Warsaw Ghetto survivor, German literary critic, dead at 93
Marcel Reich-Ranicki, who grew up in Poland and Nazi Germany, survived the Warsaw Ghetto and went on to become post-war Germany’s best-known literary critic, has died at age 93.
The sharp-tongued Reich-Ranicki established himself as West Germany’s premier arbiter of literary taste after arriving with no money in 1958 from communist Poland, where he had served as a diplomat and intelligence agent in the late 1940s.
The Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung newspaper said Reich-Ranicki died in Frankfurt on Wednesday. It didn’t give further details.
Reich-Ranicki didn’t shy away from hard-biting criticism of authors, saying once that “clarity is the politeness of the critic; directness is his obligation and his job.” In his 1999 memoirs, “My Life,” he conceded that he had a reputation as “a man of literary executions.”
Initially part of the left-leaning literary circle known as Group of 47, along with Nobel laureate Guenter Grass, Reich-Ranicki wrote for the weekly Die Zeit, then led the literature section of the conservativeminded Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung daily from 1973 to 1988. After that, he became the star of ZDF public television’s “Literary Quartet,” a popular book program.
Reich-Ranicki said he recommended German novelist Heinrich Boell for the Nobel Prize for literature. Boell won in 1972.
Reich-Ranicki was by turns supportive and critical of Grass — with whom he fell out for a time after describing one of Grass’ books as “a complete failure.”
Reich-Ranicki was born into a Jewish family in Wloclawek, Poland, on June 2, 1920. When he was 9, his family moved to Berlin following the bankruptcy of his father’s construction company.
He recalled his elementary school teacher saying to him as he left, “You are going, my son, to the land of culture.” In Berlin, Reich-Ranicki went to high school but by the time he wanted to attend university to study German literature in 1938, the Nazis had come to power and he was denied entry because he was Jewish. He was then deported to Poland.
After Nazi Germany’s invasion of Poland in 1939, Reich-Ranicki, like other Jews, was soon forced to live in the Warsaw Ghetto. There he worked as an interpreter for the ghetto’s Jewish administrative council.
Speaking to the German Parliament in 2012, he recalled the day in July 1942 when the Nazi SS informed the Jewish council of plans for the inhabitants’ “resettlement” to the east — a Nazi euphemism for deportation to the death camps, and the beginning of the end of the ghetto.