The Game Changed: Essays and Other Prose

Enzensberger’s Kiosk

Enzensberger’s Kiosk I Kiosk is the first book of poems by Hans Magnus Enzensberger published in the United States since The Sinking of the Titanic appeared in 1980. Kiosk was published in Germany in 1995. The Sheep Meadow Press is also publishing Enzensberger’s Selected Poems, which includes poems from six of Enzensberger’s books. The poems in Kiosk and Selected Poems are translated into English by Michael Hamburger and, in some instances (most notably the poems from The Sinking of the Titanic), by Enzensberger himself. Hamburger has translated Enzensberger’s poetry since the mid-1960s. In 1968, he edited and introduced a selection of Enzensberger’s poems published by Penguin in Britain, in its Modern European Poets series. The book was among the first in the series, which introduced to Englishspeaking readers—often for the first time in book form—Eugenio Montale, Fernando Pessoa, Anna Akhmatova, Paul Celan, Aimé Césaire, Yannos Ritsos, Cesare Pavese, Antonio Machado, Salvatore Quasimodo, Nelly Sachs, Zbigniew Herbert , Johannes Bobrowski, Miroslav Holub, Vasko Popa, Gunnar Ekelof, and Yehuda Amichai, among others. Hamburger—who, with Christopher Middleton, had edited the widely-read anthology Modern German Poetry 1910–1960, and, later, wrote one of the finest books written on modernist aesthetics, The Truth of Poetry: Tensions in Modern Poetry from Baudelaire to the 1960s—noted in his introduction that Enzensberger ’s first book of poems, In Defense of the Wolves, was published in 1957, only one year after both Bertolt Brecht and Gottfried Benn died (Brecht in East Berlin, Benn in West Berlin; Enzensberger lived in West Berlin at the time). Hamburger’s 33 reference to Brecht and to Benn is critical to an understanding of Enzensberger’s work. “I don’t want to talk about my biography , but, for me, the mere fact of being born in 1929 is practically determining, politically speaking,” Enzensberger told Martin Chalmers in a 1989 interview in the New Left Review. One might also say that the fact of being born in 1929 is, for a German poet, also determining, poetically speaking: One of the effects of the endless horrors of the Nazi regime is what it did to German poetry. Here, Benn and Brecht are typical. Both were condemned, and their work banned, by the Nazis because of their aesthetics. Brecht, as a communist, was forced into exile, for fear of being killed. In 1933, Benn became involved with the National Socialists, but, shortly afterward, became not only disillusioned , but morally appalled by them. In 1936, his work was censored as degenerate. Benn stayed in Germany, withdrawing as a writer but continuing to practice medicine and to write, with no expectation of ever being published again. Intensely intellectual, enormously erudite, prodigiously gifted with language , Benn was imaginatively obsessed with the relationship between reality and the human brain. Truth existed in the inner act of forming reality, and then expressing it in an object of art. The working out of the tension between inner and outer realities is the constant issue in Benn’s poetry and his prose. The only things that matter—the only things which, in reality, are true—are the external objects of human creation and the deep human processes by which they are made, what Benn called “the world of expression.” Although Brecht also probed the relationship between external and internal reality, he believed that the internalization of subjective feeling (as expressed, for example, in the anthrosophism of poets like Christian Morgenstern , Rainer Marie Rilke, and, even, George Trakl) was morally (and therefore aesthetically) wrong. Brecht judged a work of art (here his critique was Marxist) by how it expresses the effects of history and economics—the effect of politics—on individual and collective human life. Though far apart both ideologically and aesthetically, Benn and Brecht were similar in several respects. Both, for example, were obsessed with the problem of alienation. Both also recognized colloquial speech as the source of writing. Enzensberger, 34 by the fact of being German, inherited Benn’s and Brecht’s preoccupation with alienation. He also would take from them the aesthetic conviction that every form of writing is, in the first instance , the vocal speech of one’s time. But Enzensberger would not make the same imaginative mistake that both Benn and Brecht made. Each, in his own way, had tried to collectivize an intensely individualized, even deterministic aesthetic, into a political theory, and each failed terribly, often...