14 - The Lure of the Loser: On Hans Magnus Enzensberger's Schreckens Männer and Ian Buruma's Murder in Amsterdam

Summary

IN MARCH 2006 HANS MAGNUS ENZENSBERGER, one of Germany's most prominent authors, critics, and intellectuals, published an essay, entitled Schreckens Männer: Versuch über den radikalen Verlierer, in which he developed the psychological profile of a “radikaler Verlierer.” This is a male figure whose isolation and desperation can turn deadly when coopted by powerful and violent ideological forces. According to Enzensberger, the only violent global movement left today is Islamism, and after briefly surveying Islamism's history and current mission of terror he describes its lure for radical losers of Muslim background. While the essay is Enzensberger's first full-scale engagement with Islamism, it continues his long-standing commitment to confront some of the most current and most controversial problems facing contemporary European societies. The essay also takes up and modifies earlier insights into globalization and its effects on the latecomers to modernity, specifically ideas developed in his previous essays Die Große Wanderung (1992), an inquiry into global migration and state responses, Aussichten auf den Bürgerkrieg (1993), an essay on the perils of endemic violence in civic societies, and “Hitlers Wiedergänger” (1991). In this last one he compares Saddam Hussein to Hitler, and the Iraqi regime to fascism. Schreckens Männer, too, focuses on what is arguably the defining issue in global politics today: the explosive mix of globalization, political Islam, and terrorism.

These are hugely complex problems requiring the intense scrutiny of current European and Muslim societies and the history of Muslim empires and Islam, as well as the role and perception of the United States as one of the chief globalization forces, and the scholarly and journalistic literature on these questions rivals its topic in breadth and global reach.