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Author Reich-Ranicki: This fear of boredom
Photo:
Oliver Berg / dpa
For example, it was very loud.
For example, he didn't wait for some friendly usher to direct him to his quiet cultural corner at the edge of the stage.
He took the place in the middle.
Marcel Reich-Ranicki, the Polish Jew from Włocławek on the Vistula who came to Berlin at the age of 9, flew out of Germany at the age of 18 and came back to triumph at the age of 38, literature in Germany has such a loud voice awarded that no one could ignore.
It had to do with love.
With the luck of having survived.
With the luck of having got to know this inexhaustible source of strength at an early age, which helped him to survive.
The literature.
Don't be a victim.
Hoping for no pity.
But attack, participate, grow up.
That was his program when he arrived in Frankfurt am Main in July 1958.
He owned almost nothing at the time.
He and his wife Teofila, known as Tosia, had survived the Warsaw ghetto, had briefly made a career in the Communist Party and the Polish secret service after the war, had been thrown out there, had been imprisoned, and read Anna Seghers' The Seventh Cross in the cell , was overwhelmed and knew: He must devote his life to German literature.
In Poland this was only possible at the lowest possible level, if at all.
But his ambition was the greatest.
And he fled back to Germany.
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