Best Selling Books by Hans Magnus Enzensberger

As well as being Germany''s most important poet, Hans Magnus Enzensberger 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. Lighter than Air, his latest collection of moral poems, weighs lightness against seriousness. These are witty, lightly ironic poems on all kinds of subjects, easy in style, engaging in tone, often conversational. Enzensberger is a cultured, learned, widely knowledgeable man, but his poems wear their knowledge, learning and culture very lightly. Perfectly at ease in a variety of poetic forms, he presents us again and again with things that matter. This is intelligent and pointed poetry in the tradition of Brecht, humanely political and generously engaged. The poems have the ease and the lightness of real mastery. They are moral in their insistence that human life can be lived well or badly, that it is up to us to choose well and to act wisely. Enzensberger is now writing with an increasing awareness of mortality, yet addresses social and political dangers and evils with undiminished urgency. As if of their own free will, the poems of Lighter than Air reach beyond their author to affect other people lastingly. Their lightness will help that endeavour. They will float.

The international bestseller turns numbers into ideas and ideas into adventures. Enzensberger brings together the surreal logic of "Alice in Wonderland" with the kind of math everyone would love, if only they had a number devil to teach it to them. Full color.

A German teenager begins to lose his identity and any hope of returning to the present when his time-traveling journeys take him further and further into the past. In this innovative tale, Enzensberger treats history with the same wit, knowledge, and charm that he brought to mathematics in "The Number Devil".

The Silences of Hammerstein, the latest work from one of Germany''s most significant contemporary authors, engages readers with a blend of a documentary, collage, narration, and fictional interviews. The gripping plot revolves around the experiences of real-life German General Kurt von Hammerstein and his wife and children. A member of an old military family, a brilliant staff officer, and the last commander of the German army before Hitler seized power, Hammerstein, who died in 1943 before Hitler''s defeat, was nevertheless an idiosyncratic character. Too old to be a resister, he retained an independence of mind that was shared by his children: three of his daughters joined the Communist Party, and two of his sons risked their lives in the July 1944 Plot against Hitler and were subsequently on the run till the end of the war. Hammerstein never criticized his children for their activities, and he maintained contacts with the Communists himself and foresaw the disastrous end of Hitler''s dictatorship. In The Silences of Hammerstein, Hans Magnus Enzensberger offers a brilliant and unorthodox account of the military milieu whose acquiescence to Nazism consolidated Hitler''s power and of the heroic few who refused to share in the spoils.

An account of the life and death of Buenaventura Durruti, a Spanish Civil War leader, that turns his life into a larger story of revolution, commitment, and failed struggles for freedom.

The most recent book by Hans Magnus Enzensberger, Germany''s most important and influential living poet.

Wie konnte in tausend Tagen so viel passieren? Wer sich nach einem halben Jahrhundert wiederbegegnet, muss auf Überraschungen gefasst sein. Hans Magnus Enzensberger hat sich auf dieses Abenteuer eingelassen: Ein zufälliger Kellerfund gab den Anlass für eine Auseinandersetzung mit der Vergangenheit. 1963 führt den Autor eine erste Reise nach Russland, und unverhofft wird er zum Gast auf Chruschtschows Datscha in Gagra. Das Ergebnis ist ein genaues Porträt des Mannes und der sowjetischen »Tauwetter«-Politik dieser Zeit. Drei Jahre später durchreist Enzensberger die UdSSR vom äußersten Süden bis nach Sibirien. Auf diesem Parforceritt nehmen die Verwicklungen des »russische Romans«, der konfliktreichen Beziehung zu seiner zweiten, russischen Frau, ihren Anfang. 1968/1969 gerät der Dichter dann in eine Phase des politischen und privaten Tumults. Mitten im Vietnamkrieg folgt er einer Einladung an die Wesleyan University, aber schon nach wenigen Monaten lockt das Kuba der Revolution. Doch sind die Fraktionskämpfe der außerparlamentarischen Opposition in Berlin nicht so weit entfernt, als dass der Dichter nicht auch auf diesem Schauplatz zum Akteur würde ...

This bilingual (German/English) edition of the talk given at the International Congress of Mathematicians, Berlin, 1998, with illustrations by K. H. Hofmann and an introduction by David Mumford, discusses the role of mathematics within our culture.