Böllfrischgrasshandke: Martin Walser
David Midgley, 8 August 2002
At the end of May, Frank Schirrmacher, an editor at the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, declared in an open letter that he had refused to serialise Martin Walser’s novel Tod eines Kritikers, or ‘Death of a Critic’, on the grounds that it was a ‘document of hatred’, a fantasy ‘execution’ of the literary critic Marcel Reich-Ranicki. In Walser’s...