The Author of Himself: The Life of Marcel Reich-Ranicki.

About this book

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 whos who in German culture and a love letter to literature. Reich-Ranickis 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 ghettos inhumane conditions Reich-Ranicki gained both a birds-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 peasantsan 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 Polands 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 writers career. His list of friends and enemies rapidly expanded to include every influential player on the German literary scene including Grass and Heinrich Bll. 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 centurys most important events.