Sonning Prize
February 2, 2010
Enzensberg on Tuesday received the 2010 Sonning Prize at a ceremony in Copenhagen. The biennial prize, which is intended to honor work that benefits European culture, is worth 134,000 euros ($187,000).
The Bavarian-born writer has left "considerable footprints in literature, essays and journalism," said Copenhagen University, which has awarded the Sonning Prize since 1950.
Born on November 11, 1929, in Kaufbeuren, Enzensberger grew up in the southern German city of Nuremberg, where the Nazis regularly held their conventions. At a young age, he witnessed the rise and fall of the Third Reich and the victory of the Allies - experiences which would leave an impression on him.
After the Second World War, Enzensberger was employed as an interpreter for American soldiers; studied philosophy and literature in Germany and France and lived for a time in Norway. Later, he worked as a radio journalist, a dramatist and a college lecturer.
A prominent figure in the 1968 student movement, Enzensberger published an influential magazine, Kursbuch, which became a kind of cult publication among young revolutionaries.
A say in every debate
By that time he had already established himself as a successful writer. He was welcomed into the politically and culturally influential literary society "Gruppe 47" early on and was awarded the Buechner Prize in 1963.
Later, however, the writer distanced himself from the radical politics of the 1968 movement and became a vocal critic of what he called the "linker Gemütlichkeit" (roughly, "comfortable left"), as the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung wrote in the late 1980s.
Even in recent years, Enzensberger has remained both outspoken and prolific. He made headlines in 2003 by publically defending the invasion of Iraq, comparing the Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein to Adolf Hitler.
And in the last two years alone, he published a children's book, "Bibs," two essays and a piece of prose entitled "The Silences of Hammerstein." The latter is a partly fictional, partly factual account of a real-life Nazi general and the few who refused to share in the party's spoils.
Enzensberger joins a long line of prestigious Sonning Prize winners, including Winston Churchill (1950), theologian Karl Barth (1963), publicist Hannah Arendt (1975), philosopher Juergen Habermas (1987) and writer Guenter Grass (1996).
Click on the links below to read samples of Enzensberger's work in English.
kjb/DPAD/epd/kna/AP
Editor: Sonia Phalnikar