Born in the Polis city of Wloclawek of a German mother and Polish father. At a young age his mother sent him to her brother's fammily in Berlin so as he could leran German.
He was one of the last Jews to be able to do his Abitur - final school exam, which he sat in 1938.
He was moved to the Warsaw ghetto as a young man where he met his future wife. In the midst of that terro and evil he read Goethe and Schiller.
The novelist Günter Grass once questioned Reich-Ranicki at a literary conference. “What are you really — a Pole, a German or what?” Grass asked. “I am half Polish, half German and wholly Jewish,” he replied.
He later said that the statement was untrue, that he felt himself an outsider everywhere. It was a lifelong tension with his own identity that energised his work.
On one occasion he was awarded a literary award. He turned up for the big evening and then refused to accept the award.
He was one of the most powerful cultural figures in postwar Germany.
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