From the Publisher
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 Günter 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 pronouncementsand 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 Böll. 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.
Foreign Affairs -
Kenneth Maxwell
The book also extensively covers the author's postwar encounters with leading German writers such as Heinrich Boll, Gunter Grass, and Bertolt Brecht. Here Reich-Ranicki skewers their vanity and vulnerability to criticism. As entertaining as these vignettes are, however, it is his narrative skill and intelligent, intense observations that make this book so deeply fascinating.
Los Angeles Times Book Review -
Jacob Heilbrunn
Reich-Ranicki did not earn fame overnight. He intimates that lingering anti-Semitism may have impeded his rise. But Reich-Ranicki could not be stopped. He made it his business to read everything and meet everyone. His acounts of his meetings with everyone from Elias Canetti to the Mann family form an essential document of postwar European literature. Perhaps it is because with his stupendous knowledge of novels, poetry and plays, Reich-Ranicki represents the last bit of continuity with the great prewar German humanistic traditions that were destroyed in World War II. The master of masterworks has now produced his own.
Choice
Reich-Ranicki's life is a survivor's tale....Narrated in an engaging, matter-of-fact style, void of sensationalism, this book transforms Reich-Ranicki's story into an unforgettable document of modern times.
Library Journal
Reich-Ranicki, one of Germany's foremost contemporary literary critics, or "the pope of German letters," declares in the first chapter of this autobiography that he is "half Polish, half German, and wholly Jewish." Born in Poland in 1920, he moved to Berlin as a boy, where he developed his passion for literature before his family was deported by the Nazis and forced into the Warsaw ghetto. Following the war years and the loss of most of his family, he returned to Germany to a highly successful literary career. Reich-Ranicki's account of life in the Polish ghetto are some of the most vivid and compelling ever written. The main thread of this autobiography, however, is the author's complex relationship to Germany in general and the German language in particular. The issue explored throughout is how a civilized nation of high culture carried out war and the Holocaust and, on a more immediate level, how and why a Jew like Reich-Ranicki was able to reconcile himself to a country that perpetrated such horrors. This book headed the German best-sellers list for more than a year when it came out in 2001. Strongly recommended for all academic libraries, large literary collections, and all other libraries with any interest in the history of the Holocaust. Ali Houissa, Cornell Univ., Ithaca, NY Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information.
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