The R – the rolling, rumbling Rrr. His trademark. At the same time, Marcel Reich-Ranicki lisped the S. Both resulted in an unmistakable speech sound, which – in interaction with his body language – could grow into an event. When he raised his hands over his head again in brilliantly played helplessness and started: "So, my dear", then the other person could prepare for a verbal thunderstorm, counter-speech useless. For that he was loved by his audience.
On June 2, the literary pope who died in 2013, as everyone called him, would have been 100 years old. The fact that a literary critic of all people gained popularity like a pop star is due to his talent for presentation and sharp-tempered temperament. Almost every German knew his name because he had declared an unconditional struggle against boredom, especially in his TV show "The Literary Quartet" (ZDF, 1988-2001), where he judged new book releases.
His parents and brother were murdered
Marcel Reich-Ranicki was born in 1920 in Wloclawek on the Vistula into a Jewish German-Polish family. He attended high school in Berlin, and after graduating from high school was sent back to Poland by the Nazi authorities. He was not allowed to study. Both parents, Helene and David Reich, were later murdered in the Treblinka concentration camp, the older brother Alexander Reich was shot by the Nazis in a labor camp.
He later said about the monstrous phenomenon Adolf Hitler: "Should we show him as an elephant or a camel ?!" Of course Hitler was only human, what else? That makes it so difficult to understand the story: "He couldn't do anything, not even drive a car. The young Marcel Reich married his girlfriend Teofila Langnas in the Warsaw ghetto. After the escape, the couple found refuge with a typesetter until the end of 1944. After the war ended, he went to London for international intelligence. There he called himself Marcel Ranicki for the first time because Reich sounded German.
1958 followed the move to Germany
After returning to Warsaw, he worked as an editor for German literature and radio, but had difficulties with the communist authorities because of "ideological alienation". In 1958 the family moved to the Federal Republic.
Günter Grass once asked him during a conference in "Group 47": "What are you now – a Pole, a German or how?" Reich-Ranicki's spontaneous answer: "I am half a Pole, half a German and a whole Jew." Half a century later he revised his statement in his autobiography "My Life". "I was never half a Pole, never half a German – and I had no doubt that I would never become it. I was never a complete Jew in my life, I am still not today."
So he became a literary pope
With his literary criticism for "Die Zeit" and the "Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung" as well as on ZDF and as a jury spokesman for the Ingeborg Bachmann Prize, Reich-Ranicki became the most influential German-speaking critic of his era. He never seriously opposed the term "literary pope".
The autodidact (no studies, but nine honorary doctorates and various guest professorships) honored the poets Goethe, Schiller, Heinrich Heine and Bertold Brecht, valued the prose by Theodore Fontane, Franz Kafka, Thomas Mann, Wolfgang Koeppen and Thomas Bernhard. Otherwise, he showed no respect for big names, on the contrary. He did not spare even Nobel Prize winners for literature.
He wrote of Elfriede Jelinek, 2004 Nobel Prize, which he considered "a nice woman": "Elfriede Jelinek's literary talent is, to put it mildly, rather modest. Her dramas are unworkable. She never succeeded in a good novel , almost all of them are more or less banal or superficial. " Günter Grass's novel "A Wide Field", Nobel Prize 1999, was "worthless prose, boring and illegible. Nobody asked Grass to write about reunification. I would much prefer Grass to write about the love for his wife would have".
He thought John Updike was worthy of a Nobel Prize, but said: "There are chapters where you have to read all the time: we will fuck, we have fucked, we want to fuck, we want to fuck again. That is all, Updike has nothing more to offer Sometimes there is birding. It is a change and you can see it with joy. "
The eternal feud with Martin Walser
Reich-Ranicki preferred to work on Martin Walser. Excerpt: "He has been writing one novel after the other for 25 years. Most of the reviews are largely viewed negatively, many are totally forgotten. And rightly so. Nevertheless, he stumbles from one defeat to the next and is constantly known, one actually increasingly famous writer. " Walser retaliated with the key novel "Death of a Critic".
The committee for the awarding of the Nobel Prize also got his fat: "We know that the Nobel Prize always gets second-rate authors. Did Strindberg get it? No, Selma Lagerlöf. Did it get Brecht? No, Hermann Hesse. Love in Stockholm she’s not so much the excellent commodity. Grass will get him for that. ”
When Günter Grass actually became a Nobel laureate, Reich-Ranicki said: "Imagine: Martin Walser would have been awarded the prize, that would be a hard blow for me. Or even the stupid Peter Handke! A catastrophe. All kinds of things are possible in Stockholm. Grass – after all! "
Reich-Ranicki caused his last major scandal at the 2008 German Television Award, in which he was honored for his life's work: "I will not accept this award!" Then he reckoned up with the entire TV landscape and dismissed everything as "nonsense". But that's how he was. And it is missing with its unique nature. To this day.