Literature Pope
Literary Pope is an ironic and appreciative term for a literary critic whose aesthetic judgments seek to claim papal infallibility ex cathedra , as it were. In the recent past, this term was mostly synonymous with the "great critic" Marcel Reich-Ranicki, who died in 2013 .
history
For Gotthold Ephraim Lessing , the scholar Christian Adolph Klotz , with whom he had a heated argument about poetry, was “a vain, pompous and self-righteous literary pope”.
The early naturalists Heinrich Hart and Julius Hart insulted the writer and journalist Paul Lindau in their critical armed conflicts as the " pope of literature". The metaphorical character was perhaps inspired by developments in the Catholic Church: it was not until 1870 that the First Vatican Council established the circumstances under which the Pope could claim infallibility .
Kurt Tucholsky saw it as the “first effort” of his book review, “not to play the pope of literature. There cannot be, and neither should there be. Everyone who is critically active should pray this prayer three times a day: By criticizing you are not superior to the work; because of that you are not superior to him; that way you are not superior to him ”. (from: “Die Ausortierten”, in: Die Weltbühne Vol. 27, 1931, No. 2, p. 58ff) He wrote to the author Irmgard Keun in a letter: “I stand up for new people wherever I can, and You also know that I am not a literature pope ”.
During the Weimar Republic, the critic Alfred Kerr was referred to as the "Pope of literature from the Mosse family". ( Rudolf Mosse was the founder of the Berliner Tageblatt .) Whether the name was respectful is doubtful: Even before 1933, the linguist Manfred Pechau considered it defamatory enough to put it in a planned dictionary alongside anti-Semitisms such as “spiritual Jewry” and “Parasite people” the National Socialist language. In the era of National Socialism was Hellmuth Langenbucher as a literary pope.
In 1977 Martin Walser published his polemic “About Popes” in Die Zeit (March 25, 1977) against a papal-infallible literary criticism, but mainly meant Reich-Ranicki.
In 2003, in an ironic comment from the world , Elke Heidenreich was named as Reich-Ranicki's successor and " Pope of Literature" .
literature
- Thomas Anz, Rainer Baasner (eds.), Literary criticism - history, theory, practice . 5th edition, Beck, Munich 2008, ISBN 978-3-406-51095-3 .
- Oliver Pfohlmann, Small Lexicon of Literary Criticism . TransMIT / Literaturwissenschaft.de, Marburg an der Lahn 2005, ISBN 978-3-936134-09-4 .
Individual evidence
- ↑ http://w210.ub.uni-tuebingen.de/portal/GIFT/fulltext_link?id=214 ( page no longer available , search in web archives ) Info: The link was automatically marked as defective. Please check the link according to the instructions and then remove this notice.
- ↑ Iris Alanyali: Literature Popess , Die Welt , May 2, 2003
