Hans Magnus Enzensberger

Translated from the German

A short collection of essays by a German poet and thinker. Some date from the 70’s. Enzensberger can say more about the modern world in four pages than others can in a whole book. I much prefer his confident, reasonable voice, addressed to the general interested reader (as if they still exist), than I do the voice of Derrida.

His short essays range over television, tabloid papers, the tenacity of literature, the World bank, international terrorism (in 1986). I like them because they are a critique coming from someone who is not immersed in the modern and has not accepted its premises. Also he is a poet himself, a creator, and never sinks to being a mere negation of all that’s new.