Frankfurt remembers Marcel Reich-Ranicki
Im last conversation, that Marcel Reich-Ranicki conducted with his biographer Uwe Wittstock, this, a former editor in Reich-Ranicki’s literature sheet, read the now over ninety-year-old whether he was afraid of death. The question was wrongly put, the literary critic told his. It’s not about the fear of death, but about the fear of non-existence. And he has. He is also convinced that religion offers no consolation for this. There is no afterlife, death is the final point.
The literary scholar emeritus Thomas Anz, who has worked at the Literaturblatt since 1980, quoted these statements on Thursday evening in his well-attended lecture at the finissage of the Marcel Reich Ranicki exhibition in the German Exile Archive 1933-1945 in Frankfurt, and not without reason. He recalled the last years of the critic’s life, the death of his wife Teofila in April 2011, who was to outlive her widower by two and a half years, and the great loneliness that marked this last period. This was also the time when Reich-Ranicki made his last major public appearance, the speech on Holocaust Remembrance Day before the German Bundestag in Berlin on January 27, 2012. The visual and audio documents that Anz incorporated into his lecture seem like relics from a longstanding one past time in which the Chancellor Angela Merkel, the Bundestag President Norbert Lammert and the Federal President were just called Christian Wulff. Ninety-one-year-old Reich-Ranicki listens to a pianist playing Chopin, then he is led to the lectern, he reads his text uncertainly at times and makes a mistake with the dates – he names 1948 as the year in which he was sent back to Poland from Berlin , while actually 1938 war.
A contemporary witness
But at the same time an irrefutable power emanates from his words and his presentation. He is not standing here as a historian, but as a contemporary witness, so he begins his speech. He tells what he has seen and experienced and embeds it in the history of the Warsaw ghetto. He reports the moment on July 22, 1942, when SS officers announce to the chairman of the “Judenrat”, Adam Czerniaków, the occupier’s order, after which the ghetto is to be cleared of most of its inhabitants, while a few die in certain functions had, were allowed to stay for the time being; of how he himself recorded this order and dictated it to a typist, who would then have said quietly to him, who was allowed to stay because of his work: “You must marry Tosia today.”
Anyone who had read Reich-Ranicki’s autobiography “My Life” at the time knew this speech because it consisted of excerpts from the book. How bitter this necessary work was and IS, how much one must wish that it continues to reach a large audience, is made clear by a listening station of the fabulous exhibition at which Anz gave his lecture. She records a discussion with viewers of the 1978 television series “Holocaust”, which was also shown in Germany in January 1979. Reich-Ranicki was summoned as a contemporary witness, and he clearly denied the assertion that the harassment and deportation of the Jews shouldn’t have been noticed. He lists in detail what happened, what everyone could and had to see. The fact that it was probably necessary to spread these facts 35 years after the end of the war does not reflect well on that time. And it’s shocking that Holocaust Remembrance Day wasn’t introduced until 1996.
Reich-Ranicki’s speech to the Bundestag, which Anz calls an “act of last resort,” speaks of death, of the everyday, extreme threat, but she also speaks of care and love. It is these two poles that Anz points to in his analysis, and a few steps further the exhibition also shows how much Reich-Ranicki’s life was shaped by them. It sheds light on his time in Poland after 1945, his growing influence as a critic, his wide-ranging network, his talent as friend and opponent, and his enormous popularity as a literary mediator on television.
In any case, the literary scholar counters death as the final point, which the critic expects at the end, with commemoration, of which the exhibition is an example. And the fact that the aging contemporary witness still reached his audience is shown by a late honor. Almost a year after Reich-Ranicki spoke before the Bundestag, the Rhetorical Seminar at the University of Tübingen announced at the end of December 2012 that it had voted the performance “Speech of the Year”.