insists on the freedoms which have often been denied by Communist governments: like Orwell he maintains that satire and criticism should not be party-political. As well as being Germany's most important poet, he is a provocative cultural essayist and one of Europe's leading political thinkers. No British poet can match him in his range of interests and his moral passion. Enzensberger's Selected Poems draws on several collections published during the past thirty years, right up to his most recent book, Music of the Future. It includes a large selection from The Sinking of the Titanic, his last British collection, which The Guardian called 'a brilliant fantasia on the foundering of western society'. For George Szirtes, writing in the New Statesman, it was 'a dramatic and philosophical statement of compulsive power ... our emotions and our reason are driven along together as in the best of Brecht. We hear in Enzensberger the human voice amongst human voices, feel the extraordinariness of ordinary men.'