EUROPE, EUROPE <i> by Hans Magnus Enzensberger (Pantheon: $18.95; 325 pp.) </i>

“In the Hades of Milan, beneath the cathedral, in the endless, dark-brown corridors of the subway station, in this limbo of mass transportation,” Hans Enzensberger sees a dusty showcase advertising “The High International Academy of Artists of the Occult Sciences.” Sensing that Italy’s fascination with the supernatural might illuminate the nation’s fantastic, unpredictable spirit, Enzensberger--a West German journalist, dramatist and poet--embarks on a lively discussion of the country’s many exorcists and pendulum-healers, “pranotherapists” and “bioplasmologists,” readers of coffee grounds and “demonologists.” Suddenly, though, an angry voice intrudes on the narrative: “I don’t know what you’re trying to get at with your magicians,” it says. “These are the cliches of folklore! . . . Superstition is about as Italian as IBM or Coca-Cola.”

“Europe, Europe” (its original German title is the more poetic “Oh, Europe”) resounds with such dissident voices--evidence that Enzensberger has spent many hours mulling over his ideas with the natives in a determined effort to avoid the cliches that are common in political profiles of cultures abroad. It’s a refreshing departure from American literature, where political analysts are often predictably partisan and where the vacillation that Enzensberger takes pride in is seen as a tell-tale sign of intellectual impotence.

Enzensberger’s self-argumentative style reflects his kinship with contemporary German culture (where writers are almost as skeptical of themselves as they are of the state) and his desire to surprise readers with offbeat conclusions. Unfortunately, Enzensberger sometimes becomes so absorbed in twisting his narrative for effect that he forgets he has no hard evidence to support some arguments. After lauding Sweden’s enlightened Socialism as “remarkable” and “exotic,” for instance, he says the country has “forgotten something: its past.” This sounds sharp, but Enzensberger fails to tell us how the nation’s monarchical past--viewed as anachronistic by most modern Swedes--can enrich the present. Similarly, he surprises us in the essay about Italy by not mocking the supernaturalists, but proclaiming them “the last resort of common sense” in a country where “reality is becoming ever more illusory and illusion ever more real.” He fails, however, to tell us what the astrologers are “common-sensical” about.

More often, though, Enzensberger’s shunning of stereotypes reflects a genuine respect for the way people manage to evade the narrow roles society often casts for them. He is reluctant to accept the popular notion that the Portuguese are “lying deep in sleep, or even on their deathbed” because of their severely depressed economy, for example, because he senses a “critical energy” in the country. Eventually, he concludes that Portugal’s “crisis” is really an “abstract chimera” of the West, for in reality, its people manage to live in an “extensive, protean shadow economy,” subsisting by bartering and renting garden plots that never have been registered.

“What the Portuguese set against capitalist rationality is not simply incompetence, but resistance,” he writes. “They don’t attack capitalist efficiency, they avoid it, spontaneously, just like that, because it’s not self-evident to the Portuguese. . . . What the Portuguese are defending, sometimes vaguely and indistinctively, but always tenaciously, is not their property but their desires--that is, things no one owns.”

This analysis--like most in these pages--is particularly impressive because it isn’t driven by any preconceived agenda: Enzensberger celebrates the Portuguese spirit not out of scorn for capitalism or nostalgia for the Old Europe, but respect for the Portuguese, who have rejected a political system because the virtues it demands are not theirs.