Hans Magnus

Enzensberger is well known as a brilliant 'enlightened' poet and as the quintessential sharp-minded contemporary figure - a master of dialectical argumentation, and inventor of concept constructs such as "consciousness- industry", which have both specific appropriateness and wider applications. Frequently he has also applied his faculties to defining moral, intellectual and political positions etc., although he was well aware of the danger of being forced either into the role of an arbiter elegantiarum, or the voice of conscience - both of which would be equally abhorrent to him ("I don't want to be the cloth they use to clean up the world").

The writings in this 1988 collection are drawn from 6 years, and address a wide variety of matters. At a time when people don't want to hear the epithet 'critical', let alone take it seriously, the texts all show - in an almost infectious way - the pleasure in thinking as critical thinking (in contrast to that self- justified kind of critical thinking which always assumes its own untried assumptions are universally valid). Enzensberger's accuracy, his witty, never cheap conclusions and punchlines are always achieved by his paradoxical methodology of going briskly against the grain and then unexpectedly switching position more briskly. The essay from which the title of the collection is taken is subtitled "A conciliatory proposal". Here the author exposes many popular clich‚s from left-wing and right-wing rhetoric of self-contradiction, but he also quotes and revises his own position of 1968. Always gently ironic, but never just trying to achieve an entertaining effect, this Enzensberger of the late 80's bids farewell to the age of such Romantic oppositions as genius - philistine; great individual - stupid masses; spirit - politics, and many of the same kind. "The mad genius has been released from his suffering; now the madness is only play-acted, staged for the media as an outsider running amok". Diagnoses of such critical quality do not contradict themselves.