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Hans Magnus Enzensberger is Germany's most important poet, as well as a provocative cultural essayist, a highly influential editor and one of Europe's leading political thinkers. His poetry's social and moral criticism of the post-war world owes much to Marxism, yet insists on the freedoms often denied by Communist governments; like Orwell he maintains that satire and criticism should not be party-political. Born in 1929, he grew up in Nazi Nuremberg. He studied in Germany and France, and in Freiburg under Martin Heidegger. He was a founder member of Group 47, a loose grouping of disaffected German intellectuals including Heinrich Boll and Gunter Grass, generally viewed as the most influential movement after the war.
'Hans Magnus Enzensberger is a poet of formidable intelligence and range. Like Brecht before him, he combines an intense political imagination with lyric gusto. The reader discovers in him both a satirist and a friend' - George Steiner. 'A voice of ferocious urbanity, laying bare the horrors of the modern German state and resignedly picking out stark cameos of the human condition' - Peter Forbes, Financial Times.
