Alex enzensberger biography
Biography..
Corrective Affinities
“Waiting for Goethe” has been a habit of tired German intellectuals over the generations.
Biography.
Will this ascendant sage or that once-young hell-raiser grown venerable turn out to be the giant of Weimar come again? As a waste of time, the habit is nearly but not quite harmless. It’s an excuse for not taking the trouble to read contemporary writers and thinkers closely.
Is one of them the new Goethe or not? At this question, any book review editor should reach for the rejection slips.
Hans Magnus Enzensberger () was Germany's foremost poet of the postwar period, as well as a provocative cultural essayist.But even now, not all do.
Both left and right can harbor this cargo cult in the back of their minds. I remember the late Günter Grass being heckled in Berlin as he tried to dampen the revolutionary ecstasy of students in 1968.
They shouted him down:
Grass, du Kröte,
Halt dich nicht für Goethe!
[Grass, you toad, Don’t imagine you’re Goethe!]
He was furious, partly because being booed was a nasty new experience to him, but mostly becau