There is no American counterpart to Germany’s critical impresario, Marcel Reich-Ranicki. Known, with a rather pointed admiration, as the “literature pope,” Reich-Ranicki, or MRR, revitalized the conservative Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung’s book section in the 1970s during his fifteen-year tenure as literary editor. In 1988 he became a household name with his hour-long televised talk-show “Literarische Quartett” (Literary Quartet). Six times a year for thirteen years, he and three other critics discussed five books, usually contemporary works, but occasional classics as well. Against all odds and expectations, the show was a success, regularly drawing more than 700,000 viewers. Forefinger waving, MRR could make and break a book with a single word—most often his signature “Herrrrlich!” (wonnnderful!) or “Grössslich!” (horrrrible!).

Reich-Ranicki is best known for his terse, incisive, even pitiless judgments. He wrote that “[c]ourage and strength of character are not among the most conspicuous virtues of the esteemed writer Christa Wolf” in 1987, three years before she published What Remains, her only fiction explicitly critical of her government, a story she had waited a decade to publish—that is, until it was safe to do so—and five years before the extent of her association with the Stasi was revealed. After the fall of the Wall, MRR managed to salt her wound indirectly, inflicting new wounds on others, by pointing out that most of the East German writers then complaining about the ruthlessness of the Western publishing industry were braver than they were readable. Wolf, by implication, was one of the relatively more readable authors.

Although prone to enthusiasms, Reich-Ranicki is, to be sure, a demanding reader and his insistence on holding contemporary works up to the standards of the classics has enraged many a colleague and victim. One volume of his collected reviews is entitled Lauter Verrisse (Nothing but Drubbings). His attempt to counter his image as a “literary executioner” by publishing a collection entitled Lauter Lobrede (Nothing but Praise) had little effect. After his condemnation of Günter Grass’s novel about German reunification, Too Far Afield, the weekly Der Spiegel put a photomontage on its cover showing MRR’s head on a bulldog’s body, ripping up the novel. Yet Grass’s most recent novella, the as-yet-untranslated Crab Walk (about the killing of almost 10,000 German nationals fleeing East Prussia and the Free City of Danzig in 1945, when the Soviets torpedoed the refugee ship “Wilhelm Gustloff”) brought tears to MRR’s eyes. And these tears, he announced on his new book-show “Reich-Ranicki Solo,” are a sign of the novel’s greatness.

Behind the theatrics, however, is an eloquent, thoughtful critic, prodigiously well read in German language literature, who, despite the loss of his family in the Holocaust and his experiences in the Warsaw ghetto, never lost his passion for that literature. That enduring love is the cornerstone of his autobiography, The Author of Himself. Completely assimilated and an atheist, Reich-Ranicki felt as much an outsider among Jews in his native Poland as in Berlin where he attended school from the age of nine to eighteen. German literature became his “portable fatherland.” Reich-Ranicki’s mixture of devotion to Germany’s tolerant and enlightened high culture and defiance of those susceptible to the National Socialists’ bastardization of it, not to mention defiance of anyone unwilling to take him seriously, accounts to a great extent for this young provincial Polish Jew’s rise to the forefront of the postwar German literary establishment.

His rise was harrowing. Marcel Reich-Ranicki was born in 1920 in the town of Wloclawek to a lower-middle-class family. His father was a hapless businessman whose repeated failures caused his Germanophilic wife to send nine-year-old Marcel to live with relatives in Berlin. For his first few years at school, he was spared from overt anti-Semitism. After 1934, however, it had insinuated itself even into his outwardly tolerant school. In 1938, the Nazis deported him as an “alien Jew” to Warsaw. He survived by giving German lessons and, once he was confined in the ghetto, he became a translator for the Jewish Council. From this somewhat privileged position he was able to avoid deportation to Treblinka, though he was powerless to save his parents or his brother. Shortly before the final liquidation in 1943, Reich-Ranicki and his wife, Tosia, managed to slip out of the ghetto and bribe their way into hiding with a typesetter named Bolek and his family outside Warsaw. He and Tosia spent the last year of the war rolling thousands of handmade cigarettes a day to earn their keep. In 1944, as he was leaving Bolek’s house, the typesetter implored him not to tell anyone he had hidden them, “I know this nation. They would never forgive us for sheltering two Jews.”

Reich-Ranicki’s account of the humiliations and horrors of life in the ghetto is all the more moving for its utterly dispassionate tone. It is also unflinching. He tells, for example, of making a pass at his future wife ten minutes after she had tried to cut the belt from which her father had hanged himself in their ghetto apartment and of MRR’s lack of misgivings on moving into flats that had been abandoned by the previous owners in a great hurry. “Had the inhumanity we had witnessed made us inhuman too? Our compassion had certainly been dulled,” he concludes.

A certain evasiveness enters his story when he relates his years after World War II. After the Soviet Army arrived, he worked as a censor for the military, which, unbeknownst to him, was under the direction of the Ministry of Public Security. The Ministry later sent him to London briefly in 1948 as a foreign intelligence officer, though without giving him any instructions. When a Soviet advisor required him to provide a training program for spies, Reich-Ranicki, at a loss, made one up from novels he had read. The advisor was delighted. MRR also mentions that he joined the Communist Party in 1945, believing he had finally found the refuge he desperately needed. Yet in the 1950s he realized this decision had been “a serious mistake.” (He was in fact briefly imprisoned and expelled from the Party in 1948 for “ideological alienation.”) Nonetheless, he diffidently mentions his reapplication to the Party in the early 1950s. He was reinstated in 1957, though no one informed him at the time. Surely both of those situations were far more complex than he presents them here.

Although expelled from the Party, Reich-Ranicki was intermittently allowed to publish criticism and translations of German literature, and soon established himself as an authority. In 1958, with the re-Stalinization of Poland under Gomulka and a resurgence of anti-Semitism, MRR, his wife, and young son escaped from Warsaw to West Germany. Befriended by authors he had translated into Polish and more talented than many of the other critics at the time, Reich-Ranicki rapidly rose to prominence with weekly reviews for Die Welt.

His rise was rapid, but by no means easy. Reich-Ranicki’s outspokenness and ruthless independence made him many enemies. He repeatedly expresses surprise in his autobiography that so many of his friendships foundered when he wrote negative reviews of good friends’ works. But there were more sinister currents to navigate as well. In 1973, shortly after he was hired by the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, the publisher Wolf Jobst Siebert invited him to a party at which he “politely but energetically” insisted on introducing Reich-Ranicki and his wife to the guest of honor: Albert Speer.

Recently, one such current swelled into a tidal wave. In May, Frank Schirrmacher, the present publisher of the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, printed an open letter in his paper in which he explained to Martin Walser his refusal to publish a first serial of the latter’s novel Death of a Critic, claiming that Walser’s thinly veiled caricature of Reich-Ranicki as the power-hungry telegenic critic André Ehrl-König was anti-Semitic. The book had not yet been published and the manuscript was closely guarded; the uproar was deafening. For a few weeks after it appeared, Death of a Critic dominated the German bestseller lists, just as MRR’s autobiography had for most of 1999.

Although Walser has written intelligent and discerning essays on Auschwitz, he has also repeatedly provoked his countrymen with heavy-handed attacks on German taboos. In his 1998 Pauluskirche speech, Walser objected to the way foreigners have used Auschwitz as a “moral cudgel” against Germany to gain political and moral high ground. In the ensuing controversy, Reich-Ranicki even rose to Walser’s defense. But Reich-Ranicki had eviscerated too many of Walser’s more than forty books over the years. Walser’s parody of MRR in Death of a Critic is heartless and tasteless. When Ehrl-König is missing and presumed dead, for example, his wife announces that he could not have been murdered because dying was not in his character. As both Reich-Ranicki and his wife saw their families destroyed and deported, this is hardly excusable. What truly galls in this affair is Walser’s exploitation of anti-Semitic clichés for shock value and his insistence that this ad hominem attack is really just an exposure of critics’ and the media’s abuse of power.

One of MRR’s missions has been to “continue, perhaps in a very demonstrative manner, the tradition of Jews in the history of German letters.” (One of his books is entitled Disturbers of the Peace: Jews in German Literature.) In light of the Walser affair, this mission is obviously as important as ever. Another has been to spread his enthusiasm for books to as large an audience as possible without playing to the lowest common denominator. (His penchant for overstatement does, at times, lead him to play to the second lowest. He is fond of quoting Schiller’s dictum, “The critic must exaggerate!”) As one of the main spokesmen for Germany’s historical and critical conscience, he has succeeded in both missions.

Reich-Ranicki’s love of German literature saved his life on more than one occasion. Night after night in hiding, like Scheherazade, he related plots of novel and plays to Bolek, saving the most exciting for those times when his benefactor’s patience and resolve were wearing thin. Later, when banned from writing in Poland, his translations from German literature were his only means of support and finally his lifeline to the West. He has dedicated his life to serving that love.

It is a love that Germans, despite all the fame they have granted him, have returned ambivalently. (To be sure, MRR’s arrogant, abrasive critical persona has engendered no small part of that ambivalence.) Nonetheless, his contributions to postwar German literature were amply recognized this summer with the Goethe Prize, one of Germany’s most prestigious awards. “It is the highpoint of my life,” Reich-Ranicki announced in his acceptance speech. “A brighter, clearer light can not fall upon me.”