Hans Magnus Enzensberger's Zig Zag

...the viewer's secret weapon, the dreaded channel-surfing, gives the film the coup de grace...

...Much like Bertolt Brecht before him, he was acutely aware of the ideological function of the writer...

...The comparison is a desperate one, one that seeks to debunk the notion of the "blood lust of Hitler" as the ultimate expression of "some peculiarity of the German character...

...After so many exciting expeditions, I realize that I have failed to discover America...

...The enjoyment derived from watching television has, in Enzensberger's estimation, a "quasi-religious" dimension, for "it represents the technological approximation of nirvana...

...Thus, after only three months of residency, he abandoned Middletown, Connecticut for Havana, Cuba—a place where he believed he would be far more apt to fulfill his ideological dreams...

...This is what makes his latest volume of essays, Zig Zag: The Politics of Culture and Vice Versa, so rewarding—it provides us with the opportunity to survey some of his most provocative and stimulating writing...

...They were well-fed," he writes of the U.S...

...America, Enzensberger 120 DISSENT / Fall 1999 claimed, had surpassed Nazi Germany in terms of its power of destruction, as well as in its "subtlety" and "sophistication...

...It involves the German poet, essayist, and social critic Hans Magnus Enzensberger, who had come to spend a year, 1967 - 1968, as a fellow at Wesleyan's Center for Advanced Studies...

...For Enzensberger, there can be no resolution of his conflicting observations...

...Its mortal enemy is revolutionary change...

...In 1965, he founded Kursbuch, a prominent journal of cultural and political exchange, initially of a more revolutionary bent, which he edited for ten years...

...Although his remarks may be read within the context of the 1960s, as part of the broader reception of the Frankfurt School among students and members of the German New Left, their implications have also been felt by future generations...

...Whatever our minds can conceive of is grist to its mill...

...And, in "Two Notes on the End of the World" (1978), we witness his gloomy, if also ironic, thoughts on the "negative utopia": "The apocalypse is part of our ideological baggage...

...Enzensberger's subject matter is equally complex and wide ranging...

...IN THE current age of information, of Web banners, Internet commerce, and the intense proliferation of data stored in cyberspace, Enzensberger's cautionary words remain resonant and seem, perhaps, even prescient...

...Television is employed primarily as a well-defined method of pleasurable brainwashing," he asserts...

...nothing will leave it unadulterated—it is capable of turning any idea into a slogan and any work of the imagination into a hit...

...We are made privy to his dim prognosis of the status of literature: "It has lost weight...

...As the author of countless essays, he earned the reputation of a master of polemic, a stylist with verve and substance, a witty and sharp-tongued critic in a venerable tradition leading back to Heinrich Heine via Kurt Tucholsky, Karl Kraus, and Theodor W. Adorno...

...While walking the bombed-out route to school, as a Gymnasium student in 1944, the fifteen-year-old Enzensberger is confronted by an American fighter plane that opens fire on him and two of his classmates...

...During his extended career, he has weighed in on debates concerning the manipulation of the media (or what, in 1962, he famously dubbed the "consciousness industry," his own much-augmented rendition of Adorno's "culture industry"), the legacy of Western colonialism, the European Union and the World Bank, mass migrations, the Gulf War, and, most recently, the German-sanctioned NATO involvement in Kosovo...

...Whether we realize it or not, the mind industry is growing faster than any other, not excluding armament...

...Enzensberger eventually found himself in the unexpected role of interpreter...

...It is a nightmare...

...NOAH ISENBERG teaches German studies at Wesleyan University and is the author of Between Redemption and Doom: The Strains of German Jewish Modernism...

...troops, "their khaki trousers were clean and neat, and their attitude was supremely insouciant...

...He felt detached, stifled, incapable of completing his two-term stint...

...The tale of Enzensberger's departure traveled well beyond the brick walls of the New England campus...

...I]t serves as personal hygiene, as self-medication...

...During his first semester, so the story goes, Enzensberger found himself increasingly disillusioned with American politics and with what he saw as an oppressive atmosphere that precluded active engagement among the students and faculty...

...It is an aphrodisiac...

...It is waging an undeclared war against more than a billion people...

...In another odd rhetorical twist, Enzensberger appears convinced that the Iraqi tyrant is none other than "Hitler's genuine successor...

...He goes on to de122 DISSENT / Fall 1999 scribe his short-lived career as a teenage draftee, his risky desertion, and his first taste of American occupation...

...Not only does he see parallels in their respective Weltanschauungen ("His motive is his death wish, his method of governing is destruction"), but also in their support bases, albeit from a historically inverted angle: "The Nazis were the Iraqis of 1938-1945...

...this may help to explain the kind of reckoning that crops up in some of his later writings...

...The revolution that Enzensberger had once hoped for never occurred...

...One commentator recently called him a "master of metamorphosis," while another, already in 1970, noted that Enzensberger was "essentially unwilling to settle down in any place or way of thought...

...His contribution to major cultural and political discussions of the past four decades is something remarkable...

...You can call it a metaphor for the collapse of capitalism, which as we all know has been imminent for more than a century...

...How could I make up my mind about it, torn as I am between shock and gratitude, bliss and frustration, dismay and surprise...

...But even his postscript, an anecdotal report of Saddam's passion for Mein Kampf, shows signs of an argument that knows it cannot hold...

...In his highly personal account, Enzensberger not only revisits his ill-fated fellowship at the Center for Advanced Studies ("it was clear to me that there was something faintly ridiculous about my act"), but also ventures further back to his first encounters with American culture...

...Enzensberger, who will turn seventy this fall, has never been one to shy away from debate, nor from taking positions that he might later revise or even regret...

...Throughout his remarks, Enzensberger retains a level of ambivalence, part genuine affection, part acerbic critique...

...We may detect various parallels between the ideas of Enzensberger and those of such diverse thinkers as Marshall McLuhan, Harold Rosenberg, and Ariel Dorfman (in his instructive preface to a 1998 Salmagundi symposium on Enzensberger's "Consciousness Industry," Robert Boyers compiled a brilliant array of excerpts from writers like these to demonstrate their affinities with Enzensberger...

...It is a commodity like any other...

...GIVEN ENZENSBERGER'S predilection for the polemic, it is inevitable that not all of the essays in Zig Zag come off as even-handedly as his personal reflections on America...

...As Enzensberger puts it, "it is destroyed by the ridiculous format, the interruption of the advertising breaks, and the indifferent endless repeats...

...There is an underlying current of pessimism, a strain of "leftist melancholy," that reappears at several junctures in the essays collected in Zig Zag...

...In terms of its distinction from film—in particular, from art cinema—television's potential as an aesthetic medium is severely impaired by its own essential features...

...Some of them were black giants, and they were chewing a substance unknown in our part of the world and tasting of peppermint...

...It is no coincidence that his collection bears the title Zig Zag...

...He appreciates the opportunity he received to travel to the United States on an early Fulbright student exchange, in 1953, but he also deplores what he observes—racial segregation, sensationalist advertising, and a cynical entertainment industry that relies on choreographed audience response...

...According to Enzensberger, "This continuity proves that we are dealing with neither a German nor an Arab phenomenon, but an anthropological one...

...He swings from the left to the right, from manifesto-like revolutionary cries to a conservative stance on culture, and back again...

...Once pronounced a "one-man think tank," Enzensberger shows himself to be just as much at ease while graphically expounding upon the mathematical limitlessness of time (by way of a complicated exercise based on pastry dough, or the "baker's transformation"), as when analyzing the so-called "reluctant Eurocentrism" of the European left...

...Consider, for instance, his 1962 tract "The Industrialization of the Mind...

...Among the struggles described in Zig Zag is "My Fifty-Year Effort to Discover America," a lecture that Enzensberger delivered at New York University in 1997...

...Having survived the spray of ammunition in a ditch next to the road, Enzensberger recalls this event, with some irony, as "an altogether exhilarating experience...

...For Enzensberger's thought, as chronicled in the twenty pieces he selected, does not follow any linear trajectory of development...

...Perhaps we should recall that this is the same Enzensberger who during that year published his epic poem The Sinking of the Titanic, a poignant evocation of the fall of Western civilization...

...He went so far as to draw what now may appear as grossly misplaced comparisons between the political climate of America in the late 1960s and that of Germany in the mid- 1930s...

...Yet his first "real" encounter with America was anything but abstract...

...Rather than simply moving chronologically, the essays are arranged in three parts, in what may be loosely categorized as philosophical reflections, political interventions, and cultural critique (though of course there are elements of all three in each of the parts...

...its weapons range from saturation bombing to the most delicate techniques of persuasion...

...The zero medium is the only universal and widely distributed form of psychotherapy...

...Those who are concerned in the power game of today, political leaders, intelligence men, and revolutionaries, have very well grasped this crucial fact...

...DISSENT / Fa11 1999 123...

...With his letter, Enzensberger, who had already established himself as an outspoken figure within the German New Left, declared the need to recognize the magnitude of the Vietnam War and other U.S.-sponsored campaigns of aggression around the globe...

...To which he adds: "Of all my lifelong failures, this is the one which I would hate to do without...

...Even if we wish to consider the individual mind to be the "last citadel" or our "imaginary fortress," its autonomy is merely an illusion...

...Enzensberger has collected twenty pieces, dating from 1962 to 1997 (and deftly translated by Linda Haverty Rugg, Martin Chalmers, and others), which document his odyssey as a public intellectual...

...There are biting polemics—some more successful than others—alongside empirical investigations, reportage, animated musings, and bon mots...

...It has become the key industry of the twentieth century...

...Unique to DISSENT / Fall 1999 121 Enzensberger, however, is the stark antinomian character of his writing, drawing as it does on contradictory bits and pieces in order to render a more nuanced analysis...

...WKITING IN 1988, in a piece titled "The Zero Medium: or, Why all Complaints about Television are Pointless," Enzensberger casts a skeptical eye on television—referred to elsewhere in the volume as "crap with gravy"—as a monster that has run amok, leaving in its wake a devastating blow to contemporary culture...

...I believe the class which rules the United States of America," he wrote, "and the government which implements its policies, to be the most dangerous body of men on earth...

...It has, in short, helped to dumb down the masses, to promote illiteracy, and to homogenize the public sphere...

...Yet it is the unorthodox nature of his writing—the combination of mordant wit, imagination, and rigor—that makes Enzensberger unique...

...Its importance is not what it was...

...Born in a small Bavarian town in 1929, Enzensberger came of age during the Third Reich, and as a boy he envisioned America as "a continent of pure fantasy," an intriguing "figment, like something out of children's books...

...He similarly admires American cultural magazines such as the New Yorker, Harper's, and the Nation (upon which he modeled a German monthly review, TransAtlantik, which he founded in 1980), at the same time castigating the cultural isolationism that keeps the American people from learning foreign languages and American publishers from publishing foreign literature...

...It is conceding ever more territory...

...Class struggle (Klassenkampf) will not take place," he lamented in a 1998 issue of Der Spiegel...

...I just feel that I can learn more from the Cuban people and be of greater use to them," he explained, "than I could ever be to the students of Wesleyan University...

...His first books of poetry, published in the late 1950s and early 1960s, evoked in piercingly clear tones the youthful indignation that would mark the enduring generational strife of postwar West Germany...

...His sharp critique of the mass media —with both its radical and its culturally conservative, high-low dimensions—is something that has remained on the purview of his thought in the many years since...

...In one way or another, and to a different degree, this class is a threat to anybody who is not part of it...

...Taking as his point of departure the commonly held belief that "we reign supreme in our own consciousness, that we are masters of what our minds accept or reject," Enzensberger insists that "consciousness" (like art, a la Walter Benjamin) can be mechanically reproduced and altered...

...As a result, he gained access to the exotic luxury of the "C-ration," and, more important, to a box of English books, "a wild mixture of thrillers and classics, pulp fiction and philosophy...

...Although he has been hailed as one of Germany's greatest postwar writers, receiving among many awards the prestigious Georg Buchner Prize, he has also been derided as a shifty provocateur...

...The aesthetics of superficiality triumphs...

...In fact, if his open letter from 1968 suffered from his relativist analogy of Nazi Germany and America in the sixties, then his piece on Saddam Hussein, "Hitler Walks Again" (1992), raises the stakes even higher...

...its aim is to establish its political, economic, and military predominance over every other power in the world...

...In the pages of the New York Review of Books, his impassioned letter of resignation appeared under the title "On Leaving America...

...As Enzensberger himself notes in a later essay, commenting somewhat ruefully on the situation of his daughter in the 1970s, "She would be more likely to quote a television advertisement than a poem, Der Spiegel than Samuel Beckett, and Woody Allen than Adorno...

...The mind industry," he warns, "can take on anything, digest it, reproduce it, and pour it out...

...Because of the divergent and occasionally downright infuriating positions that Enzensberger has taken over the years, he has been an enigma among critics, a writer who eludes classification...

...Its substitute is the spectacle...