1. Marcel Reich-Ranicki was regarded as one of the most influential contemporary literary critics in the field of German literature and has often been called Literaturpapst in Germany.
14 Facts About Marcel Reich-Ranicki
1. 2.
Marcel Reich-Ranicki attended a German school there, but was later sent to Berlin to study.
3.
Marcel Reich-Ranicki's sister survived, having escaped to England shortly before the war.
4.
Marcel Reich-Ranicki joined the communist Polish Workers' Party after the war.
5.
Marcel Reich-Ranicki would go on to write and edit for the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung for the rest of his life.
6.
From 1988 to 2001, Marcel Reich-Ranicki hosted the literary talk show Literarisches Quartett on German public television.
7.
In Summer 2000, fellow panelist Sigrid Loffler left the panel, complaining that Marcel Reich-Ranicki had put forward Haruki Murakami's erotic novel South of the Border, West of the Sun for discussion, which Loffler disliked.
8.
Marcel Reich-Ranicki answered that she had a problem with erotic literature in general.
9.
Marcel Reich-Ranicki made headlines with his acceptance speech, in which he spurned the prize and criticized the state of German television.
10.
Marcel Reich-Ranicki declared he would have paid any monetary award back, had the prize been associated with a monetary reward.
11.
In 2012, Marcel Reich-Ranicki made a speech at the Bundestag on International Holocaust Remembrance Day.
12.
Marcel Reich-Ranicki continued to write a weekly column in the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung until shortly before his death.
13.
Marcel Reich-Ranicki died on 18 September 2013 in Frankfurt, having previously been diagnosed with prostate cancer.
14.
Marcel Reich-Ranicki's son, Andrew Ranicki, was a professor of mathematics at the University of Edinburgh.