Hans Magnus Enzensberger has repeatedly engaged with scientific topics, the history of science, and the methods of knowledge and biographies of researchers since his literary beginnings. His now legendary "Thirty-Seven Ballads from the History of Progress" was published more than a quarter of a century ago in the volume Mausoleum. For him, it is quite natural that poetry and the sciences not only share a common root but that their encounter on equal footing is more promising and necessary today than ever. He takes it for granted that a poet must engage with mathematics and chemistry, medicine and particle physics, and genetics if he wants to be taken seriously in literature; especially since the discovery of poetry within the sciences themselves "awakens a certain F. in our sluggish minds.".