Marcel Reich-Ranicki, who has died aged 93, operated at the heart of European culture for more than half a century. The most influential literary critic of his time in the German-speaking world, he was feared by writers and enjoyed by readers for his often devastating reviews, which combined conviction, subjectivity and rhetorical finesse, making them immensely powerful.
As a media personality, he made it his mission to take literature to a wide public.
He was born Marceli Reich in Wloclawek, northern Poland. His father, David, was an unsuccessful businessman, while his mother, Helene (née Auerbach), came from a long line of German rabbis.
The family moved to Berlin in 1929, where his maternal uncle, a lawyer, provided support. Reich-Ranicki took the school leaving exam but as a Jew he was denied a university place. He was subsequently deported to Poland, where he was confined, from 1940, in the Warsaw ghetto.
He and his wife, Teofila Langnas, whom he had married in 1942, escaped from the ghetto and went into hiding. His parents and elder brother died in concentration camps.
After the war Reich-Ranicki became a member of the Polish communist party. Joining the new state’s diplomatic service he was posted first to Berlin and then to London. At that time he adopted the Polish name Ranicki. In 1949 he was recalled, briefly imprisoned, and expelled from the foreign and security services and the party on ideological grounds.
The following year saw the beginnings of his literary career, as a publisher's editor specialising in German literature, a co-translator of Franz Kafka and Friedrich Dürrenmatt, and freelance literary journalist.
In 1958 he went on a study trip to West Germany and never returned. Living at first in Frankfurt, he worked as a freelancer for the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, Die Welt and for radio, moving in 1959 to Hamburg. There his regular contributions to the prestigious weekly Die Zeit over the next 14 years made his name. From 1973 to 1988 he was literary editor of the Frankfurter Allgemeine.
TV pundit
After his retirement from the paper, he moved on to a career of even greater prominence as a television pundit, leading a hugely successful book review programme, the Literary Quartet, broadcast by ZDF.
Reich-Ranicki had fraught relationships with many of the major German writers of his day, among them Max Frisch, Martin Walser and Günter Grass, whose 1995 novel Ein Weites Feld (Too Far Afield) he very publicly condemned: an image of him appeared on the cover of Der Spiegel apparently ripping a copy in half. He is believed to have been the inspiration for a number of fictional portraits of critics, most controversially in Walser's 2002 novel Tod eines Kritikers (Death of a Critic), which gave rise to charges of anti-Semitism, as the fictional author apparently murders a harsh Jewish reviewer.
Reich-Ranicki earned the title Literaturpapst ("literary pope"), but rejected the notion of infallibility. In 1992, in answer to the question, "What is literature for: truth, education or enjoyment?", he chose the last, and his essays and reviews display the qualities he valued in others' writing: accessibility, conciseness, sensual appeal, suspense, structure and wit.
Speaking about Jewishness, he would explain that he did not share or practise its religious beliefs, but did see himself as linked into a strong Jewish cultural and intellectual tradition.
On television he was a consummate showman and a towering presence, fizzing with energy and intellectual agility. With his rasping voice and glittering gaze he engaged his audiences with his rhetorical skills, sometimes infuriating them but never boring them.
When it came to his own turn to receive a lifetime achievement award in 2008, he refused it, dismissing television as a medium “full of cooks, nothing but cooks”.
Reich-Ranicki published some 20 books, encouraged young writers and above all acted as an advocate for literature, reclaiming it from the ivory tower and putting it on the public agenda. His most lasting contribution may turn out to be his autobiography, Mein Leben (published in English as The Author of Himself), which shows an altogether warmer, more human and self-critical personality than the public persona may have suggested.
It is a gripping memoir, starting with his earliest years and alive to the turbulent times with which he actively engaged, without ever completely shaking off a sense of being an outsider. From school in Berlin onwards, he retained a fear of barbarism, but that fear was “joined by happiness”, and his declared fear of some things German “by the happiness I owed to things German”.
His wife, Teofila, died in 2011. He is survived by their son, Andrew, a professor of mathematics at Edinburgh University, and a granddaughter.