The German writer Martin Walser, one of the great literary figures of post-WWII Germany together with Günter Grass, Siegfried Lenz and Heinrich Böll, who shaped the intellectual image of the Federal Republic, has died at the age of 96 in Überlingen on the Lake Constance, in Baden-Württemberg. The announcement of his disappearance was given by the website of Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung and from the TV channel Zdf. Born in Wasserburg/Bodensee on Lake Constance on March 24, 1927, lived in Nußdorf/Bodensee.
With his angular and combative ways, Walser has often meddled in public debate. Long considered an intellectual committed to the left, in 1998 he caused a sensation, during the speech for the International Peace Prize of German publishers, he stigmatized the “exploitation of Auschwitz”, speaking of “a means of intimidation that can be used at any time , or a moral cudgel”. The reaction of the German Jewish community was harsh, accusing Walser of being “an arsonist of souls”. The result was a broad debate, which involved not only intellectuals but an entire nation eager to reflect on the relationship between the search for normality of the present and the terrible legacy of the past.
From 1944 to 1945 Walser participated in the Second World War entering the Wehrmacht and was in an American prison camp. He studied German studies, theology, philosophy, history, psychology in Regensburg and Tübingen. He received his doctorate in 1951 with a work on Franz Kafka, the author who inspired his debut, a collection of short stories (An airplane over the house 1955) woven on the insistent motif of the alienation of the individual, with precise accents of social criticism. He then moved on to the novel, establishing himself among the most valid German writers thanks to Marriage in Philippsburg (Feltrinelli, 1962), After the interval (Feltrinelli, 1964) and The unicorn (Feltrinelli, 1969) which represent slices of life and an overview of the authentic reality of life Germany of the most triumphant economic miracle. After years of narrative silence, since 1972, in response to the more explicit political commitment later assumed by Walser, social criticism has been replaced by a push towards modification and hope, so that individual illness, caused by social causes, only in the social can be cured.
In Italy Sugarco has published “A Man Who Loves”, “The Ride of Blood”, “A Gushing Fountain”, “Messmer’s Travels” and “The Moment of Love”. Walser became known, among other things, for the novel “Death of a critic” (2002, also translated into Italian by Sugarco): the work was the subject of a decidedly controversial discussion, because critics accused Walser of settling accounts with Marcel Reich-Ranicki, considered the father of German literary criticism in the second half of the twentieth century , in an anti-Semitic way, which Walser denied. Walser’s book represented the greatest literary scandal in the history of the German Republic; a scandal that arose from a poetic and ingenious transfiguration of the condition of the writer in contemporary society, the “telecratic” society “.
His satire has taken every liberty because it describes with biting and caricatured truthfulness the mystification of the great critic Ehrl-König (the Marcel Reich-Ranicki of reality) who tears apart all those who do not adhere to the idea of literature as divertissiment.