It has become an intellectual habit in Germany to criticise Marcel Reich-Ranicki. The target of those attacks is both the style of his written reviews and the way he presents book review discussion on TV. Certainly his lasting success is the result not only of marketing talent, but also, and even more importantly, of profound knowledge about literature.
Marcel Reich-Ranicki is Germany's paramount critic today and he has been influential since he was an associate member of the "Gruppe 47". One has to know about his biographical background, for his experiences as a young man in the Warsaw ghetto are vital for his approach to literature. In fact, as Marcel Reich-Ranicki himself stated several times, it was German literature - chiefly Heinrich Heine and Thomas Mann - that made the young Polish-German Jew believe in a better Germany.
So Marcel Reich-Ranicki knows what it means to belong to a pursued minority.
But for him Toni Morrison's Jazz is "absolutely strange" and "inaccessible". The minority's musical culture brought into narration: We know about that in Jewish literature; the sad and longing style of klezmer, often compared to and blended with jazz, has been involved in Jewish narration more than once.
Marcel Reich-Ranicki enthusiastically praised "Wartime Lies" by Lewis Begley. Complete access there! But that is European America, not African America. Maybe it is not the void between America and Europe but the one between black and white America which is to "blame". Maybe the German reception of Toni Morrison is just the mirror of how White America reacts to Black American literature! Like with wild creatures: you do respect, you might even admire them. But they remain strange.
There are bridges leading from Europe to America; they do not end in Harlem, however, but in Manhattan. Marcel Reich-Ranicki is not narrow-minded - he is just honest.
Volker Klüting