Marcel Reich-Ranicki

Marcel Reich-Ranicki (born June 2, 1920, Włocławek, Poland—died September 18, 2013, Frankfurt am Main, Germany) was a Polish-born German columnist and television personality who became Germany’s most influential literary critic.

Reich grew up in Berlin and Warsaw. During World War II his Jewish parents were confined to the Warsaw ghetto and were then killed at the Treblinka concentration camp. With his wife, whom he had met in the ghetto, Reich evaded the Nazis by hiding with a sympathetic family outside the city. After the war he worked for Polish intelligence in London before returning to communist Warsaw, assuming the surname Ranicki (which had been his intelligence code name), and contributing to the counterculture journal Nowa kultura (later Kultura).

His career as a critic began in 1958, when he resettled in West Germany, where he changed his surname to Reich-Ranicki. He wrote columns for the Hamburg news weekly Die Zeit until 1973, when he became the literary editor of the news daily Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung. In 1988 he launched his television program Das literarisches Quartett (“Literary Quartet”), which pitted the plain-speaking host in debate with guest editors and critics. In 2002 Reich-Ranicki replaced it with a show in which he discussed literary works before a studio audience.

Reich-Ranicki wrote several critical studies on German and Polish literature. He also published a best-selling autobiography, Mein Leben (1999; “My Life”; Eng. trans. The Author of Himself: The Life of Marcel Reich-Ranicki). He won many awards, including the Goethe Prize for Literary Achievement in 2002.