The writings of Hans Magnus Enzensberger are a provocative commentary on the post-1945 period in Germany. Poet and essayist of international standing and frequent contributor to political and cultural debates, his work has accompanied the development of the Federal Republic from the 1950s to German unification and after. This study makes explicit the links between Enzensberger's literary imagination and the cultural and political history of Germany and offers a close reading of both Enzensberger's poetry and his seminal essays on politics and culture, proposing that they be considered as part of a single artistic project. The book argues that Enzensberger's significance lies in his sustained exploration of the relationship between literary and cultural practices and political democracy in Germany. It offers detailed analyses of Enzensberger's poetry and considers his essays on the 'consciousness industry' and on the 'constituents of a theory of the media' in the context of the political development of the Federal Republic in the half-century following 1945. Post-World War 2 essays on cinema and television, on tourism, consumption and migration, and on digital media and the future of literature are also considered and analysed. Enzensberger's work is situated as part of an ongoing critical debate between him and key intellectual figures such as Theodor W. Adorno, Walter Benjamin, Siegfried Kracauer, Jurgen Habermas, Jean Baudrillard and Michel Foucault."

In this highly acclaimed and entertaining book, already "among the touchstones of the new travel writing" (Newsweek), one of West Germany's leading authors takes us on an insider's tour of Europe in the recent past. Focusing on Italy, Poland, Hungary, Sweden, Spain, and Portugal, he describes how Europe has been moving toward a new identity. Enzensberger makes a witty and knowledgeable traveling companion, delving into surprising corners and byways—from the back alleys of Budapest to the halls of the Italian mint—and striking up conversations with everyone from bankers to revolutionaries, astrologers to apparatchiks. In the process, he suggests that Europe's strength lies increasingly in embracing diversity and improvisation, not bigness and regimentation. He enables us to see with fresh eyes one of the most exciting parts of the world today.

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

In the 1960s and 1970s in the Federal Republic of Germany (FRG), or West Germany, newspaper readers and television viewers were appalled by terrible images of fires burning half a world away. The Vietnam War was a decisive catalyst for the era’s wider protest movements and gave rise to an ardent anti-war discourse. This discourse privileged writing in many forms. Within it, poetry and poetic writing were key; and because coverage of the conflict in Vietnam often focused on spectacular, destructive conflagrations ignited by hi-tech machines of war, their dominant trope was fire. Hundreds of poems and related writings about Vietnam circulated in the FRG, yet they are almost entirely forgotten today. Poetic Writing and the Vietnam War in West Germany uncovers and explores some of this rich production in order to present a new history of engaged poetic writing in the FRG in the 1960s and 1970s, and to draw out distinctive characteristics of wider protest culture. In doing so, it makes the case for attending to marginal, non-canonical or neglected literary and cultural forms, and for critical thinking about why they might, over time, have been obscured. This book offers, too, a case study for reflection on the representation of war, on ways in which German oppositional culture could imagine its others, and the ways in which other voices could speak to it in turn, and on the relationship of poetry to the historical world.