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Literature on television?

That can't work at all - at least not for a mass audience.

This is how (or something like that) in 1988 most of the TV makers of the public broadcasters saw it, who always looked at quotas, even though they were (and are) financed by fees.

But then came Marcel Reich-Ranicki.

On March 25, 1988, ZDF broadcast the first edition of the “Literary Quartet” as the successor to the leisurely program “Aspects of Literature”.

The concept was simple: three regular participants and a changing guest, all of them renowned literary critics, discussed four to five new releases live and in front of an audience in the manner of a talk show.

The regular cast of the "Literary Quartet": Hellmuth Karasek, Sigrid Löffler and Marcel Reich-Ranicki

Source: picture-alliance / dpa

The format got its charm from the insults of the books (and authors), which especially Reich-Ranicki uttered, often introduced with the words "So take care!".

But other verdicts became almost proverbial: "Why am I condemned to read this type of literature?" Or "It is miserable literature, but - the German criticism is enthusiastic!"

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At its core, the “Literary Quartet” was never a real literary program, but rather a - mostly intelligent and stimulating - chimpanzee that, despite the polemical talent of the constant participant Hellmuth Karasek, lived largely from Reich-Ranicki.

The show made him the most prominent intellectual and columnist in Germany.

Marcel Reich, born in 1920 in the Polish province, came from a Jewish, Germanophile family and lived in Berlin from 1929 to 1938, went to school here and was even able to pass his Abitur despite the anti-Semitic policies of the Nazi regime.

But at the end of October 1938 he was deported to the German-Polish no man's land in the infamous “Poland Action”.

At the end of 1940 Marcel had to go to the Warsaw ghetto, from which he and his wife Teofila were able to escape in early 1943;

the couple had to go into hiding for the next year and a half.

Marcel Reich-Ranicki 1966

Source: picture-alliance / IMAGNO / Nachla

After the advance of the Red Army, Reich began to work for the Polish communist secret police at the end of 1944, including in the censorship department and counter-espionage.

When he was sent to the Polish Embassy in London as an agent leader in 1948, he took the name Ranicki.

Two years later, he was considered an apostate and even spent time in prison.

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In 1958 he used a study trip to the Federal Republic of Germany to move to the West, and soon afterwards began to work for the "Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung" as a literary critic.

For this he combined his birth name and his cover name to form the double name Reich-Ranicki.

From 1960 to 1973 he wrote for the weekly newspaper “Die Zeit” before returning to the “FAZ” and becoming head of the literary department.

After the end of his regular work as an editor in 1988, the experiment “Literary Quartet” began, which had a previously unforeseeable success and became a real figurehead for ZDF.

The popularity of Reich-Ranicki, now known as the “Pope of Literature”, reached new heights when he published his brilliantly written, admittedly not always completely complete, memoir “Mein Leben” in 1999, which topped the bestseller list for non-fiction books for a year.

Bronze bust by Marcel Reich-Ranicki

Source: picture alliance / dpa

In 2001 the ZDF ended the regular broadcasting of the “Literary Quartet”, but that did not change Reich-Ranicki's popularity.

He had one last big appearance in 2008 when he turned down the German TV Prize he had been given for his life's work on the open stage: “I won't accept this prize.” Marcel Reich-Ranicki died in 2013, two years after his wife, at the age of 93 Years.

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