Cultural Amnesia (89 page)

Marcel Reich-Ranicki

Jean-François Revel

Richard Rhodes

Rainer Maria Rilke

Virginio Rognoni

MARCEL REICH-RANICKI

Marcel Reich-Ranicki (b. 1920), by far the most famous critic in Germany between World War II and
the millennium, continues, into the twenty-first century, to exercise, over the German literary scene, a dominance which some writers prefer to regard as a reign of terror. Actually there can
be no real argument about the fairness of his judgements—a fact which, of course, makes his disapproval feel even worse for those found wanting. He writes so well that his opinions are
quoted verbatim. Victims of a put-down are thus faced with the prospect of becoming a national joke. Most of those writers whose later books were savaged by him had their early books praised
by him: those are the writers who become most resentful of all against him. Well equipped to look after himself, he is hard to lay a glove on. Watching magisterial figures such as Günter
Grass vainly trying to get their own back on Reich-Ranicki is one of the entertainments of modern Germany. Even those wounded by him would have to admit, under scopolamine, that he can be
very funny when on the attack. Hence their intense enjoyment of the moment when history caught him out. Deported from Berlin to the Warsaw ghetto in 1938, Reich-Ranicki survived the Holocaust
but stayed on in Communist
Poland after the war, and first pursued literary criticism under East German auspices. When he finally defected to the West he forgot to tell
anyone that he had been a registered informer under the regime he left behind. Almost everybody was, but he made a mistake in letting someone else say it first. The scandal whipped up on this
point did something to offset his impeccable wartime track record as a Jew on the run from the Nazis. But despite the extra animus aroused by what was taken to be his lack of contrition when
discomfited, common sense eventually prevailed and his story as a survivor of Nazi horror returned to the centre of attention, especially after he published, at the turn of the millennium,
his autobiography
Mein Leben
, which became a best-seller. There was an English translation, called
The Author of
Himself:
but understandably it made little impact, his name being so little known outside Germany. Within Germany, he is as well-known as any chancellor, and more likely to last in
office. Few critics in any country have ever so outstripped the poets and novelists in being literature’s living representative, but there is no mystery about the reason. Vastly and yet
vividly learned, his judgement alive in every nuance, he writes with a wonderfully seductive clarity which will be especially appreciated by the beginner in German, who could learn the
language from this one writer, just from the way he writes about other writers. His favourite form, the short essay, makes for an easily digestible bite-sized chunk. Collections of these
short pieces fill a shelf, and there couldn’t be a better way into German literary culture, from the poetry to the politics and vice versa. He writes even better in praise than in
dispraise, but, as usually happens, the dispraise is more fun. Reich-Ranicki, well aware of that fact, has often pointed out that a literary culture deprived of rigorous criticism would soon
die of niceness. He is obviously correct, but that doesn’t stop other writers hoping that he will be nice to them, and from protesting loudly when he isn’t.

We shouldn’t call a critic a murderer just because it is
his duty to sign death certificates.

—MARCEL
REICH-RANICKI,
Die Anwälte der Literatur
, P. 88

A
T THE VERY
END
of the twentieth century, Germany caught a lucky break. The best-seller lists were dominated for an entire year by
Mein Leben
, the autobiography
of Marcel Reich-Ranicki. Germany’s toughest literary critic had written a life story to entrance the nation, but the lucky break didn’t come just from the remarkable fact that a man
of letters with an unchallenged title to a marble plinth was encamped on top of the best-seller list as well. It came also from the fact that he was a Jew. A large part of his story was about the
quirk of chance by which he had survived the Nazi era. It became part of Germany’s story, however, and against all the odds, that the most dreadful century of its history was rounded out by
an act of redemption. New generations were rushing the bookshops to find out about the crimes that the older generations had committed. Anti-Semitism had been officially over since 1945. Now, in
2000, it was culturally over as well. It might still be said to taint the culture, or even to permeate it: but not to dominate it. A Jew was in the driving seat. So that, at last, was the end of
that.

Reich-Ranicki himself was unlikely to burst into tears of joy at these signs of atonement. One of the
factors that made his best-selling triumph so satisfactory to the onlooker was that here was no figure of affection being handed a lifetime achievement award. Throughout his career as a
critic—which, if you count in his first journalism written in Poland and East Germany, covers the entire post-war period—he has been notoriously unbiddable. A characteristic
collection of pieces was published in 1984 as
Laute Verisse
, which pretty well means “Naked Hatchet-Jobs.” In actuality he has a wide range of
literary sympathy and is one of the rare critics in any language who can be as enjoyable in approbation as in the opposite. He has always had a way of recommending a book that sends you flying to
find it: try
not
to read Theodor Fontane’s nineteenth-century classic novel
Effi Briest
after Reich-Ranicki has
got through praising it. But there can be no denying that he is a tough customer, and some of the living writers on whom he has
passed negative judgement have made their
wounded feelings known. There have been pitiable whimpers and loud squeals from the injured, and when MR-R (just as the
Kaiserliche und Königliche
Austro-Hungarian Empire used to be called
k.u.k.
in print because it had to be mentioned so often, Reich-Ranicki is customarily referred to by his monogram)
was caught up with by his pre-Western past, there were plenty of literary onlookers who found it hard not to enjoy his discomfort. The facts said that he had never done much for the Communist
government of East Germany except to go through the motions of informing on people who had no secrets to keep, but for once MR-R was on the back foot, and fellow scribes who had been decked by
him were glad to see it, especially if they lacked his gift of being vitriolic. One of his abiding flaws is to suppose that writers offended in their dignity have the expressive power to answer
him if they wish. Commendably eager to avoid praising himself, he is slow to realize that his easy habit of buttonholing an audience through a newspaper is more than just a trick, it’s a
talent.

But the gift for being vitriolic counts for nothing unless it is contained within the larger gift of being appreciative.
Nobody minds being knocked by the kind of critic who does nothing but knock. What hurts is being knocked by the critic whose praise you would like to have, and every living writer in the
German-speaking countries would like to have MR-R’s endorsement. The same would probably go for the dead, if their opinion could be consulted. MR-R is a critic who has always written as
well as any writer, so even his most bitter enemies are aware from the starting gun that his own literary status is already settled, although he has never claimed such a thing for himself. He has
always held to the principle (which was also favoured by Stefan Zweig) that great artists are disqualified from being objective critics, because they are always thinking of how
they
would have done it. Following Friedrich Schlegel, MR-R said it of the greatest German writer, Goethe. To say of the author of
Faust
that he was too much of a poet to know much about the arts was pretty bold, when you consider how much Goethe knew about everything, but it was characteristic of
MR-R to take on the biggest example and make his argument stick. What he really meant was that Goethe’s critical judgements were all self-serving, and that the fact should be remembered
when you are under
the intoxicating impression that Goethe, to make a single point, is invoking the whole aesthetic world. MR-R has always held that the business of judging a
book is strictly ad hoc: he professes not to like the criticism that sets itself up as “an alternative airfield” and uses the subject as a pretext to stage an airlift of everything
the critic wants to bring in to prove himself powerful. For MR-R to take this line was an act of self-denial, because he himself was very well equipped to play the
uomo universale
. Just because he has an incurable knack of making himself sound arrogant shouldn’t deafen us to the truth of his humility. Advancing the principle
that the great artist can’t criticize with a pure heart, he has been ready to live by the unspoken corollary, that no objective critic can be a great artist. He has been ready to live by
it, but he could never make it stick. He writes too well. No wonder he is feared.

Marcel Reich-Ranicki writes so well that he can point a critical judgement and make poetry of it, so that
you remember the prose aperçu like a balanced line of verse. In his book
Nachprüfung
he calls Joseph Roth a “
Vagabund mit Kavaliersmanieren
” (p. 210). A vagabond with the manners of a cavalier: the perfect way to remember Roth, of whom we can be sure that when he was
drinking himself to death in Paris in the late 1930s, he made no disturbance. Here is something more about Joseph Roth from the same source, and this is even better, because it captures what made
the texture of Roth’s writing so enchanting: “He always made it easy for his readers and often made it hard for his interpreters.” But in the German the antithesis is less
ponderously arranged: “
Er hat es seinen Lesern immer leicht und seinen Interpreten oft schwer gemacht
.” MR-R, as you can see, does the same: his
German is so plainly carpentered that a beginner feels at home in it, and so neatly joined syntactically that it is hard to translate without pulling it to pieces. To round out the subject of
MR-R’s admiration for Roth, it should be said that MR-R also possesses the creative critic’s essential gift of being able to quote from any source but always to the purpose. The man
of letters Karl Heinz Bohrer said that Roth was a moralist out of stylistic purity, and a stylist out of moral sensitivity. Not even MR-R can improve on that, so he quotes it: just what a good
critic should do, but it takes humility to do it—the kind of humility that needs an air of arrogance to protect its Delphic mission.