POSTPRANDIAL TALKS ARE a tricky business at the best of occasions, and I confess that I feel a few uncertainties about my promise to speak about Jewish critics and German literature as such, at large, no less. I have been long unwilling to dabble in generalities and I would rather speak, tonight and now, about one prominent critic whom I have come to know in recent years, if not decades. Marcel Reich- Ranicki of Frankfurt was unable, unfortunately, to attend our conference in person, and in his absence I would like to say something about his attitudes, ideas, and achievements — not in an impersonal way but keeping in mind my own experiences which probably qualify me, as least as his contemporary between societies, to understand him more clearly. I hasten to say that I am not going to indulge in the popular sport of Marcel Reich-Ranicki bashing, by now an established literary genre in Germany and elsewhere, especially among the younger generation. Reich-Ranicki bashers have been working with clubs or, as did Peter Handke, ironic condescension, but rarely with the more delicate stubbornness used in Count Franz Czernin’s little book. I think Count Czernin would have argued more convincingly if he had not touched on the questions of Marcel’s Jewishness (I am using the term with hesitations) in a few lines and with elegant kid gloves saying that Marcel’s life has been shaped by “certain forces of disasters that are usually described in political terms.” It would be easy to suggest that younger Austrian and German intellectuals have a difficult time calling a spade a spade, but they are not the only ones (as our conference attests), and Hans Mayer once suggested that speaking about himself as a Jew among Germans he would do better to tell the story of an individual life than theoretically to discuss ideas, however pure and welldefined. I would like to follow his advice, at least in part.

I do not know of any American critic who is as widely and prominently visible as is Marcel Reich-Ranicki to German-speaking audiences.