Death of a critic

from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Death of a Critic is a novel by Martin Walser that was published in 2002 by Suhrkamp Verlag .

action

The novel begins as a story of a certain Michael Landolf who wants to prove that Hans Lach, whose last book in André Ehrl King literary program SPRECHSTUNDE panned has been, is not responsible for the death of the disappeared from the scene Star critic, although he by himself to his Accused arrest himself and increased it into murder fantasies. To this end, Landolf conducts research within the German literary scene, talks to Chief Detective Wedekind about Salmon's last book, Desire to Be Criminal , visits Hans Lach in psychiatry and begins an affair with the publisher's wife Julia Pelz-Pilgrim.

In the stories of Professor Silberfuchs, called Silbenfuchs, and Rainer Heiner Henkel, the missing Ehrl-König takes on the form of a power-obsessed "Großkaspar" who does not engage in serious literary criticism, but rather self-staging at the expense of the writer. It turns out that even on the supposed night of death, the critic only seized the opportunity of a staging in order to be able to devote himself to the affair with a young writer. It is also clear at the end of the novel that Michael Landolf and Hans Lach are one and the same person. The narrative thus takes on the traits of a literary self-talk and the fact that the beginning and the end coincide in a ring composition further seals off the literary cosmos from the outside.

Name and real role models

The name "Ehrl-König" refers to Johann Wolfgang Goethe's famous ballad Der Erlkönig . The intention that Walser associated with this choice of name is said to have been to make it clear that in Ehrl-König's arms “the authors perish like the child in Goethe's ballad”. In his 1993 novel Without Each Other , Walser introduced a literary critic by the name of Willi André König, who was called "Erlkönig in the industry."

Marcel Reich-Ranicki is generally regarded as the role model for the figure André Ehrl-König . Other figures are also traced back to real personalities in the literary business: Julia Pelz-Pilgrim to Ulla Berkéwicz , Professor Silberfuchs to Joachim Kaiser , Rainer Heiner Henkel to Walter Jens , Wesendonck to Jürgen Habermas . The novel is thus a key novel in which real people are transformed into literary characters .

Motifs

Death of a Critic is a postmodern novel untypically for Walser. It is not only a crime farce , media business satire and affair story, but also contains a psychological study that deals with the identity problem of writers in the media age. In addition, the book also contains a game with the levels of reality in the form of a key novel. For this very reason, Walser's critics consider the novel to be a failure. Jan Philipp Reemtsma claimed that Walser's wish to harm Marcel Reich-Ranicki with his book had led to a “loss of control” and a writing process “in a state of autosuggestive disturbance”. "The basic concern of Martin Walser, to let Marcel Reich-Ranicki appear in his novel in an absurd and bizarre figure with the highest insult value, destroys all efforts to create an almost complex narrative structure." Due to an open letter from FAZ editor Frank Schirrmacher this aspect is Romans was particularly prominent in the public eye. It is interesting that the public discussion about Walser's work followed the script of the novel in many respects, which is why, from today's point of view, as Sigrid Löffler already remarked, it appears “mercilessly clever and almost prophetic”.

Public controversy

trigger

Before the novel was available to other reviewers, let alone in bookshops, the FAZ had received the unedited manuscript to check for a preprint. In his open letter to Walser, however, the FAZ editor Frank Schirrmacher declined to publish it in advance in his newspaper and thus made the content of the work public. Schirrmacher, who gave the laudatory speech when Martin Walser was awarded the Peace Prize in 1998 , called the novel a compulsive reckoning of Walser's bitterness with his long-time critic Marcel Reich-Ranicki in his article. Schirrmacher simply saw the "murder of a Jew" as the subject of the book.

Walser's defense lawyers immediately accused Schirrmacher of inventing the "journalistic first strike" ( Thomas Steinfeld in the SZ ) and violating the rules of etiquette of the press. Schirrmacher countered: "Elementary rules of propriety have been violated by the book". Walser contradicted him indignantly. He would never write a book like the one Schirrmacher described - he was not crazy. His novel is solely about power in the literary business. And if Schirrmacher considers the attributes used in the novel to be typically Jewish, he himself is the anti-Semite.

The public acceptance of the work was mostly negative. The main focus of interest was on the attack on Reich-Ranicki and Walser's motives for it, packaged in a novel. Hellmuth Karasek , with both Reich-Ranicki and Walser for a long time, valued the book as “a document of an almost superhuman hatred that overwhelms the author because he saw himself under the thumb of Reich-Ranicki all his life”, and gave with it the tenor of the majority of public expressions of opinion. Voices in defense of Walser remained the exception. The managing editor of the Süddeutsche Zeitung Joachim Kaiser , who had been friends with Walser and Reich-Ranicki for decades, tried to smooth things over by comparing this argument with “marital disputes between older couples”, which would become increasingly bitter and violent over the years. Otherwise, however, he praised the old "lively, personal, educated, heartfelt Walser sound" in the book.

Anti-Semitism problem

The question of the extent to which Walser had used anti-Semitic clichés in his attack on Reich-Ranicki was almost inevitably addressed in the public discussion. Martin Walser's novels Ein jumping fountain and without each other and his speech on the occasion of the award of the “Peace Prize of the German Book Trade” had already raised voices that wanted to recognize the writer's latent anti-Semitism . In all cases, Walser's literarily complicated and rationally controversial examination of the subject contributed to the fact that these allegations could arise. In addition, there were resentment-laden public statements by Walser: "In our relationship, he is the perpetrator and I am the victim," he said in 1998 about Reich-Ranicki, for example. "Every author he treats in this way could say to him: Mr. Reich-Ranicki, in our relationship I am the Jew."

In the controversy over the death of a critic , however, (almost) no critic of Walser made the accusation that Martin Walser was personally an "anti-Semite", but that he had written an "anti-Semitic book" or that his book led to an anti-Semitic reception. In all friendship, the Jewish-American writer Ruth Klüger, who was friends with Walser, accused him in an open letter of having “affected, offended, insulted her by portraying a critic as a Jewish monster.” Walser's supporters pointed out that the death of one Critic 's topic of "Jews" only in a short passage in connection with the media processing of the alleged murder of Ehrl-König, about whose possibly Jewish origin the newspapers speculate, including the sentence allegedly uttered by the offended Hans Lach in the direction of Ehrl-König “From tonight zero o'clock will be struck back” as a scandal and motive for the crime. And they emphasize that Walser does not attribute this saying to laughter, but rather describes it as an invention of the media. In this sense, Death of a Critic contained Walser's written response to the previous accusations as a latent anti-Semite and made clear his very negative attitude towards an inaccurate handling of his work.

Walser's critics said that this narrow defense approach falls short. Walser's novel consistently uses historical ciphers and anti-Semitic clichés to describe Ehrl-König, “starting with the fact that the critic takes the name of his uncle 'Wasserfall' as a pseudonym (the striker salutes his humor ), his chain-smoking wife Can't even speak German, that the old man is a horny goat ”, says Hellmuth Karasek. Walser describes Ehrl-König as a homeless figure in an anti-Jewish manner, added the publicist Hanno Loewy , and his gestures come from the repertoire of subhumans . And Thomas Assheuer reminded many of the sentences that the poet holds against his critic in the novel of nationalist slogans with which writers such as Kolbenheyer , Grimm and Johst had fought against Jewish literary criticism.

In Walser's publishing house Suhrkamp there was a dispute about whether the book should be published at all, and changes were made: In a first version, Ehrl-König's television broadcast was compared with the Nazi Reichsschrifttumskammer and his gestures with those of the People's Court chairman Roland Freisler . In the published version from the gestures of which was dictator "Hynkel" playing Charlie Chaplin become.

Some critics investigated the continuity of such evaluation patterns at Walser. The director of the Fritz Bauer Institute Micha Brumlik accused Walser of having prepared the propagation of "hatred of Jews" for years. Thomas Assheuer added that Walser has long harbored resentment against the “Judeo-Christian tradition” as the antithesis of German mysticism and pagan tradition. His novel is "the consistent implementation of an aesthetic and political program from which Walser never made a secret" and which makes use of sources as diverse as Friedrich Nietzsche , the French legal intellectual Alain de Benoist and Ernst Jüngers . And the literary scholar Klaus Briegleb drew a bow from Walser's active role in “creating mood” against Reich-Ranicki at the time of Group 47 , his satirical Reich-Ranicki portrait from 1962, his essay Our Auschwitz from 1965 to the death of a critic . Walser's “work result” is the demand: “In view of the Second World War, an end to the competition for victims , no longer differentiate between ' Auschwitz ' and ' Dresden '! An understanding with the Jews in Germany is only possible at the price they have to pay. ”Briegleb's summary:“ That is old anti-Semitism ”.

Martin Walser left Suhrkamp Verlag for Rowohlt because he had the feeling that he had not received the appropriate support from his publisher during the debate . The literary criticism of his texts, which he perceived as imprecise, especially in the case of the death of a critic , was later treated by Walser in the novel The Moment of Love .

expenditure

The title was not available in bookshops for a while. Several issues have since appeared, including:

Also an audio book edition, out of print:

  • Death of a critic. Novel. Author reading, 4 CDs, Eichborn LIDO, Frankfurt am Main 2002, ISBN 3-51841-378-3 .

literature

  • Dieter Borchmeyer , Helmuth Kiesel (ed.): The emergency. Martin Walser's “Death of a Critic”. Hoffmann and Campe Verlag, Hamburg 2003, ISBN 3-455-09413-9 .
  • Torsten Gellner: An anti-Semitic storm of affect? Walser, Schirrmacher, Reich-Ranicki and the "Death of a Critic". Tectum-Verlag, Marburg 2004, ISBN 3-8288-8730-9 .
  • Elvira Grözinger : death of a writer. Martin Walser and the Jews. In: Frankfurter Jewish News. 106th year 2002 (Postprint: Universität Potsdam, Potsdam 2007, full text )
  • Georg Heller : Finally an end? "Germans" and "Jews" - experiences . With a preface by: Martin Walser, Ed. Isele Verlag, Eggingen 2002, ISBN 3-86142-269-7 .
  • Frank Hinkerohe: Martin Walser's novel "Death of a Critic" in the discussion of German literary criticism . WiKu-Verlag, Duisburg 2006, ISBN 3-86553-151-2 .
  • Daniel Hofer: A literary scandal as it stands in the book. On the history, misunderstandings and the media anti-Semitism discourse around Martin Walser's novel “Death of a Critic” . LIT-Verlag, Berlin / Vienna 2007, ISBN 978-3-8258-0378-0 .
  • Liwia Kolodziej: Anti-Semitic Literature? On the problem of anti-Semitism in Martin Walser's novel "Death of a Critic". Grin-Verlag, July 2009, ISBN 978-3-640-36502-9 .
  • Matthias N. Lorenz : "Auschwitz pushes us into one spot": Representation of Jews and Auschwitz discourse with Martin Walser . Metzler-Verlag, Stuttgart 2005, ISBN 3-476-02119-X .
  • Stefan Neuhaus : Martin Walser's novel "Death of a Critic" and its history (s). BIS-Verlag, Oldenburg 2004, ISBN 3-8142-0911-7 . (Series of publications: Lectures - Speeches - Reports / Library Society Oldenburg, Volume 43)
  • Viviana Plasil: Political Correctness and Anti-Semitism. A cultural studies analysis using the example of Martin Walser's novel "Death of a Critic". VDM-Verlag, Saarbrücken 2007, ISBN 978-3-8364-5400-1 .
  • Dieter Stein (ed.): The dispute over Martin Walser. Articles and interviews by Eckhard Henscheid , Joachim Kaiser , Heimo Schwilk , Martin Walser, Günther Zehm u. a. Edition JF, Berlin 2002, ISBN 3-929886-13-8 .

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Marcel Reich-Ranicki. Friends and enemies
  2. ↑ Martin Walser: Without each other . Suhrkamp, ​​Frankfurt am Main 1993, p. 19.
  3. ↑ Jan Philipp Reemtsma: In the state of auto-suggestive disturbance , in: "FAZ" v. June 27, 2002.
  4. ↑ a b Frank Schirrmacher: Dear Martin Walser, We will not print your book ... , in: "FAZ" v. May 29, 2002.
  5. ^ Death of a critic. 2nd ed., Unabridged paperback edition, 219 pages, List-Taschenbuch-Verlag, Munich 2003, back cover, List-Taschenbuch 60326
  6. ↑ cf. Thomas Steinfeld: The Deuter Pack. The double scandal surrounding Martin Walser's manuscript. In: SZ v. June 4, 2002.
  7. ↑ Frank Schirrmacher: I was so disgusted . In: Der Spiegel . No. 23 , 2002, p. 185 ( online - June 3, 2002 , interview).
  8. ↑ Martin Walser: The author is the loser . In: Der Spiegel . No. 23 , 2002, p. 186 ( online - June 3, 2002 ).
  9. ↑ a b Hellmuth Karasek: attempted murder at any price , in: "Der Tagesspiegel" v. May 31, 2002.
  10. ↑ Joachim Kaiser: Walser's scandal , in: "Süddeutsche Zeitung" v. June 5, 2002.
  11. ↑ "Süddeutsche Zeitung" v. 19./20. September 1998.
  12. ↑ Ruth Klüger: See Germany. Martin Walser's "Death of a Critic" ( Memento of the original dated February 28, 2008 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The @1@ 2Template: Webachiv / IABot / www.lyrikwelt.de archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. . In the Frankfurter Rundschau v. June 27, 2002.
  13. ↑ Hanno Loewy: There is no business like anti-Semitism , in: “Der Tagesspiegel” v. June 10, 2002.
  14. ↑ a b Thomas Assheuer: In the fetters of western guilt morality , in: "Die Zeit" v. June 6, 2002.
  15. ↑ Micha Brumlik: Targeted and without remorse , in: "Frankfurter Rundschau" v. June 7, 2002.
  16. ↑ Klaus Briegleb: Uncontrolled lust for depreciation , in: "Die Welt / Die Literäre Welt" v. July 2, 2002.