I only met Marcel Reich-Ranicki once. It was at his apartment in Frankfurt, I was there with my friend and colleague Dominik Wichmann for an interview about everything, Reich-Ranicki*s wife Theophila opened the door, she led us into the living room, there was a large black sofa and a lot of pictures, paintings, drawings above it, I tend to remember them as being mainly portraits of writers, which would have made sense for a lover of literature, for someone as passionate about people, readers, writers as RR – then he came, in a sort of foul mood which did not seem to be a show but not real either, it was more like a test that he put infront of the world, in this case two lone representatives of this so called world, and depending on how the world behaved, how we performed, he would be willing to change this mood, slowly, he would not show it too early, it would be his joy to see us realize that somehow the fog was lifting, we were here with him and he actually kind of enjoyed it, not least of all because we were there to be lectured by him, this is what an interview, maybe any talk with him amounted to, but also because he saw that the world, which used to be so cruel to him, had granted him another day. It was his talent, maybe his blessing, more likely his curse that he employed his attitude towards the world in judging books – not that I know any other way that makes sense to me if you don*t want to be a calculating fool or an academic bore: But in his case this life provided him with ample proof of the evil of man and the risk everybody runs to be betrayed or to be a betrayer. There was no middle ground for him, not after having survived the Holocaust. That he came back to Germany made sense and did not. That he wanted to be loved by Germans was not something that he could have expected, and when it happened, both sides seemed to be surprised. But even then, after all these years in Germany, he still felt that pain, he had that suspicion that he did not belong after all, that he was accepted, but in a different way. He earned his respect, through clear language and clear judgements. He was feared. But he never got over the fact that he was never, he said that, he was never invited to the regular Feuilletonkonferenz at Die Zeit where he used to work before joining the Frankfurter Allgemeine. He was an outsider. How couldn*t he have been? He was a jew.