What do you think?
Rate this book
Civil Wars: From L.A. to Bosnia
In Civil Wars , Hans Magnus Enzensberger, Germany's most astute literary and political critic, chronicles the global changes taking place as the result of evolving notions of nationalism, loyalty, and community. Enzensberger sees similar forces at work around the world, from America's racial uprisings in Los Angeles to the outright carnage in the former Yugoslavia. He argues that previous approaches to class or generational conflict have failed us, and that we are now confronted with an "autism of violence": a tendency toward self-destruction and collective madness.
144 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1993
1 person is currently reading
147 people want to read
About the author
Hans Magnus Enzensberger
311 books166 followersSee also:
Cyrillic: Ханс Магнус Енценсбергер
Hans Magnus Enzensberger was a German author, poet, translator and editor. He had also written under the pseudonym Andreas Thalmayr.
Enzensberger was regarded as one of the literary founding figures of the Federal Republic of Germany and wrote more than 70 books. He was one of the leading authors in the Group 47, and influenced the 1968 West German student movement. He was awarded the Georg Büchner Prize and the Pour Le Mérite, among many others.
He wrote in a sarcastic, ironic tone in many of his poems. For example, the poem "Middle Class Blues" consists of various typicalities of middle class life, with the phrase "we can't complain" repeated several times, and concludes with "what are we waiting for?". Many of his poems also feature themes of civil unrest over economic- and class-based issues. Though primarily a poet and essayist, he also ventured into theatre, film, opera, radio drama, reportage and translation. He wrote novels and several books for children (including The Number Devil, an exploration of mathematics) and was co-author of a book for German as a foreign language, (Die Suche). He often wrote his poems and letters in lower case.
Enzensberger also invented and collaborated in the construction of a machine which automatically composes poems (Landsberger Poesieautomat). This was used during the 2006 Football World Cup to commentate on games.
Tumult, written in 2014, is an autobiographical reflection of his 1960s as a left-wing sympathizer in the Soviet Union and Cuba.
Enzensberger translated Adam Zagajewski, Lars Gustafsson, Pablo Neruda, W. H. Auden and César Vallejo. His own work has been translated into more than 40 languages.
Cyrillic: Ханс Магнус Енценсбергер
Hans Magnus Enzensberger was a German author, poet, translator and editor. He had also written under the pseudonym Andreas Thalmayr.
Enzensberger was regarded as one of the literary founding figures of the Federal Republic of Germany and wrote more than 70 books. He was one of the leading authors in the Group 47, and influenced the 1968 West German student movement. He was awarded the Georg Büchner Prize and the Pour Le Mérite, among many others.
He wrote in a sarcastic, ironic tone in many of his poems. For example, the poem "Middle Class Blues" consists of various typicalities of middle class life, with the phrase "we can't complain" repeated several times, and concludes with "what are we waiting for?". Many of his poems also feature themes of civil unrest over economic- and class-based issues. Though primarily a poet and essayist, he also ventured into theatre, film, opera, radio drama, reportage and translation. He wrote novels and several books for children (including The Number Devil, an exploration of mathematics) and was co-author of a book for German as a foreign language, (Die Suche). He often wrote his poems and letters in lower case.
Enzensberger also invented and collaborated in the construction of a machine which automatically composes poems (Landsberger Poesieautomat). This was used during the 2006 Football World Cup to commentate on games.
Tumult, written in 2014, is an autobiographical reflection of his 1960s as a left-wing sympathizer in the Soviet Union and Cuba.
Enzensberger translated Adam Zagajewski, Lars Gustafsson, Pablo Neruda, W. H. Auden and César Vallejo. His own work has been translated into more than 40 languages.
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews
December 31, 2022
An irrationality that exists in all of us...
Psychologically, it is much more satisfying to vent your hatred on the enemy you know: that is, on your immediate neighbor. Civil war is not merely an old custom, but the primary form of all collective conflict.
It is generally the rule, rather than the exception, that man destroys what he most hates, and that is usually the rival on his own territory.
War, once the simplest means of enrichment, has become bad business. Capitalism has realized that state-regulated slaughter does not pay sufficient dividends.
Compared with the present lot, earlier combatants were true believers. They set the greatest store by killing, or being killed, in the name of some ideal. No matter how repulsive their world view, they held to it 'with iron resolve', 'fanatically', 'unshakably'. ... The complete absence of conviction is striking.
What we see is not conviction, but its facsimile.
The protagonists are almost exclusively young men. Their behavior demonstrates the extent to which the patriarchal system has been eroded.
...an illusion that is economically unworkable.
It is obvious that the spokesmen of the Right don't believe in their own bluff. Their old world view has disappeared without trace, and left only an empty longing for aggression in its place.
...this collective self-mutilation is not simply a side-effect of the conflict, a risk the protagonists are prepared to run, it is what they are actually aiming to achieve.
It is possible that all religions have their origins in personal sacrifice; ever since the gods were banished from the world, men have never been short of some higher purpose in whose name they would kill and die. We might even wonder whether 'culture' is dependent on this ability to put causes before ourselves.
Few dispute that the world market, now that it is no longer a vision of the future but a global reality, produces fewer winners and more losers as each year passes.
The general level of violence is no more than the desperate reaction to a hopeless economic situation.
The losers, far from regrouping under a common banner, are hard at work on their own self-destruction, and capital is retreating from the battlefields wherever possible.
in New York as well as in Zaire, in the industrial cities as well as in the poorest countries, more and more people are being permanently excluded from the economic system because it no longer pays to exploit them.
You don't have to be a Hegelian to see that the longing for recognition is a fundamental anthropological fact. But the notion that it has ever been realized is illusory. It is something that the overwhelming majority of those alive today can only dream about.
Hegel takes the expression 'recognition' literally and attempts to establish it objectively. The man who feels humiliated will never let matters rest there.
The unprecedented growth in world population. A utilitarian categorization, 'superfluous.'
It is difficult to know where in this train of thought the search for meaning stops and contempt for human life begins.
Merely stating your own position fans the flames of conflict. There is no Archimedean point.
Never has there been so much talk of human rights as now:
The Universal Declaration of Human Rights, passed unanimously by the General Assembly of the United Nations in 1948, presents in its preamble...
- political and social rights, including the right to life, liberty and personal security, the right to freedom of thought and of religion, the right to freedom of expression, the right to social security and to work, and the right to a standard of living which guarantees health and well-being.
- "Every person is entitled to a social and international order in which the above rights and freedoms can be fully realized."
4/5 of the world's population live in conditions that make a mockery of the declaration's rhetoric.
Psychologically, it is much more satisfying to vent your hatred on the enemy you know: that is, on your immediate neighbor. Civil war is not merely an old custom, but the primary form of all collective conflict.
It is generally the rule, rather than the exception, that man destroys what he most hates, and that is usually the rival on his own territory.
War, once the simplest means of enrichment, has become bad business. Capitalism has realized that state-regulated slaughter does not pay sufficient dividends.
Compared with the present lot, earlier combatants were true believers. They set the greatest store by killing, or being killed, in the name of some ideal. No matter how repulsive their world view, they held to it 'with iron resolve', 'fanatically', 'unshakably'. ... The complete absence of conviction is striking.
What we see is not conviction, but its facsimile.
The protagonists are almost exclusively young men. Their behavior demonstrates the extent to which the patriarchal system has been eroded.
...an illusion that is economically unworkable.
It is obvious that the spokesmen of the Right don't believe in their own bluff. Their old world view has disappeared without trace, and left only an empty longing for aggression in its place.
...this collective self-mutilation is not simply a side-effect of the conflict, a risk the protagonists are prepared to run, it is what they are actually aiming to achieve.
It is possible that all religions have their origins in personal sacrifice; ever since the gods were banished from the world, men have never been short of some higher purpose in whose name they would kill and die. We might even wonder whether 'culture' is dependent on this ability to put causes before ourselves.
Few dispute that the world market, now that it is no longer a vision of the future but a global reality, produces fewer winners and more losers as each year passes.
The general level of violence is no more than the desperate reaction to a hopeless economic situation.
The losers, far from regrouping under a common banner, are hard at work on their own self-destruction, and capital is retreating from the battlefields wherever possible.
in New York as well as in Zaire, in the industrial cities as well as in the poorest countries, more and more people are being permanently excluded from the economic system because it no longer pays to exploit them.
You don't have to be a Hegelian to see that the longing for recognition is a fundamental anthropological fact. But the notion that it has ever been realized is illusory. It is something that the overwhelming majority of those alive today can only dream about.
Hegel takes the expression 'recognition' literally and attempts to establish it objectively. The man who feels humiliated will never let matters rest there.
The unprecedented growth in world population. A utilitarian categorization, 'superfluous.'
It is difficult to know where in this train of thought the search for meaning stops and contempt for human life begins.
Merely stating your own position fans the flames of conflict. There is no Archimedean point.
Never has there been so much talk of human rights as now:
The Universal Declaration of Human Rights, passed unanimously by the General Assembly of the United Nations in 1948, presents in its preamble...
- political and social rights, including the right to life, liberty and personal security, the right to freedom of thought and of religion, the right to freedom of expression, the right to social security and to work, and the right to a standard of living which guarantees health and well-being.
- "Every person is entitled to a social and international order in which the above rights and freedoms can be fully realized."
4/5 of the world's population live in conditions that make a mockery of the declaration's rhetoric.
June 6, 2025
after reading the magnificent "reveurs de l'sabsolut" and "chicago ballade" this is my first disappointment with Enzensberger
some of this is almost reactionary
the blurring by which all the travails of the "developing world" become just a blind unthinking barbarism (this was published in 1990) is what we get from VS Naipaul
but come to think of it there were little hints of this in "Reveurs de L'absolu" which however is full of pithy insights and is a great read
This brand of myopia was widespread at that juncture, not long after the Berlin Wall came down and people spoke, absurdly , of the "end of the cold war" the general public and most academics and writers little grasped that they had not lived through a "cold war" specific to the nuclear adversaries of a bipolar world, but only through the latest and intermediate chapter of anglo american psychosis, one of whose features is a Russophobia going back centuries.
In this respect , Enzensberger's Civil Wars is in a mediocre rut.
some of this is almost reactionary
the blurring by which all the travails of the "developing world" become just a blind unthinking barbarism (this was published in 1990) is what we get from VS Naipaul
but come to think of it there were little hints of this in "Reveurs de L'absolu" which however is full of pithy insights and is a great read
This brand of myopia was widespread at that juncture, not long after the Berlin Wall came down and people spoke, absurdly , of the "end of the cold war" the general public and most academics and writers little grasped that they had not lived through a "cold war" specific to the nuclear adversaries of a bipolar world, but only through the latest and intermediate chapter of anglo american psychosis, one of whose features is a Russophobia going back centuries.
In this respect , Enzensberger's Civil Wars is in a mediocre rut.
November 23, 2021
Çarpıcı gözlemler, kaliteli tespitler barındıran akıcı bir kitap. Tek solukta okunuyor. Görünen o ki, üzerinden geçen çeyrek asır yazarı haksız çıkarmamış!
Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews