After five decades of opinion-giving, Hans Magnus Enzensberger is no longer interested in playing the 'answer-o-mat', he tells Derek Scally.
From the instructions on the telephone, Hans Magnus Enzensberger seemed to be living the clichéd poet's life. "Ring the bell and then come all the way up to the top floor".
But any expectations of meeting a poet toiling in a damp attic room vanish as soon as the door is opened by Enzensberger in a white shirt, grey cardigan , with piercing blue eyes. Behind him, the sun shines through the huge windows of his apartment above the Munich rooftops. Bookshelves line the walls and manuscripts lie everywhere in orderly piles but there are no poet clichés to be seen: no bottles of absinth and no sheets of brilliant but flawed verse fuelling a coal burner.
Enzensberger has as little time for living what he calls the "unworldly poet's life" as he has for the labels pinned on him during a career spanning nearly five decades.
"I've been the chief ideologue of the 1968 generation, an anarchist, a renegade, an angry young man, an old grandfather," he says, extracting a cigarette from a packet. "I've been a thousand things. You take note of it, but the best thing is to more or less ignore it. But it is always better than when no reaction at all comes. That's very bad for an author when no one says anything about you."
That is a fate unlikely to befall Enzensberger, who has made a career out of provoking German society. As well as being Germany's foremost living poet, he is a well-respected essayist, an influential translator, publisher and commentator on contemporary affairs.
The breadth of his body of work is matched by the critical respect he enjoys at home and abroad.
"I write poetry, essays, opera libretti even scientific articles. But I am not a specialist. I want to amuse myself, I don't want the civic responsibility."
He was born in the Bavarian town of Kaufbeuren in 1929, grew up in Nuremberg and studied in Germany and at the Sorbonne.His breakthrough came with his 1958 book of poetry, Verteidigung der Wölfe (Defence of the Wolves). The work divided critics, with one calling it an "unintentional parody of poetry" while another saw it as the "first great political poetry since Brecht" from Germany's first "angry young man".
"When I started it was a good situation. The old elites were discredited, the old Nazis had to go. You had an open field," he says. "Then it was clear that it couldn't continue that way because Germany was a ruin. These days it's not so clear because there is a comfort level, what I call the success trap."
That trap is the expectation of perpetual economic success despite the downward spiral of economic stagnation. The government of Gerhard Schroeder is now confronted with a historical decision: to continue tinkering with the creaking social state devised by Bismarck or to face down the unions and go the road of Thatcher's Britain.
In the past, any crucial debates about German society were a chance for the left and right to lock swords. But Germany's great intellectuals, from Enzensberger to Jürgen Habermas, appear to have chosen to sit out this debate, leaving unchallenged the business-friendly solutions to Germany's problems presented by the country's economic institutes and employer organisations.
"Germany has become a boring country. I don't feel the call to be the prophet," says Enzensberger. "The left in Germany is petrified. It's become a defensive interest group of Social Democrats and unions. There is no more movement, the reformists make no reforms.Britain had Thatcher and while I don't love Mrs Thatcher, something has to give here to remove the blockade."
Similarly, he has resisted the temptation to wade into the debate about Germany's role in the Iraq crisis. It's a far cry from 1991, when he wrote an essay in Der Spiegel comparing Saddam Hussein to Adolf Hitler and criticising Germans for "directing their protests against George Bush and not Saddam Hussein".
"No other people is more qualified from its experience than the Germans to understand what is happening in the Arab world," he wrote, calling Saddam Hussein's hate-filled call for war an echo of Nazi cries for Totaler Krieg.
"What thrilled the Germans was not just the licence to kill but the prospect of being killed. Just as ardent is the wish of millions of Arabs to die for Saddam. The Führer will do everything in his power to fulfil his supporters' wish."
A decade on, Enzensberger defends his pro-war stance then as a justified reaction against Iraqi aggression.
But the current situation is anything but clear. "Sometimes you have to admit that you don't know the answer and I don't know what the right answer is. Perhaps all answers are wrong," he says. "The veto matter is a no-win situation, because if I use my veto I destroy the United Nations, the US will start a war anyway and the Security Council has lost its authority. If I don't veto, then I am in agreement with the US plans which is perhaps also a wrong answer."
His decision to withdraw from the front-lines of intellectual commentary can be seen in his latest collection, Die Geschichte der Wolken (The Stories of the Clouds), just published in Germany by Suhrkamp. "I write about terrorism and war but they are not the only themes. The world isn't just made up of politics. Life isn't a press conference," he says.
Although tired of commentary, Enzensberger says he has yet to tire of "switching jackets" from poet to publisher. He played a crucial role in the career of German writer W.G. Sebald, who died in a car crash in December, 2001, just as his writings on the Allied fire-bombing of German cities during the second World War generated a heated discussion in Germany and abroad.
"I discovered Sebald, it was a matter of luck. He was a wonderful man, a wonderful author. He had a big future," he says simply. His publishing role has brought him into contact with Irish authors, but not as much as he would like. "The situation is good for Irish literature, it's very well represented in Germany," he says. "But I have hardly worked with any Irish authors because they all have publishers here."
As a visitor to Ireland since the early 1960s he has watched Ireland's recent economic development with interest. "The economic success of Ireland will redimensionalise the role of the poet in Ireland. It will no longer be like it was in the 1920s . . . when poets and dramatists played a crucial role in creating the Irish identity."
He decided to participate at the festival in Dun Laoghaire out of curiosity.
"I don't do any readings in Germany, because of the whole cottage industry of reading tours. I am more interested in Ireland. I am not a household name. I don't know what will happen, so the reaction is much more exciting," he says.
As regards his own future, Enzensberger is pensive. "There are authors who are long-distance runners like Proust with one book in his life. Then there are short distance runners, the 100 metre-man, the 200 metre-man. I am a 400-metre author," he says.
Hans Magnus Enzensberger is still quite a way from the finish line but, like all good athletes, has developed a strategy to maximise his energy in the home stretch. After nearly five decades of opinion-giving, Germany's great intellectual says he is no longer interested in playing the "answer-o-mat".
"I am not responsible for the stupidity of others," he says, explaining a philosophy that could serve young authors well: "Don't write about things that others force you to do. Seize the initiative: it's a good strategic rule. Mao Tse Tung once said it."
Hans Magnus Enzensberger will read with Paul Muldoon at 8.30 p.m. next Saturday in the Pavilion Theatre, Dún Laoghaire. The readings will be introduced by Peter Fallon