Marcel reich ranicki biography of albert king

Marcel Reich-Ranicki is remarkable for both his unlikely life story and his brilliant career as the "pope of German letters. 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 , he moved to Berlin as a boy.

Reich-Ranicki's life took him from middle-class childhood to wartime misery to the heights of intellectual celebrity.

There he discovered his passion for literature and began a complex affair with German culture. In , 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.

Günter Grass (–) and Marcel Reich-Ranicki (–) first met in May in Warsaw.

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 , 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 writer's career. 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. Hoffman und Campe.

Deutscher Taschenbuch Verlag.