Bypassing the audience? – Kai Sina remembers the magazine “TransAtlantik” and its founders Hans Magnus Enzensberger and Gaston Salvatore – the result is a story of failure on a high level. : Literaturkritik.de

Kai Sina mentions the magazine “TransAtlantik” and its founders Hans-Magnus Enzensberger and Gaston Salvatore – the result is a story of failure on a high level.

Written by Nora Eckert

Book review/references

Who remembers “TransAtlantic”? The question came to me the other day as I stood in front of the overcrowded bookshelf pondering what to settle. I looked at two thick volumes in Prussian blue, the first two years of the journal mentioned here two volumes in. Yes, who else knows them? Shortly thereafter, fortunately, Kai Sina’s review article was on the table, which unexpectedly answered my question. Yes, someone else knows how to tell the story as part of the “second Munich modernity,” and how high-flying plans fail not only in reality, but perhaps also because of zealous pedagogy and a certain undeniable arrogance, such as spiritualistic people sometimes tend to do.

But “TransAtlantik” knows more, I was told in a report in the Süddeutsche Zeitung entitled “Luxury and Literature”. She reports on a revival event at the beginning of the year in Munich, which was held at the Schumann Guild. Comrades gathered who remembered how Hans Magnus Enzensberger wanted to “teach hedonism and German culture” – and given his ideas about it apparently not very successful. But now I wouldn’t think of hedonism first when I think of Enzensberger (rather as a misunderstanding) and also not when I’m flipping through his journal today.

Perhaps cultural magazines are in a special way spiritual products that serve and are born out of intellectual fashions and mindsets – frankly whether they are ahead of their time or left behind. At best, they shape their audience and they are also shaped by their audience and expectations, in terms of content and aesthetics, with any dependencies on one side or the other. Ultimately, sales numbers are the measure of success or failure.

At the start of “TransAtlantik” there was a 29-page concept sheet full of ideas and followed the motto that there was always room at the top. The themes and list of (favorite) authors are impressive and clearly ‘think big’. But as with ideas, some come so early, others so late, that they miss out on success one way or the other. Recipes for success are recognized only after that, otherwise there would be no failures, most likely. Even if you try to copy an idea that was already successful, there is no guarantee that the calculation will be correct. Hans Magnus Enzensberger and Gaston Salvatore, both friends since the late 1960s, influential in the protest movement and thus similarly socio-political, wanted to create the intellectual icon “The New Yorker” for Germany with their magazine idea and unequivocally identify the title “TransAtlantik”. Line of thought – go west!

Kai Sina mainly pursues two goals with his article: on the one hand, he portrays the magazine under the patronage of Ennzenberger and Salvatore. This is the time between October 1980 and December 1982, when the two are responsible for the content of the 29 magazines published per month up to then. The magazine will continue to exist for a few more years with a change of editorial staff, but these will play no part in the message. On the other hand, Senna wants to “in the course of filming […] Locating the magazine’s distinctive places as precisely as possible in the history of ideas in the Federal Republic of Germany after 1945”.

The result is a useful, easy-to-read book that achieves its goals. The editors are assigned two character portraits, which group very different personalities together including their foibles (sometimes also of who they look like as a dude). Anecdotal stories also come into their own, these trivia from everyday intellectual life always come in handy. But Sina looks at society and listens to it at the same time, reporting on her speeches at the time and outlining her cultural horizons.

In the beginning, there was a social change, so the discovery of the past makes the culture of the eighties seem more liberal – in contrast to the fears at the beginning of Helmut Kohl’s chancellorship with a pompous slogan of spiritual and moral renewal. Enzensberger and Salvatore started from the idea that Germany, as a country of social climbers, was looking for a cultural identity and overcame the provinces. Now is the time for an “urban smart consumer magazine,” said the concept paper. A miscalculation, because “TransAtlantik” clearly did not offer what a wider audience wanted to read. Surely it was also a miscalculation that the “responsible reader” did not want to be singled out. The publishers called it overrated and, out of hatred, created a program that ended up defaulting on its exclusivity.

The table of contents reflects the thematic and literary preferences of the publishers, who are constantly critical of the times and the missionary cultural ethos. However, where Enzensberger and Salvatore speak of role models, it sounds disturbingly “aesthetic,” since the two in all seriousness referred to Swift, Diderot, and Balzac. Their literary rank cannot be questioned, but what exactly is their 1980 paradigm? Because the sense of irony, enlightenment and physiology of everyday life (Balzac’s specialty) did not have to be excavated first. Above all, the magazine should not be colorful, not fashionable and bloated. The only thing colorful are the ads Kai Sina tries to analyze their interaction with texts and themes with some examples. They were wanted to be “magazine readers” and remained visually spartan, though very original and not devoid of humor despite all the propriety. But the separation of feeling and sensitivity seemed to frustrate the public.

The open criticism came mainly from the left: that the magazine’s money came from Heinz Van Nuys, who was at home as a tabloid journalist and made money by imitating Playboy “Louis”, among other things. Enzensberger did not challenge this and answered the question if he did not care where the money came from: a project like “TransAtlantik” needed a venture publisher who was an outsider and did not participate in editing. Noahice is such a publisher.

In “Concrete”, Herman L. Gremlizza calls Salvatore and Ennzenberger “traitors to the creed of the pure left”. De Zeit and Stern also argued with moral distortion. Spiegel saw it a little differently, with a synopsis mixed in with it under the heading “Farewell to Anger”. The magazine has been compared to a salon that “doesn’t matter anymore, but it’s all interesting”. In this way, Enzensberger advanced to become the “neat of the West German left”, for which there may have been rules of his own. Senna comments: Enzensberger “wanted to bid farewell to intellectuals in their dominant function of interpretation and interpretation, but without interfering with the process”. And he fails because of his claims, only better, Cena says, because he was aware of the irony. However, I venture to doubt whether that is really speaking of Enzensberger. But in my opinion, what he is talking about is his attitude, which Senna describes as a “goodbye to principles” and signals the end of dogmatism.

Departures and New Beginnings can be read more compellingly than an impressive list of authors, including such names as Wilhelm Genazino, Martin Mosebach, and Rainald Goetz – after all, three Büchner Prize winners. Sina’s summary is:

TransAtlantik was to train West Germans to become similar to Enzensberger: cosmopolitan, cynical, urban, urban. The only problem in the editorial office was that only Enzensberger was like Enzensberger and could act accordingly.

The latter can be nicely illustrated in Mitwritten by Miklroczky. Ordinary sensations. At the time, Rutschke was the editor of “TransAtlantik” and gave a lot of close-up ideas with humor.