German-Jewish author Marcel Reich-Ranicki, a survivor of the Warsaw ghetto who fled Poland and became a prominent cultural figure in postwar Germany as a distinguished literary critic and a popular television talk show host, died in Frankfurt at the age of 93.
German Chancellor Angela Merkel said Reich-Ranicki’s decision to settle in Germany despite losing many of his family in the Nazis’ extermination camps was “one of the events of the post-war era for which we can only be grateful.”
Reich-Ranicki’s parents and brother died in the Holocaust.
“Not even the murderous hatred of the Nazis could banish Marcel Reich-Ranicki’s love especially for the German poets,” Merkel said.
Initially part of the left-leaning literary circle known as Group of 47, along with Nobel laureate Guenter Grass, Mr. Reich-Ranicki wrote for the weekly Die Zeit, then led the literature section of the conservative-minded Frankfurter Allgemeine daily from 1973 to 1988. After that, he became the star of ZDF public television’s “Literary Quartet,” a popular book program.
Over six decades he produced a stream of witty, sometimes barbed, but consistently erudite commentary in a career that saw Germany through the Cold War and national reunification. He became Germany’s leading literary arbiter, and in the process helped pave the way for Jews to again play an important role in the nation’s culture and politics.
He said he lived with the irony of loving the masterpieces, even of artists whose views he detested.
“The biggest anti-Semite in the history of German culture was Richard Wagner,” Mr. Reich-Ranicki once told an interviewer. “And the greatest opera I know is his Tristan and Isolde.”
The novelist Gunter Grass once questioned Mr. Reich-Ranicki at a literary conference.
“What are you really – a Pole, a German, or what?” asked Mr. Grass.
“I am half Polish, half German and wholly Jewish,” Reich-Ranicki replied.
Revered and feared as a critic, he became famous for his TV roundtable with authors and critics, “The Literary Quartet,” which aired from 1988 to 2001.