Marcel-Reich-Ranicki-Obituary

Marcel Reich-Ranicki

Obituary

BERLIN (AP) - 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 conservative-minded 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.

Reich-Ranicki, who took minutes of the meeting, recalled that a "deathly silence" was followed by uproar. He said those present "seemed to sense what had happened: that the sentence had been pronounced for the biggest Jewish city in Europe. The death sentence."

Discovering that, as an employee of the Jewish council, he was among those exempted from immediate depor tation along with their wives, Reich-Ranicki hurriedly married his girlfriend Teofila, whom he called Tosia.

In February 1943, the couple escaped the Warsaw ghetto. A typesetter and his wife on the outskirts of Warsaw hid them in the basement or attic of their house during the day. At night, they made cigarettes, which the typesetter then sold. This continued until the Red Army arrived the following year.

Reich-Ranicki's parents and brother were killed in the Holocaust. His sister, Gerda, and her husband escaped to England from Germany shortly before the war.

Having survived the war, Reich-Ranicki joined Poland's communist party. He said he and his wife credited their survival to the Red Army and that communist ideas appeared "very attractive" at the time. But, after returning from his stint as the Polish consul in London and as an agent with Poland's fledgling intelligence service, he was briefly detained and kicked out of the party amid the increasingly re pressive atmosphere of the late 1940s.

He was still able to publish literary criticism in 1950s Poland and even had his expulsion from the communist party revoked - although he said he was never officially informed. But, disillusioned in part by an upturn in anti-Semitism, he decided not to return in 1958 from a study trip to West Germany; his wife and son, who had already flown to London, joined him there.

Born Marcel Reich, he took the name Ranicki when he worked for the Polish government in London after the war. He shifted to the double-barreled Reich-Ranicki when he launched his career as a critic in West Germany.

Reich-Ranicki never denied having been a member of Poland's communist party, but became embroiled in an argument about his past in 1994 when, following a German television report, he had to acknowledge having worked for the Polish intelligence. He had previously criticized some East German intellectuals for not coming clean about alleged ties t o their country's secret police.

"I regret nothing that I did then, and I see not the slightest reason to justify myself," Reich-Ranicki said. His wife died in 2011 and he is survived by their son, Andrew.

___

GEIR MOULSON, Associated Press


Copyright © 2013 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.

Guest Book

Not sure what to say?

You are in God's loving care now, rest in peace.

in God's care rest in peace

What hope us there for the dead? John 5:28.

Go the Family's of Micheal I give him & All the Holocost People who had Died & Lived thrue that bad sadness situ washions ! All my Love too them all Great & Small ones who suffered. I was not born then but seeing & reading about them gave me shuch sadness tied them. ;-) ;-(

May God bless you and your family in this time of sorrow.

Requiem æternam dona ei, Domine.
Et lux perpetua luceat ei.
Requiescat in pace. Amen.

May you find comfort in the happy memories of your loved one until you are reunited.

Sorry for your loss. May you find comfort in the "Hearer of prayer" at this time. -Psalms 65:2