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Full Description
Marcel Reich-Ranicki is remarkable for both his unlikely life story and his brilliant career as the "pope of German letters." His sublimely written autobiography is at once a fascinating adventure tale, an unusual account of German-Jewish relations, a personal rumination on who's who in German culture, and a love letter to literature. Reich-Ranicki's life took him from middle-class childhood to wartime misery to the heights of intellectual celebrity. Born into a Jewish family in Poland in 1920, he moved to Berlin as a boy. There he discovered his passion for literature and began a complex affair with German culture. In 1938, his family was deported back to Poland, where German occupation forced him into the Warsaw Ghetto. As a member of the Jewish resistance, a translator for the Jewish Council, and a man who personally experienced the ghetto's inhumane conditions, Reich-Ranicki gained both a bird's-eye and ground-level view of Nazi barbarism. Written with subtlety and intelligence, his account of this episode is among the most compelling and dramatic ever recorded.He escaped with his wife and spent two years hiding in the cellar of Polish peasants--an incident later immortalized by Gnter Grass. After liberation, he joined and then fell out with the Communist Party and was temporarily imprisoned. He began writing and soon became Poland's foremost critical commentator on German literature. When Reich-Ranicki returned to Germany in 1958, his rise was meteoric. In short order, he claimed national celebrity and notoriety as the head of the literary section of the leading newspaper and host of his own television program. He frequently flabbergasted viewers with his bold pronouncements and flexed his power to make or break a writer's career. His list of friends and enemies rapidly expanded to include every influential player on the German literary scene, including Grass and Heinrich Boll. This, together with his keen critical instincts, makes his memoir an indispensable guide to contemporary German culture as well as an absorbing eyewitness history of some of the twentieth century's most important events.
Contents
Foreword vii PART ONEDragged, Half Plunging, so He Sank ...' 14 3. Herr Kastner: 'To Be Applied to the Soul' 21 4. Reverence for Writ 29 5. Racial Theory 44 6. Several Love Affairs at the Same Time 54 7. My Most Wonderful Refuge - the Theatre 71 8. A Suffering which Brings Happiness 88 9. The Door to the Next Room 98 10. With Invisible Luggage 103 PARRT TWO: 1938-1944 11. Poetry and the War 113 12. Hunting Down Jews Is Fun 123 13. The Dead Man and His Daughter 131 14. From Quarantine District to Ghetto 138 15. The Words of a Fool 144 16. 'If Music Be the Food of Love ...' 151 17. Death Sentences to the Accompaniment of Viennese Waltzes 161 18. An Intellectual, a Martyr, a Hero 179 19. A Brand-new Riding Crop 176 20. Order, Hygiene, Discipline 183 21. Stories For Bolek 193 PART THREE: 1944-I958 22. My First Shot, My Last Shot 209 23. From Reich to Ranicki 222 24. Brecht, Seghers, Huchel and Others 235 25. Josef K., Stalin Quotations and Heinrich Boll 247 26. A Study Trip with Consequences 261 27. A Young Man with a Massive Moustache 269 PART FOUR: I958-1973 28 Recognized as Germans 281 29. Group 47 and its First Lady 287 30. Walter Jens, or the Friendship 297 31. Literature as Awareness of Life 304 32. Canetti, Adorno, Bernhard and Others 312 33. A Tavern and a Calculating Machine 327 PART FIVE: 1973-1999 34 The Sinister Guest of Honour 339 35. Make Way for Poetry! 344 36. A Genius only during Working Hours 353 37. The Magician's Family 358 38. Max Frisch 367 39. Yehudi Menuhin and Our Quartet 373 40. Joachim Fest and Martin Walser 382 41. 'Tis a Dream ...' 391 42. Thanksgiving 393 Index 395
