Most Popular Books by Hans Magnus Enzensberger

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".

In "Civil Wars," Hans Magnus Enzensberger, Germany''s most astute literary and political critic, chronicles the global changes taking place as the result of evolving notions of nationalism, loyalty, and community. Enzensberger sees similar forces at work around the world, from America''s racial uprisings in Los Angeles to the outright carnage in the former Yugoslavia. He argues that previous approaches to class or generational conflict have failed us, and that we are now confronted with an "autism of violence" a tendency toward self-destruction and collective madness.

This is a record of an extraordinary journey around Europe, made by a poet and essayist who went to countries outside the stream of modern history. He takes the reader beyond stereotypes and headlines to nations that refuse to conform to the main political trends of East or West.

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.

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.

Any new book by poet, essayist, writer, and translator Hans Magnus Enzensberger, one of the most influential and internationally renowned German intellectuals, is cause for notice, and Mr. Zed''s Reflections is no exception. Every afternoon for almost a year, a plump man named Mr. Zed comes to the same spot in the city park and engages passersby with quick-witted repartee. Those who pass ask, who is this man? A wisecracker, a clown, a belligerent philosopher? Many shake their heads and move on; others listen to him, engage with him, and, again and again, end up at the same place. He doesn''t write anything down, but his listeners often take notes. With subversive energy and masterful brevity, Mr. Zed undermines arrogance, megalomania, and false authority. A determined speaker who doesn''t care for ambitions, he forces topics that others would rather keep to themselves. Reluctant to trust institutions and seeing absolutely nothing as "non-negotiable," he admits mistakes and does away with judgment. He is no mere ventriloquist dummy for his creator--he is too stubborn for that. And at the end of the season, when it becomes too cold and uncomfortable in the park, he disappears, never to be seen again. Collected in this thought-provoking and unique work are the considerations and provocations of this squat, park-bench philosopher, giving us a volume of truths and conversations that are clear-cut, skeptical, and fiercely illuminating.

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. Born in 1929 in Bavaria, he 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 often denied by Communist governments: like Orwell he maintains that satire and criticism should not be party-political. In 1994 he published his Selected Poems with Bloodaxe and his essays on new world disorder, Civil War, with Granta. In Kiosk, his subsequent collection, he draws on his wide knowledge of the scientific and technical developments of the last half-century, yet comes out on the other side of extreme scepticism, on the side of poetry and poetry''s ''negative capability'', a kind of unknowing. Though never a confessional poet, he has won through to the freedom to draw on intimate experience too. However disillusioned now about public issues, he remains a poet of defiance, as intelligent, compassionate and trenchant as ever. Kiosk was followed in 2002 by Lighter than Air. His bilingual New Selected Poems was published by Bloodaxe in 2015.

In these 99 meditations, poet and novelist Hans Magnus Enzensberger celebrates the tenacity of the normal and routine in everyday life, where the survival of the objects we use without thinking--a pair of scissors, perhaps--is both a small, human victory and a quiet reminder of our own ephemeral nature. He sets his quotidian reflections against a broad historical and political backdrop: the cold war and its accompanying atomic threat; the German student revo Enzensberger''s poems are conversational, skeptical, and sere≠ they culminate in the extended set of observations that gives the collection its title. Clouds, alien and yet symbols of human life, are for Enzensberger at once a central metaphor of the Western poetic tradition and "the most fleeting of all masterpieces." "Cloud archaeology," writes Enzensberger, is "a science for angels." Praise for the German edition "After reading this wonderful volume of poetry one would like to call Enzensberger simply the lyric voice of transience."-- Sueddeutsche Zeitung "With this book Enzensberger reveals himself both as a spokesman of persistence and as a decelerator."--Neue Zuercher Zeitung

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.

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 ...

"Enzensberger''s latest book is a documentary, a collage of documents, narration, fictional interviews around the lives of the German general Kurt von Hammerstein and his wife and children. A member of an old military family, a brilliant staff officer, last commander of the German army before Hitler seized power, Hammerstein was nevertheless an idiosyncratic character. Too old perhaps to be a resister - he died in 1943 - he retained an independence of mind which marks him out from most of his army colleagues." --Book Jacket.

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.

Expanded dual language edition of Germany''s most important poet, adding work from his later collections Kiosk, Lighter Than Air and A History of Clouds to his earlier Bloodaxe Selected Poems. The translations are by Enzensberger himself and by Michael Hamburger, David Constantine and Esther Kinsky.

Hans Magnus Enzensberger, además de gran poeta, es uno de los más agudos ensayistas de nuestro tiempo. En este libro reúne catorce textos escritos entre 1989 y 1997, muchos de ellos ya aparecidos en diarios y revistas alemanes, y que se publican en libro con leves retoques, mientras que tres de los trabajos son inéditos. Ya el mismo título del libro, "Zigzag", refleja a la perfección la forma de pensar de Enzensberger. En sus ensayos y artículos huye de la descripción lineal y homogénea, prefiriendo una exposición tan zigzagueante como la propia evolución histórica. En ellos, aborda temas muy diversos: la dictadura de la moda, el lujo y el derroche en la sociedad actual, la política cultural de los entes públicos, los intelectuales al servicio del poder, la profusión de escritores faltos de imaginación y seriedad, la figura de Gorbachov como desmantelador de un imperio, la guerra civil de Uganda contrapuesta a la situación de Bosnia o la política de Hussein, aquí comparado con Hitler, artículo éste que desencadenó fuertes controversias en Alemania.

Essays cover Eurocentrism, democracy in modern Germany, economic policies, and socialism.

Worum geht es in diesem "Album"? "Wir haben es nicht mit einem Tagebuch zu tun", wird am Anfang des Bandes festgestellt. Aber womit dann? Mit einem Kuddelmuddel, einem Sudelbuch, einem Capriccio, einem Scrap-Book vielleicht. Oder handelt es sich einfach um eine Wundertüte, gefüllt mit Meditationen, sonderbaren Bildern, offenen Briefen, geheimen Depeschen, Rätseln, Spielen, Zitaten, Gedichten, Essays und Kassibern? Selber schuld, wer sich vor der Elektronik duckt wie das Kaninchen vor der Schlange, sagt Enzensberger. Das Buch als Betriebssystem ist noch lange nicht am Ende. Könnte es nicht noch besser werden, lässiger, ehrgeiziger, schöner, weniger langweilig? Und so mag es dem Leser mit diesem extravaganten Buch ergehen wie im Mythos oder im Märchen: Aus zerstreuten Gliedern wird zuletzt wieder ein Ganzes. Wer in diesem Buch blättert, wird ökonomische Seitenblicke finden neben politischer Polemik, eine Dosis Mathematik ebensogut wie Gebrauchsanweisungen für Poesiemaschinen, und vieles mehr das alles organisiert nach den wilden Gesetzen des menschlichen Gehirns, opulent inszeniert von Franz Greno.

Chronicles the adventures of Prince Esterhazy, a rabbit who goes to Berlin to find a bride and witnesses the destruction of the Berlin Wall.