The Author of Himself

Marcel Reich-Ranicki has lived a colourful and picaresque life. Born in 1920 of Polish Jewish parents, he spent his youth in Berlin until the Nazis came to power. In 1938 he was deported with his family back to Poland, where he spent the war. In its subtlety, intelligence and clear-headedness, his account of the Warsaw Ghetto, the relations between Poles and Jews, Poles and Germans, Poles and Poles is one of the most compelling and dramatic ever recorded. After the war, Reich-Ranicki returned to Poland and joined the communist party, for which performed secret intelligence work. He then spent two years in London at the Polish embassy, during which time he fell out with the communist party. Then in 1958, after seeing Willy Brandt kneeling before a Holocaust memorial in Berlin, he decided to return to the German city of his youth. Once back in Germany, Reich-Ranicki's rise was meteoric: first as a book reviewer and then on to national celebrity, as the Culture Czar' on the influential Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung. He has been described as 'the Pope' of German letters.
As well as being a remarkable life, this book is also a love letter to literature and the theatre, and especially the work of Shakespeare. It's also an indispensable guide to twentieth-century German literature, many of whose post-war protagonists he knows, has even sharply criticised, and sometimes praised.