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Marcel Reich-Ranicki, “the Pope” of German literature, “died [on September 18], at the age of 93, in Frankfurt,” reports Die Welt Kompakt.
Born in 1920 to Jewish family in Wloclawek, Poland, he survived the Holocaust and finally settled in Germany in 1958, where he became one of the country’s most renowned literary critics. Buoyed by his argumentative and plain speaking style, his television show Das Literarische Quartett was hugely successful. For Die Welt —
Marcel Reich-Ranicki was the face of German literature and a great showman [...] The fact that a survivor of the Warsaw Ghetto became the country’s number one literary critic is one of the happiest coincidences of German postwar history.
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