Tumult

Tumult (2014)

This page by Susan Schonfield

Tumult (2014, English translation: 2016) is an ironic reflection by Hans Magnus Enzensberger on his past role as a public intellectual and ‘angry young man’ of 1968. The book was translated into English in 2016. The German edition’s dedication, ‘Den Verschwundenen’ which translates into English as ‘To those who have disappeared’ is absent from the English edition, which has no dedication whatsoever. This immediately raises speculation on what Enzensberger may have meant; firstly, in the German edition – is he commemorating the disappeared socialist dictatorships he visited? Is he remembering lost comrades? Or his own youthful ideals? Then, secondly, there are questions why the dedication was dropped from the English edition: was it a genuine oversight? Was it considered too ‘political’ for an English audience? Or too enigmatic altogether? This initial ambivalence resonates throughout the book. 

Enzensberger assumes that his readers are familiar with the anti-authoritarian student movement of 1968. Yet, by 1968, Enzensberger was no longer a young man, being in his late thirties, at least half a generation older than the rioting students. Also, the students were mainly middle class, and Enzensberger came from an upper middle class background. Even so, his political sympathies were with the students, although he takes care in Tumult to place himself as often being absent from where the central actions were taking place. He deliberately omits his participation in the literary Gruppe 47 from 1955 onwards, and his editorship of the highly influential left-wing journal Kursbuch from 1965 to 1975. The student activists or ‘Sixty-Eighters’ are described ironically in Tumult in terms of their typical left-wing in-fighting: ‘Without [this] intervention they would have gone on arguing for ever, in order to continue to drive the necessary process of splitting into factions forward.’ (pp. 173-74)

The contents of the book are in five sections, which cover dates from 1963 to 2015, not entirely in chronological order. For instance, the first section, from 1963, is immediately followed by a ‘Postscript’ from 2014, with a poem written on his return to Germany in 1963. The second section describes his second visit to Russia three years later, titled ‘Scribbled Diary Notes from a Trip Around the Soviet Union and Its Consequences’. It too has a short ‘Postscript’, and also ends with another poem written on his return to Germany, with both short and long biographical notes. The fourth and longest section of the book, ‘Memories of a Tumult’, covers the years 1967-1970, and has a dialogic structure; the younger Enzensberger is interrogating the older one, and vice versa. Again, the section is followed by its own short ‘Postscript’, which ties up some loose ends, gives biographical details, and includes a poem from around 1968. Tumult ends with the section called ‘Thereafter’, which has updates on some of the people encountered, together with headed paragraphs on different topics that in general continue the themes and thoughts from the main section. There is also a final ‘Postscript’, written in 2014, which finishes by describing the deaths of the two women, mother and daughter, he knew and loved from the time of his first visit to Russia. The book ends with a poem ‘Remembrance’, written in 1978. The complex structure of Tumult suggests that, although nominally ‘about’ uprisings and social movements, the book is in fact heterogeneous and complex: while intensely personal, it deals with subjects such as world events and major political personalities; it also includes descriptions and traveller’s tales, vivid personal encounters, and different viewpoints from several individuals expressed at different times of their lives. There are also sketches of the cities he visits and their citizens.

Enzensberger is aware that autobiography can be unreliable. He attempts to solve this problem by using the device of his older self talking to, interrogating and being interrogated by, his younger self. This device had been used fictionally two centuries earlier by Marivaux, in La Vie de Marianne (1731-45), where an older Marianne reviews and reflects on her younger self. This section in Tumult is crucial because it shows how much he has changed, particularly as Enzensberger distances himself further from his younger self by saying he does not see him as himself, but ‘as a younger brother’ (p. 113).  It also means that the older Enzensberger is the one formulating the questions put by his younger self, and can therefore choose what not to be asked about. Also, the older self can also respond obliquely whenever he chooses, something Enzensberger excels at. 

Enzensberger speaks of the main left political movements in Germany in the sixties as if from a sideways, tangential viewpoint, and this comes through when he describes, wittily and acerbically, Kommune 1 (pp. 122-25); though one of his brothers, and his former wife were involved, Enzensberger harbours no illusions about Kommune 1 in retrospect: ‘…the relationship between the Kommune and the popular press was a mutually profitable piece of business. The organisers had a sign on the door of the house: ‘First the dough, then the show’ (p. 125). More central was his role as founder in 1965 of the radical periodical Kursbuch, a leading forum for the student movement. The omission of Kursbuch, more than anything else, reveals the withdrawal by his older self from the activism of his younger days, and could be seen as an attempt to cover up the extent of his own involvement.

The picture of the reality that Enzenberger experienced being different to the picture presented in the media is also shown by his description of Ulrike Meinhof and Andreas Baader, whom he knew. He was sympathetic to Meinhof, describing her motivations and family background; Baader is dismissed as ‘a crook on the run’, an opportunist.  Enzensberger dissuaded them from staying with him, because he was himself under surveillance at that time. He has a last meeting with Meinhof, described in a tone of sombre lack of sympathy, even though somewhat nostalgically; and he compares the ‘fantasy’ and dogma he encounters from the Red Army Faction during that meeting (pp. 260-63) to that he experienced from a Hitler Youth leader when he was a teenager.

As a public intellectual, he describes how he resolved never to become a demagogue and ‘rabble-rouser’, recognising that he had that gift (p.105). He does, though, report facts that would be unpopularly received by the governments of the day. For example, when writing of Akademgorodok, a Soviet university in Novosibirsk: ‘They all talk very openly…. There is a simple reason why the exercise of authority is different here: the Party depends on these brains to keep up in the armament and technology race.’ (p. 88).

And of the Cuban revolution, something the West would not want to hear: ‘I had the impression that the majority of the people in the streets didn’t just accept it, they were happy about it.’ (p. 149). His political antennae are highly tuned into the events of the Cuban revolution, and his opinions of aspects of it incisive and outspoken. He met Fidel Castro three times, and is pitiless in his description of the blunders that happened in the early days. The ‘greatest economic fiasco the Omniscient One brought down on his country’, of forcing an increase in sugar production (pp. 201-202) is one; Castro’s obsession with Don Quixote is another (p. 199); the drive to produce a Cuban Camembert another. As an indirect result of receiving a Camembert, a marked sign of favour from El Jefe and a highly perishable one at that, Enzensberger recounts that he and Masha benefited from it to the extent of a new lightbulb, previously unobtainable, and an apartment (p. 190). He is unequivocal in pointing out the impossibilities of enforcing some of the less tolerant of the new regime’s edicts: ‘The worst aspect of their revolutionary sex education, however, was the witch-hunt against homosexuals […] This of course involved the Cubans in a futile struggle against themselves, for on this subtropical island sexuality has taboos but no limits’ (p. 208). (Castro only became more tolerant towards gay/lesbian citizens of Cuba in the late 1980s/early 1990s, and same-sex marriage was not legalised in Cuba until the 2022 Cuban Family Code referendum).

Enzensberger is also self-mocking in pointing out the difference between his and Masha’s attitude to the accepting of the privileges offered to them in Cuba; she takes advantage of them, feeling ‘positively obliged’ to do so, he, with his ‘simple left-wing mind’ – more irony - finds them suspect (p.193); Masha knows from experience how to behave in a socialist economy. 

In an interview in 2015, Enzensberger rejects the idea of himself as a public intellectual who should comment on world affairs: 

‘Intellectuals aren’t any smarter than other people. There are also dumb intellectuals. Anyone can see that. You just have to read the paper. There are pretentious people out there. They have no clue, but offer their opinion on everything. In Italian, there’s the expression… They use the term tuttologo for some people. A know-it-all academic. One who’s responsible for everything. One can call them. That’s good for the newspapers. Just call the know-it-all.’  

Source: ‘Hans Magnus Enzensberger Interview: A Closer Look’, 22 mins, 04 seconds

The difference in the perspective of the younger self and the older one is very clear, and Enzensberger has spoken of it: ‘From the perspective of the young man I once was. And not from my perspective today. There’s a difference in perspective.’  Source: ‘Hans Magnus Enzensberger Interview: A Closer Look’, 30 mins, 30 seconds

His later perspective is that of a relativist; his pronouncements are more ambiguous, less assertive, and very much at a distance from his earlier experiences. The ‘Postscript’ sections reflect this change, that Enzensberger, from being a committed public intellectual, has retreated into the role of writer, including more about his life and his story – his visit to France with his daughter, for example, the filling-in of the details of the lives of people he has known, loved and respected. The text is a more literary one. This might be interpreted as a way of coming to terms with the disappointment of his political cause, although he remains optimistic about the future of writing and poetry. The early texts in Tumult are more dogmatic, and certainly written in a left-wing mode of thought; the later reflections are more open-ended, ironic and ambivalent.

In conclusion, as well as being an ironic reflection and memoir of some of his selected experiences, the book captures the spirit of the times; it offers a particular view of Enzensberger’s experiences, given with an eye to posterity, which downplays his activism in the 1960s by not only presenting himself as tangential, but also by omitting some of his actions which were central to the political left movements in West Germany at the time. The voice of the older man predominates, showing disappointment in what happened to the causes he supported as a young man. While bearing in mind the warning ‘caveat lector’, his reflections on their denouement from the perspective of a long life productively lived offer a literary, but not necessarily a political, viewpoint that captures and holds the reader’s imagination and attention.

English Translation

Hans Magnus Enzensberger, Tumult, trans. by Mike Mitchell (London and Calcutta: Seagull Books, 2016)