The German Hans Magnus Enzensberger, one of the great European intellectuals of the 20th century, left an extensive work when he died in November 2022 at the age of 93. A year later, the Altamarea publishing house published a book of his, unpublished in Spain, in which with an acidic and sharp pen he traces the lives and trajectories of more than sixty writers who overcame political risks during the turbulent last century. Survival artists. Literary vignettes of the 20th century is a succession of short biographical vignettes –translated from German by Carlos M. Pina–, deliberately subjective and stark, but in which there is also compassion.
As Enzensberger himself argues in the introduction, significantly titled “intention, claims and discharge of responsibilities”, what unites the biographers is having survived “the State terror and the purges, with all the moral and political ambivalences that this entails” , sometimes thanks to his intelligence, his personal relationships, his discretion, his exile – real or internal -, his international fame or his ability to ingratiate himself with the oppressive regime. Some he treated personally; He knew others through their works and public activities. The book – in a somewhat larger version – was published in Germany in 2018.
The bulk of those succinctly biographed come from Germany and Central Europe, but there are also Russians, French, Americans and other nationalities, and among them there are several Nobel Prize winners. Hans Magnus Enzensberger, who in 2002 received the Prince of Asturias Award for Communication and Humanities, always showed great interest in Spanish and Latin American literature. That is why some of his names appear here, although not always for the good of those chosen.
“I don’t know why I found this person so unfriendly. I never met him personally, nor did he me. He never did anything to me,” says Enzensberger about Camilo José Cela, whom he harasses very badly. He emphasizes that during the Franco era he was an informant and censor, which “it seems that did not harm him, nor did his exhibitionism, nor his tremendousism, which became a hallmark for critics, nor his penchant for the gruesome and the grotesque.” And he charges against La colmena: “Surprisingly, this chaotic work had international success and has been translated into many languages.”
Gabriel García Márquez remembers when they met in a place on Gran Via in Barcelona in the company of Carlos Barral and the Goytisolo brothers, in Franco’s last years. “Then Gabo arrived – everyone called him Gabo – and he immediately dazzled the Spanish host with his fantastic eloquence and his strange occurrences. At that time he was not yet an icon, just a journalist from Colombia that no one knew.” However, he then reproaches him that, despite the reputation that he “despises all Latin American leaders,” he maintained a friendship with Fidel Castro, because Gabo himself “was clearly possessed by political power, as long as he was more or less leftist.” ”.
He also met Pablo Neruda (“a liante, a lively man and a child”), with whom he met for the first time in 1967 at a meeting of poets in London. The organizers “after eating wondered where the guest of honor had gone. He was in a corner with his ear glued to the radio: he had been waiting for a message from Stockholm. But the Swedish Academy had ignored it, awarding its prize to a Guatemalan poet, Miguel Ángel Asturias (…) That ‘misstep’ was corrected by the Swedes a couple of years later.” Later both met again in Moscow, where the Chilean wanted to give him a deluxe edition of his latest book (Enzensberger does not reveal which one); “Unfortunately, the volume was so large that it did not fit in any suitcase.”
He met Octavio Paz in West Berlin, at the time when the social democrat Willy Brandt was mayor (he was mayor for almost ten years, from 1957 to 1966) and the Ibero-American Institute organized illustrious visits. Enzensberger says that, when the Spanish Civil War broke out, the willing Mexican wanted to enlist in the Republican army and maintains that he was rejected because he was apolitical. “What Octavio did not like at all was the civil war within the Civil War that the communists of Barcelona instigated against the POUM (Marxist Unification Workers’ Party) because, in his eyes, they were Trotskyists. That was one of the reasons why he did not want to have anything to do with the Communist Party.”
Among the authors of his closest geography, he met and describes the Polish Ryszard Kapuscinski as a friend. “I always knew that he was a born storyteller who didn’t stick exactly to the facts,” admits Enzensberger, of whom he was an international correspondent for the Polish state news agency. But he defends him from the investigations that, after his death, identified him as an informant for the SB, Poland’s communist secret police. “And what does he care? How could he have let the Party roam undisturbed for decades and write whatever he wanted if he hadn’t gotten a few crumbs? “No one has proven that they harmed any colleague with it.”
He also treated the Hungarian Imre Kertész, a Holocaust survivor. “He was an affable person, but I did not let myself be fooled by his charm, because behind him was someone who could be ruthless with himself and with the world he had ended up in.” He met the Italian Alberto Moravia in a cafe in Piazza del Popolo in Rome. “He didn’t give an impression of happiness and that day it seemed to me that he was frowning. People whispered about him and his greed was considered ridiculous, a defect especially deplorable in Italy.” He met the American Arthur Miller in Spain. “Not only did I find his plays in the middle of the Cold War impressive, but, above all, his attitude. I think he didn’t fire a single shot, but he did well in civilian life.”
With the German Bertolt Brecht – it is not clear if they ever met – he is implacable: “He was someone to admire and avoid. He knew he was always an exploiter and it sucked. He humiliated his disciples and worshipers. (…) The best thing was to treat him as he treated others: taking advantage only of what could be found useful in him. ”But he grants him political clairvoyance (“he saw the dictatorships of Italy, Germany and Spain coming and immediately understood their catastrophic consequences”), although he was later “less perceptive” with the Soviet Union.
Enzensberger admits that there are few women in the book (“I cannot compensate for this proportion. Please contact the Patriarchate”) and many Jews (“because their lives were in more danger than those of others and because they belonged to a people that has “We have to thank the book for its survival during the dispersion”). Indeed, there are many Jewish authors, such as the aforementioned Kertész and others whom he did not deal with in person, such as the Bulgarian Elias Canetti (“Auto de fe is an unbearable book, a literary monster. Its plot – simple, almost banal – does not reveal nothing”) or the Ukrainian Vassili Grossman, who in his work Life and Destiny places a character who sees German National Socialism and the Soviet system as equal (“expressing this during Soviet times was obviously an intolerable sacrilege”).
Among the few women reviewed, the German Nelly Sachs – also Jewish – stands out, whom she visited in Sweden, a country to which the future Nobel Prize winner was able to miraculously escape in 1940. Sachs “couldn’t stand the posturing, the vanity and the excessive praise and It was enough to look out of the corner of your eye to show it,” recalls Enzensberger. “In her will she arranged for me to take care of her copyright. “I have respected her indication that her poems from her youth should not be brought to light again, despite the insistence of some philologists very willing to contravene her will.”
Those portrayed also include, among others, the Russian Boris Pasternak, the Portuguese Fernando Pessoa, the German Ernst Jünger, the Italian Curzio Malaparte, the Egyptian Naguib Mahfuz, the Japanese Kôbô Abe, the Albanian Ismael Kadaré, the Romanian Eugene Ionesco and the French Colette. Enzensberger records in all the vignettes the cause of death or the cemetery where the illustrious biographer rests.
