June 2002 - Nr. 6
New Martin Walser Novel Sparks Literary Debate
TWIG - Acclaimed German novelist Martin Walser’s latest work, Death of a Critic, won’t be published until summer, but it is already the talk of the German literary world. Frank Schirrmacher, publisher of the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung (FAZ), announced this week that the novel would not be serialized in the pages of his influential newspaper ahead of its official publication. In an open letter to Walser, Schirrmacher accused the novelist of using a "full repertoire of anti-Semitic clichés." His novel is, in Schirrmacher’s words, a "document of hate" and would "toy with the fiction of finishing off what the Nazis did not accomplish."
Death of a Critic tells the story of Jewish literary critic and celebrity André Ehrl-Koenig’s supposed murder. An offended writer is suspected as the culprit. In the end, the case is solved when it is discovered that the critic is not really dead, but was merely engaged in a ploy to spend time with his lover. To Schirrmacher, Walser’s book is a thinly fictionalized account of the novelist’s long-running feud with the prominent German literary critic Marcel Reich-Ranicki, who appears in the novel barely disguised as Ehrl-Koenig. "Your novel is an assassination," Schirrmacher wrote, "in which you settle the score with Reich-Ranicki…Your book is nothing but a murder fantasy… This is about the murder of a Jew."
It’s not only the topic but also the people involved that have attracted so much attention to these contretemps. Martin Walser had already been accused of making anti-Semitic remarks in a speech he gave after winning the Peace Prize of the German Book Trade in 1998. The man who presented the award was none other than Frank Schirrmacher. Reich-Ranicki was the editor-in-chief of the FAZ’s literature bureau for 15 years and still works as a critic for the newspaper.
To Walser, the FAZ’s rebuke seems thoroughly overdone. "A novel should be allowed to be polemic," he said in a statement. "And I don’t understand why one should see similarities between the novel’s characters and their real-life role models… This book is not about a Jew, but about a critic." Reich-Ranicki’s disdain for Walser’s work is no secret. Time and again, the critic has excluded Walser’s novels from his personal selection of literary masterpieces, even though Walser is widely held to be an important contemporary writer. On Thursday (May 30), Reich-Ranicki broke a week of silence on the controversy, telling a Swiss newspaper that he found Death of a Critic "miserable literature."
