The market for German-language literary fiction is concentrated among a handful of publishers. Looking at the German novels on my bookshelf, names like dtv and Rowohlt come up again and again. By contrast, few English-language publishers recur. Even the two most prominent ones, Vintage and Penguin, cover only a small proportion of the spines.
It used to be that in German-speaking literary circles, not only publishers were considered immensely powerful, but literary critics as well. The most powerful of them was Marcel Reich-Ranicki, who reached the apex of his influence in the 1990s. He had a prime-time TV show in which he reviewed books that had recently come out, and his verdicts significantly altered the trajectory of authors’ careers, for better or worse.
No-one who wields this much influence is universally loved, especially not a literary critic. One of the authors who felt oppressed by Reich-Ranicki’s power was Martin Walser. That’s even though Walser was one of Germany’s most prominent writers. Walser felt so passionately about Reich-Ranicki that he wrote a novel in which a thinly disguised critic gets murdered. It was called Tod eines Kritikers, which means Death of a Critic.
This novel was endlessly discussed around the time I graduated from high school. I didn’t care, preferring science fiction and adventure stories. But something must’ve stuck, because when I recently browsed the German-language section of the dusty mom-and-pop bookstore in the Northern California town where I live and saw Death of a Critic, I bought it.
It’s a strange novel. Walser, a genius with language, uses his gift not to write the best possible novel, but to express his hatred for another person. Imagine that Jonathan Franzen, instead of writing Purity, had written a complaint to an airline about the food they served him, and that complaint is 560 pages of extremely eloquent and witty prose. Walser’s book is equally silly, at least conceptually.
Walser’s passionate hatred for his subject is hard to comprehend. What’s even stranger is that he was clearly able to step back and write in a light-hearted style that makes the novel a joy to read sentence-by-sentence, but only so long as one is able to forget the underlying motivation. When the novel returns to its subject and it becomes clear that the whole point is to denigrate someone, the pleasure of reading the beautifully crafted prose goes away. Weirdly, Walser is aware of this. One section in particular, which I have tried to translate below, illustrates this perfectly:
To be delighted about someone’s death excludes you, in a way not previously felt, from humanity. To not be delighted about the death of someone who has done you nothing but harm turns you into someone who has been silenced, into a hypocrite, into someone who is forever numb.
Martin Walser
