Picking Up the Pieces

Zig Zag: The Politics of Culture and Vice Versa
by Hans Magnus Enzensberger, translated by Linda Haverty Rugg, et al.
The New Press, 1998, 342 pp., $25

Here is a cherished anecdote told every now and then at Wesleyan University, where I teach. 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. 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. He felt detached, stifled, incapable of completing his two-term stint. 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. “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.”

The tale of Enzensberger’s departure traveled well beyond the brick walls of the New England campus. In the pages of the New York Review of Books, his impassioned letter of resignation appeared under the title “On Leaving America.” “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. In one way or another, and to a different degree, this class is a threat to anybody who is not part of it. It is waging an undeclared war against more than a billion people; its weapons range from saturation bombing to the most delicate techniques of persuasion; its aim is to establish its political, economic, and military predominance over every other power in the world. Its mortal enemy is revolutionary change.”