Hans Magnus Enzensberger: At Thirty-three

Hans Magnus Enzensberger’s “At Thirty-three” tells the story of an unmarried woman who, at thirty-three years old, has become disillusioned and disappointed with the way her life has turned out, and perhaps with the world at large. The poem seems to be set sometime around 1980, judging by the reference in line 9 to the mass killings in Kampuchea (present-day Cambodia) carried out in the late seventies by the Khmer Rouge. The poem consists entirely of long, end-stopped lines, all of which except two constitute full sentences. This arrangement, along with the poem’s straightforward, not especially poetic language, gives it a matter-of-fact rhythm. The absence of meter and rhyme also contribute to the poem’s prose-like quality, which mimics the main theme of the poem, that of idealism vs. reality. Poetry (representing idealism) is cast into prose-like language to symbolize the unwitting replacement of the character’s early idealism with a less-than-ideal reality.

The main character fancies herself a communist in ideology, though she belongs, ironically, to the privileged, educated, upper class. She holds a doctorate, and her grandmother sends her money; there is no mention of her working. Indeed, the poem’s third-person narrator notes “She’s never handled a ration card.” But the woman is so infatuated with the idea of the noble working class, it seems, that she’d once “almost married a baker,” but for some reason did not go through with it. Perhaps she simply couldn’t bring herself to follow through with the practicalities of her idealism and give up her wealth and status. Or conversely, perhaps she considered a baker too close to the petite bourgeoisie.

The conflict between ideas and reality comes back in line 9, when the narrator refers to Cambodia under the totalitarian Khmer Rouge and their systematic torture and murder of a fifth of the country’s population—under the auspices of creating a truly communist country for the good of the proletariat. As a communist, the woman in the poem feels guilty about the atrocities committed by the Khmer Rouge because they were originally an orthodox communist party and likely held many of the same beliefs as she.

Political aspects aside, the poem strikes a universal resonance with its portrayal of disillusionment as one grows older. The main character’s life is not like she imagined it would be when she was young. Line 5 reveals that she sleeps alone, having apparently become disillusioned with love after being reduced to affairs with paraphiliac intelligencia. “It was all so different from what she’d expected,” the narrator notes. The woman’s youthful rebellion and idealism turned out to be less glamorous than she’d envisioned, as embodied by the rusted Volkswagens in the following line. She had dreamed of a romantic, carefree life as an expatriate artist, but ended up lonely and ineffectual. The last line is especially poignant in that it discloses the extent of her discontent and implies that her youth resurfaces only when she mourns its loss.