Ulrich Weinzierl, born in Vienna on March 7, 1954, grew up in a professor's household.

Nothing unusual in Vienna, but it was unusual in his youth that both parents taught at the university and developed a public activity that was attested to by numerous honors.

The father Peter Weinzierl was an experimental physicist and nuclear researcher, the mother Erika Weinzierl was the defining figure of Austrian contemporary history research for decades.

With books on the Catholic Church and anti-Semitism, she made a significant contribution to opening the Austrian public to a critical examination of the Austrian part in National Socialism.

Ulrich Weinzierl's four years older

Patrick Bahners

Feuilleton correspondent in Cologne and responsible for "Humanities".

  • Follow I follow

From 1979 onwards, Ulrich Weinzierl worked in the documentation archive of the Austrian resistance. Ulrich Weinzierl presented numerous publications in the research field of exile and political and religious persecution in Austria, which was first infiltrated by the National Socialists and then occupied by his mother, especially in the genre of anthologies and source editions.

This contemporary world of experience, the memory of a hatred of everything intellectual that was rampant in Vienna long before 1938, not only formed the background when Ulrich Weinzierl reported on Austrian controversies and embarrassments for German newspapers;

it also explains some of his melancholy demeanor and his tendency towards sarcasm.

From Science to Newspaper

At the age of 23, Weinzierl received his doctorate in 1977 after studying German and art history from Wendelin Schmidt-Dengler with a thesis on Alfred Polgar, one of the most famous of the Viennese feuilletonists.

The book version appeared in 1978 under the title "He was a witness".

In 1985, Weinzierl followed up with a Polgar biography, which went through several editions.

Hans Weigel (1908 to 1991), the theater and language critic (“The Sorrows of Young Words”), paved the way for him to get into the feuilleton, and he recommended him to Marcel Reich-Ranicki, the editor responsible for literature and literary life of the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung.

Regular work for the Literaturblatt was followed in 1987 by employment as a feuilleton editor based in Vienna.

“Profession: feuilletonist” is how Weinzierl introduced himself in his acceptance speech in Darmstadt in 1996 when the German Academy for Language and Poetry awarded him the Johann Heinrich Merck Prize for literary criticism and essay.

In this speech, Weinzierl admitted to being a Reich Ranicki student.

He is proud of this student body and always concerned that Reich-Ranicki "may be disgraced by unusually foolish behavior".

At the time, quite a few fellow critics and Germanists were more or less open to the verdict that Reich-Ranicki had made literature too popular even before his television career.

Like the collaboration of university Germanists of the rank of Walter Hinck or Peter von Matt, the promotion of Weinzierl, although he never aspired to the title of professor, also proved that Reich-Ranicki, as head of literature, had an alliance of criticism and philology in mind.

Accurate reading was the first critical commandment for him.

Nationally acclaimed literary critic

Weinzierl said of him in Darmstadt: "Great is his loyalty.

Once Reich-Ranicki decides to support him, he won't let him go.” Weinzierl served as a juror for several years in the Klagenfurt reading competition for the Ingeborg Bachmann Prize invented by Reich-Ranicki.

In 2009, a decade after leaving the FAZ, Weinzierl was awarded the Frankfurt Anthology Prize, with which the FAZ, under editor Frank Schirrmacher, honored authors in the column for weekly poetry interpretations founded by Reich-Ranicki.

He thanked for a "friendly greeting from the old homeland, which brings back many memories".