Marcel Reich-Ranicki Research Articles

After the Transitions

After the Transitions Krzysztof Siwczyk (bio) and Alice-Catherine Carls (bio) Click for larger view View full resolution FRANCIS MESLET, FORGOTTEN LIBRARIES SERIES (2023) / FRANCISMESLET.COM Translator's note: Almost thirty-five years have passed since the democratic awakening of central Europe, yet despite being praised today for its originality, eastern and central European literature is still not fully understood by Western readers. Krzysztof Siwczyk, a major Polish poet and accomplished actor of the post-1989 generation, examines the "disintegration" gunnysack created by a century of totalitarianism in his country. After affirming the death of Polish literature's noble novels of the "heroic past," he affirms the future preeminence of essays. To his reflective text is added a personal confession that combines Gombrowiczian satirical accents with poignancy to tell of innocence, ugliness, and cruelty in a truth-driven stream of consciousness that alone can conjure poetry.–ACC WE CAN CLEARLY SEE today from a cultural perspective that the symbolic year 1989 ushered in a specific kind of prosperity for the literature of this part of the world (see WLT, "After the Wall Fell," Nov. 2014). Interestingly, the traumatological prosperity of Polish literature—the "young" poetry and prose—flourished in Germany, which after the fall of the Berlin Wall and reunification contributed with an open heart and mind to the rapidly rising European careers of such writers as Olga Tokarczuk or Andrzej Stasiuk. A relatively fluent transfer into target languages and the critics' significant interest—including the likes of Marcel Reich-Ranicki—led to judgments about the ways in which a specific kind of central European experience could, through its literature, contribute to enrich the spiritual heritage of the old continent, or at least of its postmodern and wealthy part that, through a happy alignment of political conditions, found itself on the right side of the Iron Curtain. Broadly defined, central European literature turned out to be a kind of "accursed share," to use the title of Georges Bataille's 1949 book, that "European literature"—also broadly defined—internalized as its own, hitherto invisible imago. The historical experience of a war waged by two totalitarian regimes—plowing through Europe while contributing to the collapse of Enlightenment myths—found its reward as the "black sun" of the twentieth century began to shine with full brilliance. Writers, many of whom had suffered an unwanted and forced quarantine in the camp of communist states, began to enter the canon of European literature. [End Page 62] The majority of them has already fallen on the trash heap of literary history for having missed the historical reset that is etched in our minds through photographs of meetings between Ronald Reagan and Mikhail Gorbachev or cross-stitched portraits of John Paul II, who called on the Holy Spirit to renew his homeland during his pilgrimage to Poland. The effectiveness and dynamism of the historical process are measured not by individual human beings but by galaxies of interstate interests or blocs of states sharing the same system like the one that happened in 1989. In fact, 1989 turned out to be a postmodern "Orwellian year" for Poland or, more precisely, its beginning. Literature was very much aware of it because it was not swept up in the fever that accompanied the social strengthening of the Solidarity movement. In my opinion, far fewer than the ten million Solidarność members were real democrats and committed citizens. In a country of forty million people, four out of five people were not mentally ready for change. It is precisely to this mute and politically indifferent majority that the most important texts of Polish-language writers who debuted after 1989 were devoted. In fact, to this day, one can hear disgruntled longings for a great contemporary novel that would explain to us who we really were as a society and what changes we have undergone in the last four decades of Polish freedom—a freedom brutally tamed today by small autocrats like Jarosław Kaczyński, a devotee of the new "Smolensk religion," whose cult launched like a supernova after the plane carrying his brother crashed in 2010. One thing is certain: four decades of democracy have not fundamentally altered our Polish tendency...

O „duchowej ojczyźnie” Marcela Reicha-Ranickiego

The aim of this paper is to present a profile of literary critic Marcel Reich-Ranicki (1920–2013), who lived on the borderland of three cultures: Polish, Jewish, and German. The paper attempts to reconstruct the main phases of Reich-Ranicki’s life in Poland, including an analysis of the critic’s interests and opinions about Polish literature, as well as his concept of a ‘spiritual homeland’. The status of M. Reich is studied in relation to the category of the alien commonly encountered in the discourse of the humanities. Reich’s strangeness is presented in three dimensions: space, culture and mentality. The paper also proves that it was the trauma of the Holocaust that had exerted the major impact on Reich-Ranicki’s personal memories and accounts.

When Translation Reshapes Reception: The Curious Case of Zeruya Shalev in the German Literary Sphere of World Literature

Abstract This article sets out to explore the conditions that paved the way for the unique success of the German translation of Zeruya Shalev’s second novel, Love Life (Hayei ahava, 1997), offering a specific example of the potential benefits that arise from cross-cultural translations. Upon its publication in Israel, Love Life was received quite critically; it was considered too simplistic, straightforward, and feminine to be considered an ‘important’ work. However, following the novel’s translation into German by Mirjam Pressler in 2000, it gained wide recognition in Germany and soon became a best-seller, owing much to Marcel Reich-Ranicki’s unusually warm review on the television program Das literarische Quartett (The Literary Quartet). Hence, this article examines the various cultural and commercial conditions that set the backdrop for Love Life’s success as a translated work. While focusing on the reception of a specific literary text, the article surveys both Israeli and German literary spheres, and draws on the contemporary discourse in the field of World Literature. Furthermore, it offers a comprehensive discussion on translation, and demonstrates the unique position of translated literature, and specifically Hebrew literature, in the German literary field. Subsequently, the discussion sheds light not only on the circumstances that supported, if not determined, Love Life’s enthusiastic reception in Germany, but also on the extraordinary effect of this success on Shalev’s position within the Israeli literary system in the two decades that have followed.

Die große Mischkalkulation: Institutions, Social Import, and Market Forces in the German Literary Field ed. by William Collins Donahue and Martin Kagel

Reviewed by: Die große Mischkalkulation: Institutions, Social Import, and Market Forces in the German Literary Field ed. by William Collins Donahue and Martin Kagel Ari Linden Die große Mischkalkulation: Institutions, Social Import, and Market Forces in the German Literary Field. Edited by William Collins Donahue and Martin Kagel. Paderborn: Brill Fink, 2021. Pp. x + 251 pages. Paper $57.00. ISBN 978-3770565696. In 1913, Kurt Wolff of the newly established Kurt Wolff Verlag offered something of a confession to Karl Kraus, with whom he would soon form a professional relationship: "I for my part consider a publisher to be . . . a kind of seismographer, whose task is to keep an accurate record of earthquakes. I try to take note of what the times bring forth in the way of expression and, if it seems worthwhile in any way, place it before the public" (Alexander Wolff, "How Kurt Wolff Transformed Pantheon into a 20th-Century Publishing Powerhouse"). While it may be rarer today to encounter this kind of sentiment among the gatekeepers of German literature, Wolff's statement nonetheless points to the fundamental role that the publisher—and the literature enterprise as a whole—plays in placing literature "before the public." In the terser and less self-aggrandizing words of one of the contributors to this illuminating new volume: "Ohne Betrieb keine Literatur" (130). And yet essential as the Literaturbetrieb is to literature (its institutions and agencies, not just the "business" thereof), many of us critics ignore this dimension in our scholarship and do so at our own peril. Die große Mischkalkulation, an edited volume containing contributions by academics, authors, translators, filmmakers, dramaturges, and librarians, largely aims to correct this oversight by providing numerous perspectives on the current state of the "German literary field." In so doing, it contributes significantly to our understanding of what this field entails in its entirety, attending, as the editors write, to the "material conditions that underlie the production, dissemination, and consumption of literature" (3). In Part 1, Geoffrey Baker convincingly argues for the necessity of a central, physical space (Berlin) despite our increasingly virtual world, while Marike Janzen carefully articulates how the "Mischkalkulation"—a central motif of the volume, as indicated by its title—of small publishers involves the process of weighing short-term financial loss against potential long-term gain in the form of prestige, and how such a calculus [End Page 401] is to be situated within Germany's longer history of Bildung. Heidi Madden makes a case for onsite research stays at libraries and archives in Germany, which, along with book fairs, provide invaluable resources for accessing both older and contemporary German-language literature. Claire A. Ross, Sarah Traylor, Necia Chronister, and Ulrike Wiethaus champion the yet untapped potential for literary studies to play a more active role in the Literaturbetrieb, given that academics are often the ones reviewing, assigning, and promoting the work of authors. Finally, David Gramling's interview with the "Black Dominican queer femme feminist" (8) author and activist SchwarzRund provides unique insights into multilingualism in German publishing, minorities in German academia, and intersectionality in the German literary and publishing world. Part 2 addresses the fate of the book, the enterprise of literature in the digital age, and the challenging process of filming literature. While Matthias Pabsch argues that the physical book has in no way become a thing of the past, Steffen Richter highlights many of the complexities that have arisen in virtue of digitalization, including the way literary criticism has been "decentralized" (124). Volker Schlöndorff's recollection of his first encounter with German literature—namely, Günter Grass—has implications that extend beyond his autobiography. Part 3 addresses the evolving relationship between literature and literary criticism over the last few decades. Victoria Bläser and Rolf Parr discuss televised literary criticism as a kind of middle-ground between pure entertainment and the academic reception of literature; Julian Preece suggests that the longstanding rivalry between Günter Grass and Marcel Reich-Ranicki was both singular as well as revealing in terms of the general insight it offers into the ambivalent relationship between author and critic; and Thomas Scholz's interview with then literature editor of...

Modelling of communicants' strategic plans in personal German-language interview

This article describes and tests the author's methodology for analyzing the specifics of interaction and the implementation of communicants' strategic plans in personal German-language interview. The author's understanding of the personal interview as a communicative event, in which the interaction of communicative processes of varying degrees of complexity and structure is implemented, implies a detailed study of the conditions and nature of each of them. In order to study communicative activity and features of interaction in the personal German-speaking interview, which has such characteristics as goal-setting and spontaneity, ritualization and self-organization, the presence of subject-logical and psycho-social plans of interaction development, the author undertakes to develop a comprehensive method of analysis. The material for the study in this article was an interview with the renowned German literary critic Marcel Reich-Ranicki Hasste Marcel Reich-Ranicki wirklich die Frauen?. The linguistic material was examined in detail using a transcript of the video interview created with the FOLKER / Exmaralda programme (Institut fr Deutsche Sprache) in accordance with the GAT2 transcription system. The complex method of analysis described in this article is based on the theoretical postulates and practical methods of the current trends in modern linguistics and communication research. It enables the study of the peculiarities of communicative interaction and the analysis of verbal realization of communicants' strategic programs. As a result of the application of the described complex method of analysis the author identified structural and discursive units of analysis and made a conclusion that the core of the interviewer's strategic program forms the strategy of information request with the dominance of tactics of argumentation and establishing and maintaining intersubjective relations. The interviewee's strategic program is constituted by the strategy of self-presentation, the core of which in this interview are the tactics of enhancing one's own image and the tactics of informing.

Stephanie BAUMANN: Peter Rühmkorf, Marcel Reich-Ranicki, a polemic: literary critique, media and public opinion after reunification in Germany

Le texte intitule Ich habe Lust, im weiten Feld de Peter Ruhmkorf est au centre de cette con-tribution. Cet ecrit se presente comme une reaction a la fameuse critique illustree par la photo de la « une » du Spiegel devenue egalement celebre, montrant Marcel Reich-Ranicki en train de dechirer le roman post-reunification de Gunter Grass, Ein weites Feld (1995, Toute une histoire). Elle se deroule sur fond de debats identitaires, politiques et sociaux mis en branle a la fin des annees 1980 avec la « querelle des historiens allemands ». La polemique sur le lien entre critique litteraire et interpretation politique traitee dans l’article s’avere exemplaire du fait que l’enjeu ne se limite pas ici a mettre en evidence les lignes de fracture de l’opinion publique politico-mediatique dans les annees qui suivent la chute du Mur. Elle renvoie aussi au role essentiel joue par Marcel Reich-Ranicki dans la fabrication d’un espace de ce genre.

Dominique DIAS: Emotion and evaluation: the case of emotional adjectives in the reviews of Marcel Reich-Ranicki

Cette contribution propose de revenir sur l’affirmation selon laquelle la critique littéraire de Marcel Reich-Ranicki serait émotionnelle. Partant de l’étude des adjectifs affectifs, l’objectif est de montrer le rapport qui existe entre émotion et évaluation. L’approche se veut, dans un premier temps, lexicale afin de mieux comprendre ce que le sémantisme des adjectifs affectifs implique en termes d’évaluation. Puis nous proposons une analyse à l’échelle textuelle à partir du cas de l’expression de la surprise pour observer la façon dont les adjectifs affectifs peuvent structurer leur environnement textuel. Le corpus d’étude est constitué des textes rassemblés dans Lauter Verrisse (1970) et Lauter Lobreden (1985).

Redaktor wydawniczy jako tłumacz

Publishing Editor as Translator: On Translating the work of Cees Nooteboom in the Suhrkamp VerlagCees Nooteboom has been the face of Dutch literature in Germany. His photo, which features on the cover of Niederländische Literaturgeschichte [History of Dutch literature, 2006], a volume edited by Ralf Grüttemeier and Maria-Theresia Leuker, is a telling illustration of this. Usually, his successful market position is related to a eulogy to the book Die folgende Geschichte, delivered by the pope of German literary criticism, Marcel Reich-Ranicki in October 1991 in a TV programme „Das Literarische Quartett”. This paper tells the prehistory of Nooteboom’s success in Germany based on unpublished data drawn from the Siegfried Unseld Archive (Deutsches Literaturarchiv Marbach). The main focus of the discussion is placed on the cooperation between Nooteboom and the publishing editor, Elisabeth Borchers, who exerted a significant influence on the form of his initial publications by Suhrkamp Verlag.

Wir Unsichtbaren. Geschichte der Polen in Deutschland by Peter Oliver Loew

Reviewed by: Wir Unsichtbaren. Geschichte der Polen in Deutschland by Peter Oliver Loew Jie-Hyun Lim Wir Unsichtbaren. Geschichte der Polen in Deutschland. By Peter Oliver Loew. Munich: C.H. Beck, 2014. Pp. 336. Paper €18.95. ISBN 978-3406667084. In a recent review essay, Michał Nowosielski pointed out that no monograph has been written so far on the history of the Polish minority in Germany (“Polacy w Niemczech. Stan i Perspektywy Badań,” Przegla˛d Zachodni 3 [2012]: 26). The existing scholarship in his estimation is fragmented, descriptive, narrowly focused, gender blind, or framed by the national history. Nowosielski called for a comprehensive history of the Polish minority in Germany from a transnational perspective (26–27). Peter Oliver Loew’s book is just that. For Loew, however, the reason why scholars have yet to write such a monograph derives from the difficulties with its terms: Germany, Poland, and minority (11). All three components of this topic resist easy or agreeable definition. Loew’s pioneering work intends to make the “invisible” visible. Poles in Germany have been marginalized, silenced, erased, and deprived of agency. As subalterns, they have spoken discreetly, but were hardly heard. Or worse, their voices were hijacked for the purposes of national histories: for instance, when historians try to determine [End Page 208] whether they were really “Polish Prussians” or “Prussian Poles.” Such an interrogation simplifies and singularizes their fluid, multiple, and often interchangeable identities in an ahistorical effort to fix them. Even today, “Poles in Poznań and Pomorze are jokingly called ‘Prussian Poles’ for their Prussian virtues” (122–123). Such self-identification defies national categorization. Indeed, people in borderlands often adhere to these fluctuating, multiple, elusive, and joking identities. Keenly conscious of these methodological dilemmas, Loew sees identity both as a “pragmatic concept” and a “working concept.” Pragmatically Loew frames historical Germany encompassing both German territorial states and German-speaking states where Poles lived. The large part of East Prussia, Silesia, Pomorze, the Habsburg monarchy, and so on, were parts of Germany in this sense. As a working concept, he defines Poles in terms of both a subjective and an objective nation (12). In this way, Loew can count Marcel Reich-Ranicki—the Polish Jewish German “literary pope” (Literaturpapst)—as a Pole. Though Reich-Ranicki did not regard himself even as half Polish, he maintained a strong bond to Polish language and poetry (206). Yet this approach leaves open the question of where to place the “Polonized Germans” who had belonged to “group 4” in the Deutsche Volksliste (171), the Nazi institution that classified the peoples of Occupied Europe according to racial desirability. In Loew’s schema, they seem to be subjective Poles but objective Germans—which would make them ultimately Germans. Loew ends up defining Poles, minorities, and Germany either too broadly or too narrowly because he still tends to reify identity. To be sure, he sees identity flexibly as multiple, fluid, and fragmented; but he often uses a mix of constructivist language and essentialist argumentation. The term itself seems responsible for that reification. Referring to identity still allows readers to imagine that it exists independent of the actions that create it and the norms that legitimize it. An alternative might be to use the concept of identification as it draws attention to the agency of historical actors in dialectical interplay with power institutions and thus the tension between relational and categorical modes of identification. Nonetheless, Loew’s panoramic description of the Polish minority in Germany is colorful, dynamic, wide-ranging, and transnational. His illustrations, postcards, and photos are fabulous. In the place of the stereotyped clichés of Poles as migrant workers, forced laborers, and seasonal workers, he explores the broad spectrum of their diverse historical traces. They include itinerant merchants at the Messe, the intelligentsia in exile, revolutionaries in the socialist movement, students at universities, artists in performance, inmates in concentration camps, prisoners of war in German POW camps, volunteers and conscripts in the German army during the two world wars, war expellees, postwar settlers, displaced persons, commuters, peddlers, marriage emigrants, and athletic stars, among others. That much diversity “makes it impossible to speak sweepingly of ‘Poles in Germany’” (278–279). The virtue of...

Brecht'sGuter Menschin Sichuan: Recontextualizing China

IntroductionBertolt Brecht's fascination with China and the Far East is evident from the Chinese scrolls and Japanese Noh masks that hung from his walls; the plots of plays and novels including Die Massnahme, Der kaukasische Kreidekreis, and Me-ti, Das BuchderWendungen;his freely translated Chinesepoems; and histheoreticalessays onepic theater,particularly, inderchinesischenSchauspielkunst.However, it is oftendifficult to see beyond the surface manifestations of such interests. Brecht, who took notes on Chinese philosophy and wrote approvingly aboutChinesepoetry,nevertriedto justifyor explain his own relationshipto China or (Hayot 54). Nor does there exist a metadiscourse on China with which to begin to think about not only Brecht's to China, but his own understanding of that relation (Hayot 55). Critics such as Marcel Reich-Ranicki, Martin Esslin, and John Fuegi have been cited for dismissing Brecht's fascination with China as either superficial or as a form of exoticism.1 Conversely, critics such as Renata Berg-Pan and Yuan Tan have attempted to establish the importance of Chinese poetry and philosophy to Brecht's worldview by examining specific examples of overlap between them. Although oppositional in nature, these critical perspectives nevertheless elucidate Brecht's relationship to China in a similar manner: both camps assign fixed positions to China and Chinese culture in to Brecht's personal and professional work.In contrast, I propose in this article that Brecht's engagement with China is far more variable, and that Brecht's worldview; his construct of China; and its referent, the historical, geopolitical entity of China, are not only closely linked, but also in constant flux. The depiction of China in texts such as Der gute Mensch von Sezuan suggests that Brecht's relationship to China is more nuanced and complex than has often been perceived. Brecht's utilization of Chinese markers and motifs in Dergute Menschandotherworksspeakstotheimportanceofforeigninfluence inthedevelopment and formation of new cultural, political, and historical perspectives. Focusing on the dynamics of cultural exchange, I situate Brecht and German literature in a broader globalcontext,andapproach hisoeuvre from multiple angles to examine cross-cultural mixtures across national discourses that were once considered separate and discrete.The Development of Der gute Mensch von SezuanAn oft-cited example of Chinese influence upon Brecht's thinking and worldview is Brecht's essay on Verfremdungseffekte from 1936.2 In this theoretical work, Brecht discusses how Chinese acting methods produce the Verfremdungseffekt, or alienation effect. According to Brecht, the alienation effect forces the audience to consciously accept or reject the actors' actions and utterances. In other words, the alienation effect deliberately distances the audience from both the actor and the performance. In his essay, Brecht suggests how the alienation effects of Chinese opera might be used to develop theater reform in modern-day Europe, and more specifically, ein realistisches und revolutionares Theater; that is, Brecht's concept of epic theater (22.1: 206).Although Chinese opera provides the basis for Brecht's essay, Brecht's attitude towards Chinese opera throughout the course of the text is alternately laudatory and dismissive.3 While he praises Chinese theater practices such as the lack of a fourth wall, the actors' method of self-observation, and their ritualistic and highly stylized movements, Brecht also downplays the distinct Chineseness of these methods by noting that such alienation effects were also found auf primitiver Stufe schon bei theatralischen und bildnerischen Veranstaltungen der alten Volksjahrmarkte (22.1: 200). Brecht goes on to equate Chinese theater with mysticism and primitivism, and views Chinese theater as incapable of containing or expressing worthwhile social, political, or ideological motives. …

Günter Grass et Toute une histoire Mise en image et écriture du tournant de 1989 en Allemagne

Grass cannot have been aware of the storm that was about to break around him when the first pages of his new novel appeared in Der Spiegel and Marcel Reich-Ranicki broke his roman Ein weites Feld into pieces. The following article deals with Grass’ novel, perhaps a Wende-Roman, through the analysis of its style, illustrated by caricature, film and symbolic images. This technique lends more weight to the characteristics retained and may explain with this mosaic of combinations why it was so difficult for such a novel to find acceptance, please the readers and escape severe judgments.

Marcel Reich-Ranicki. La littérature, une vie. Judéité/germanisme

Although Marcel Reich-Ranicki is relatively unknown in France, he is a famous figure in German culture. Born in 1920 to a Jewish Polish father and a Jewish German mother, Reich-Ranicki spent his childhood in Poland before finishing his studies in Berlin. It is there that he discovered his lifelong passion for German literature, a passion that saved his life by giving him hope.Reich-Ranicki was sent back to Poland due to increasingly strict racial laws but later managed to escape the Warsaw Ghetto. In 1958, he decided to return to the very country where Nazism was born, the country that was responsible for the murder of his loved ones. How did this man, who went on to become the most famous literary critic in Germany, reconcile his fear of Germans and his admiration for German culture? Reich-Ranicki spent his life reading and defending German literature up until his death in September 2013.

Para entender Marcel Reich-Ranicki

The article presents the literary critic Marcel Reich-Ranicki and tries to explain his extraordinary success in Germany. It highlights some qualities of his criticism as well as his special relation to mass media and entertainment. Finally, by going into details of his biography, the text surveys the relation of the Polish-born Jewish critic with Germany and German culture.

“Leitkultur” and Canons: Two Aspects of Contemporary Public Debate

ABSTRACT What they are and more importantly in recent history, who and what they should become, has been a central question for Germans. In recent years the complex of cultural identity, social policy, and migration has significantly been shaped by Bassam Tibi's concept of "Leitkultur," the civic-democratic underpinnings of a tolerant society. Juxtaposed with the question of a literary canon, its size, content, in fact, its very possibility and desirability, "Leitkultur" has informed, often controversially, public discourse. This article explores the cultural-literary intersection between the two terms and navigates it via four recent works: Marcel Reich-Ranicki's Der Kanon; Johannes Thiele's Das Buch der Deutschen-, Dietrich Schwanitz's Bildung-, and Thilo Sarrazin's Deutschland schafft sich ab. - The result? While a canon must be premised on "Leitkultur" -a "Leitkultur" without literature would be a sorely impoverished human cultural space.

Refractions of the Third Reich in German and Austrian Fiction and Film by Chloe Paver

904 Reviews Von Lindeiner rightlyacknowledges that the range ofKlaus's interestswas broad and his concerns were surprisingly altruistic inone suspected of elitism. He tirelessly advocated co-operation between exiles of very different persuasions and was quick to acknowledge the need forgreater understanding between emigres and their host countries. In all this, the titlechosen forhiswartime journal, Sammlung, issignificant, implying both meditation and mediation, along with a rallying of resources. Yet the resulting product isultimately foundwanting: the journal remained 'wenig aktuell, wenig eindeutig, [... .]wenig tagespolitisch' (p. S7), itseditor providing 'kaummehr als DenkanstoBe' (p. 62), which turnout tobe 'zwangsweise vage' (p. 74). This book began life as a doctoral project, and it is perhaps unfair to expect the author to have progressed much beyond Marcel Reich-Ranicki's categoric assess ment: 'In keinem einzigen seinerWerke vermochte [Klaus Mann] die Diskrepanz zwischen seinen literarischen Moglichkeiten und seinen Absichten zu beseitigen' (ThomasMann und die Seinen (Frankfurt a. M.: Fischer, Iggo), p. I93). She has pro vided a solid investigation of individual texts but has not achieved a re-evaluation of the enigmatic figurebehind thework. Heavily reliant on secondary literature, as evidenced by 974 footnotes, this book bears thehallmarks of a competently executed D.Phil. thesis rather than those of a ground-breaking monograph. UNIVERSITY OF KENT OSMAN DURRANI Refractions of theThird Reich inGerman and Austrian Fiction and Film. By CHLOE PAVER. (Oxford Studies in Modern European Culture) Oxford: Oxford Univer sityPress. 2007. viii+ I74 PP. ?40. ISBN 978-O-I9-9266I i-i. What is itwe thinkwe are doing when we study representations of theThird Reich? This basic question provides the starting-point forChloe Paver's analysis of thepro ject of 'Vergangenheitsbewiltigung'. Rather than constructing yet another survey of post-war literature, Paver problematizes thewhole process of commemoration and mourning, seeking to deconstruct the standard critical approaches to the field. She contends in her introduction that 'there is a need for a study that keeps thewhole critical enterprise at arm's length' (p. 9); as she sees it, critical discourse is often locked into a hermeneutic circle,merely affirming the liberal consensus of post-war literature rather than questioning itsassumptions. Accordingly, she attempts to sug gest 'ways inwhich, faced with a self-evidently enlightening work about theNazi past, one might do more than simply reconstruct its moral meanings' (p. 28). The approaches Paver takes to her chosen texts, films, and memorial sites-she makes a particular issue of her interdisciplinarity, as a corrective to the academic ob session with high-brow 'literature'-follow a fairlyclear pattern: the critical consen sus is summarized, thenquestioned and subverted. The firstchapter,which analyses Michael Verhoeven's filmDas schreckliche Mddchen, sets the template. This satire of a small German town's attempts to suppress itsNazi past, based on the real-life story of the schoolgirl Anna Rosmus and her controversial research into her hometown's history, readily invitesmoral approval of itsmessage of resistance. Yet 'one needs to be at least a little suspicious of the psychological rewards' that thisprocess of identi fication offers,argues Paver (p. 21); accordingly she interpretsVerhoeven's film as a satire not only on small-town repression but also on the 'thirst forsensational stories about people who insiston telling the truthabout theThird Reich' (p. 25), and of the consumerist attitude towards a 'correct'way of viewing theNazi past. By question ing the far from transparent processes with which liberalmoralities are constructed, Paver seeks tobreak out of the circularity of 'affirmativereadings' (p. 28). The subsequent chapters follow largely the same pattern. Peter Schneider's Vati and Bernhard Schlink's Der Vorleser are deconstructed in terms of their (according MLR, I03.3, 2oo8 905 to Paver) only partially successful narrative structures, in terms of what they 'do' rather thanwhat they 'say': Schlink inparticular iscriticized forhis undifferentiated presentation of social class, forhis assumption thathis 'generation' all share his edu catedmiddle-class perspective on theNazi past. The thirdchapter, on theother hand, which examines one work of 'documentary literature' (Helga Schubert's Judasfrauen) and two documentary films (Helke Sander's BeFreier und BeFreite and Ruth Beck ermann's Jenseits des Krieges), explores theways inwhich gender shapes post-war memory of theThird Reich. Paver contends that these female film-makers are essen...

Sammlung zur heiligsten Aufgabe: Politische Künstler und Intellektuelle in Klaus Manns Exilwerk by Karina von Lindeiner

MLR, I03.3, 2oo8 903 inCanetti's works. Preece also observes areas of contention in the fields of politics, gender, or world literature.He generally remains a very factual reader; judgements about style, literaryquality, or aesthetic innovations are extremely rare. Overall, this book provides at least three important insights: itclarifies the com plexity of a very intricatepersonal relationship and productive literarycollaboration as well as rivalry; itdiscusses extensively and in an exemplary manner the difficult position of a Jewish, socialist woman writer during the I930S and the London ex ile; and itpresents the hitherto widest-ranging thematic analysis ofVeza's literary production with a strong emphasis on biographical, historical, and factual evidence. None of the quotations or titles remains inGerman; Preece forces us to return to the archive inZurich ifwe want to follow up the unpublished material he used. One of his central points, thatCanetti's 'depiction ofTherese Krumbholz [inDie Blendung] was his original crime against Veza' and 'her revengewas to startwriting' (p. I27), is a challenging invitation for furtherdiscussion. UNIVERSITY OF BRISTOL ALEXANDERKOSENINA Sammlungzur heiligstenAufgabe: PolitischeKiinstler undIntellektuelle in Klaus Manns Exilwerk. By KARINA VON LINDEINER. Wiirzburg: K6nigshausen & Neumann. 2006. 228 pp. ?29. ISBN 978-3-8260-3448-c. This latest addition to the growing corpus ofmonographs on themost literary of Thomas Mann's children does not immediately set out to catch the eye. The title as abbreviated on the spine, 'Sammlung zur heiligsten Aufgabe', would not look out of place in theTheology section, while the cover illustration eschews theobvious in favour of an unidentified Central European edifice reflected in an inverted puddle. This is all themore astonishing when one considers that themuch-photographed Klaus Mann was one of a small number of individuals, including Kafka and Picasso, who had the unsettling ability of staring unflinchingly into the camera as if to bare their innermost soul. As theargument unfolds, thepicture remains insoft focus in spite of the assiduous ness with which Karina von Lindeiner conducts her research.The underlying subtext is familiar: thatKlaus had no specific ideology, thathe abhorred the political Right and came to reject theLeft, retreating into an elitist aestheticism thatwas fundamen tallyout of alignment with the realities ofpost-war Europe. The vaguely sketched-out ideals towhich Mann Junior committed himself may even, the author argues, have been a response to the deliberately mushy concepts evoked by theNazis: 'Aufderen (teilweise absichtlich) schwammig gehaltene Begriffe antwortete ermit nichtminder weitgefassten moralischen Uberbegriffen (auBer der "Vernunft" zum Beispiel "Bil dung", "Fortschritt", "Kultur", "Toleranz", "Wahrheit" und "Zivilisation")' (p. 39). This essentially defeatist introduction to the subject ('Manns sozialistischer Hu manismus entzieht sich der apodiktischen Definition', p. 46) precedes a refreshingly livelyand informativediscussion ofher subject's journalism and novels. In the second half of this study, theauthor comes intoher own as a competent guide to threenovels, Flucht indenNorden, Mephisto, and Der Vulkan. Here she identifies real and potential rolemodels among the marginalized characters of Johanna,Otto Ulrichs, and Kikjou. Yet theoverall historical perspective remains somewhat fuzzy,aswhen Aldous Hux ley,for example, is identified as one of several 'communist' influences (p. 55). It is hard to accept thatKlaus's views on the propagandist role of literature should be likened to those of theNazis ('Es istnicht zu iubersehen, dass sein Kunstverstandnis [... .]auch formaleAhnlichkeiten mit dem nationalsozialistischen hatte') and thathe should stand accused of using his literary colleagues inmuch the same way as the Hitler state exploited Gottfried Benn and Gerhart Hauptmann (p. 87). 904 Reviews Von Lindeiner rightlyacknowledges that the range ofKlaus's interestswas broad and his concerns were surprisingly altruistic inone suspected of elitism. He tirelessly advocated co-operation between exiles of very different persuasions and was quick to acknowledge the need forgreater understanding between emigres and their host countries. In all this, the titlechosen forhiswartime journal, Sammlung, issignificant, implying both meditation and mediation, along with a rallying of resources. Yet the resulting product isultimately foundwanting: the journal remained 'wenig aktuell, wenig eindeutig, [... .]wenig tagespolitisch' (p. S7), itseditor providing 'kaummehr als DenkanstoBe' (p. 62), which turnout tobe 'zwangsweise vage' (p. 74). This book began life as a doctoral project, and it is perhaps unfair to expect the author to have progressed much beyond Marcel Reich-Ranicki's categoric assess ment: 'In keinem einzigen seinerWerke...

'Wende' und 'Einheit' im Spiegel der deutschsprachigen Literatur: Ein Handbuch by Frank Thomas Grub (review)

57? Reviews work, which occupies a space that combines fiction, non-fiction, and police report. She notes that this specific consideration highlights how 'the sheer magnitude of Stasi material, the intensity with which the Stasi planned and carried out its activities, the very real goals ofZersetzung and kaputmachen [...] constitute a reality that many West German readers finddifficultto comprehend, but one that East Germans experienced as an everyday reality' (p. 224). In this regard her essay makes an interesting study of the impact of surveillance material on life and literature in the GDR. One contribution that stands out is Paul Cooke's essay on Wolfgang Hilbig's Ich. Cooke raises questions about the limits on resisting the world-view offered by the state, and about the extent to which the 'unofficial informants' might also be de? scribed as victims. He draws out the relationship of this issue to Foucault's ideas, and presents a provocation that could have been productively pursued at other points in the book. The GDR, as it is depicted here, seems to have been something ofa laboratoryforexperimenting with policing its subjects. It was farless veiled in its application of power than the West and for this reason its mechanisms run parallel to those de? scribed not only by Foucault, but also by Althusser and Zizek. Some of the essays would have benefited by more directly pursuing these social and historical concerns. Undeniably, some readers will find that the volume's essays stay too close to indi? vidual texts rather than returning to the broader issues outlined in the introduction. However, the book contains many well-considered and thoughtful readings, and its close textual analyses will well serve those who would want to use the book to struc? ture courses on the GDR, or to reflecton the question of what it means for literature to be written beneath the watchful eye of a police state. University of Missouri, Columbia Brad Prager 'Wende'und 'Einheit'im Spiegel der deutschsprachigenLiteratur: Ein Handbuch. Vol. i: Untersuchungen; vol. ii: Bibliographie. By Frank Thomas Grub. Berlin and New York: de Gruyter. 2003. Vol. 1: x + 689 pp.; vol. 11:x + 349 pp. ?148; $178 (the set). ISBN 3-11-017775-7. Literary production in the years immediately following the 'Wende' was accompanied by complaints from literary critics such as Marcel Reich-Ranicki that few ofthe works being published sought to address the events of 1989 and 1990, or the implica? tions of these events fora reassessment of German and not least East German history. Gunter Grass's novel Ein weites Feld (1995) seemed to provide an answer to calls for a 'Wenderoman', and Rolf Hochhuth's Wessis in Weimar (1993) could certainly claim to be a significant 'Wendedrama'. But these works did not satisfy the critics; their aesthetic quality was disputed, and, perhaps more importantly,they had been written by West Germans sympathetic to East Germany, whereas the expectations of many West German literary critics had been that East Germans would write literary works critical ofthe GDR. What constitutes a 'Wenderoman' is, then, a matter of perspec? tive; this, surely, is the underlying satirical point of Jens Sparschuh's novel Eins zu Eins (2003), which sets the history of the 'Wenden' in relation to the 'Wende' and its aftermath. Any chosen perspective is of course itself informed by a set of political, historiographical, and ethical expectations that often have little to do with aesthetics. Some ofthe participants in the 'Literaturstreit' of 1990-92 sought to sever what was perceived as the Gordian knot connecting German literature with didactic, politicizing agendas. Politics, the argument ran, was bad for aesthetics. That Gunter Grass's Ein weites Feld and Hochhuth's Wessisin Weimar were pilloried by many literary cri? tics is evidence that the real goal ofthe 'Literaturstreit' had been to replace left-wing agendas with right-wing ones. The hoped-for totalitarianist deconstructions of the MLRy 100.2, 2005 571 GDR in literary form were clearly not regarded as bad for aesthetics?one reason, no doubt, for the overestimation in some sections of the German press of Monika Maron's 'family history' Pawels Briefe (1999), which spans the Third Reich and the German Democratic Republic...

Writing from Disaster: Two Autobiographies

Writing from Disaster:Two Autobiographies Françoise Meltzer (bio) Victor H. Brombert . Trains of Thought: Memories of a Stateless Youth. New York: Norton, 2002. Pp. 334. Marcel Reich-Ranicki . The Author of Himself: The Life of Marcel Reich Ranicki. Translated from the German by Ewald Osers. Mein Leben. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2001. Pp. viii + 407. Life, Nietzsche noted in The Use and Abuse of History, "is absolutely impossible without forgetting." An apparently contrary declaration appears at the entrance to Yad Vashem, the Holocaust museum in Jerusalem: "Memory is Redemption." And yet, one can argue that both are true with respect to memories of horror. The right to amnesia is undeniable, if only for the sake of preserving some sense of humanity and sanity for the victim. At the same time, the right to testify—to record so that history is not rewritten, often in the hope that the same horrors are not repeated—is equally forceful. "Who will witness for the witness?" asked the poet Paul Celan. The Holocaust holds no monopoly on human horror. But when Jesse Jackson, for example, says he is "tired of hearing about the Holocaust" (a comment for which he later apologized), and when there are still "historians" arguing that it never occurred or was greatly exaggerated, and when in the general populace there are some who view the catastrophe with scandalous and ignorant skepticism (Mel Gibson's father comes to mind), it is clear that, in the words of Lawrence Langer, "every future generation will have to be educated anew in how to face the historical period we call the Holocaust."1 In this sense, the Holocaust is not to be relegated to that which must be told to future generations of Jews only, as if an addendum [End Page 107] of horror to the Passover story. I take Langer's "every future generation" to mean just that. Geoffrey Hartman notes that the Holocaust may be an event "that has ruptured our sense of what human nature is."2 It is hardly surprising that some survivors choose to repress their experience, finding life without such forgetting impossible. And there are those, as we know, who, through the retelling of their experience, attempt a kind of healing, or unburdening, or registering of the events as they lived them. But, as Hartman also points out, "it is getting late." Perhaps because it is getting "late" for the survivors, a large spate of Jewish memoirs from the Second World War, including the two under review here, have recently appeared. But I want to be careful here: several years ago I argued in one of my books that Paul Celan, though he had taken his life some twenty years after the end of the war, was nonetheless (for complicated reasons I won't go into here) a Holocaust victim. I was taken to task by a scholar of the Holocaust who wrote to me that Holocaust victims could only be defined as those who actually died in the camps. Accordingly, then, the two autobiographical memoirs that I will consider here are not strictly speaking written by Holocaust survivors. The first, Trains of Thought: Memories of a Stateless Youth, is by the famous scholar of French literature Victor Brombert. His is the story of a Jewish refugee from occupied Nazi Paris. The second, by the German literary critic Marcel Reich-Ranicki, is his account of the Warsaw Ghetto, which he managed quite incredibly to survive. Given the conditions in the Warsaw Ghetto, it seems to me to be permissible to call those few who escaped with their lives Holocaust survivors. Indeed, the cover of the Reich-Ranicki memoir cites the Times Literary Supplement's opinion of the book: ". . . an unforgettable piece of Holocaust literature." I bring up this problem of definition, not in order to quibble over lexical details, a tactic which would be at best inappropriate in this context. I bring it up as a mode of respect for those who did, in fact, survive the camps, so that their stories will be in no way belittled, cheapened, or otherwise lessened through neutralizing or dehistoricizing analogies. There can be no analogies for the Nazi death...

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

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

The Culture of Culture: Toward a German Variant of Performative Democracy

Marcel Reich-Ranicki, the German literary critic, recalls in hisrecent memoirs that at age ten, when he set out from his small townin Poland, his teacher said with tears in her eyes, “Mein Sohn, Dufährst in das Land der Kultur.” Elias Canetti recalled in the first volumeof his memoir—The Tongue Set Free—how when he was age eight,his mother, recently widowed, found fulfillment at the Burgtheaterand left Manchester to take up residence in Vienna. Was it just themagic of the German language that transported these Jews and madeliterary overachievers of their children? A vision of metropolitan cultureand assimilation? Culture was “the way ‘in,’” as Louis Spitzerputs it in his book on marginality, Lives in Between.