Mausoleum: Siebenunddreißig Balladen aus der Geschichte des Fortschritts was published by Suhrkamp in 1975, with the English translation by Joachim Neugroschel appearing in 1976 as Mausoleum: Thirty-Seven Ballads from the History of Progress. The collection is a gallery of portraits in verse — thirty-seven historical figures who contributed to the idea and the reality of “progress,” each rendered in a biographical poem that combines documentation, imagination, and critical analysis.
The subjects range from Giovanni de’ Dondi (fourteenth-century clockmaker) through Leibniz, Diderot, Babbage, Darwin, Kropotkin, and Turing to Che Guevara — figures who embodied, in different ways, the conviction that human intelligence can reshape the world. Enzensberger’s treatment is neither celebratory nor purely ironic: each ballad acknowledges both the genuine achievement and the human cost, the liberation and the destruction, the vision and the blindness.
The title — Mausoleum — signals that these figures are dead: progress has consumed them. Their inventions, discoveries, and revolutions have outlived them, but in forms they would not recognize and often would not endorse. The mausoleum preserves their memory while encasing it in stone — a monument that is also a tomb.
Collecting Mausoleum
First German edition (Suhrkamp, Frankfurt, 1975): Cloth binding.
Market values:
- First German edition: $20–$50
- First English edition (Urizen Books, 1976): $15–$40