Marcel Reich-Ranicki suffers from cancer

The 92-year-old literary critic Marcel Reich-Ranicki is cared for at home

05.03.2013

The respected literary critic Marcel Reich-Ranicki (92) claims to suffer from a cancer disease. This confirmed Reich-Ranicki on Monday afternoon the news agency „dpa“. „I'm not feeling very well, but I'm not in pain“, Reich-Ranicki said in a newspaper interview. For some time he already knew about his cancer. He is cared for at home and does not have to be treated in a clinic. Reich-Ranicki did not say what cancer he was suffering from. The Bild newspaper reported that it was „Prostate Cancer“. He also did not confirm this report in an interview.

He was born in 1920 in Poland. Reich-Ranicki is one of the most important literary critics in Germany. Between 1973 and 1988 he headed the literary editorial of „Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung (FAZ)“. To this day Reich-Ranicki writes for the newspaper.

He became a major public through the literary broadcast „The Literary Quartet“ known. This television program ran between 1988 and 2001 with large audience reaction in the second German television (ZDF).

Wife died in 2011
In 1999 the autobiographical book was published „My life“. In this Reich-Ranicki reports, among other things, his experiences in the Warsaw Ghetto during the reign of terror of the National Socialists. In the ghetto he married his wife Teofila in 1942. Shortly before the mass murder of the imprisoned, the two spouses managed to escape. In 2011 Teofila Reich-Ranicki died at the age of 91 years. Both spouses were married for almost 70 years. His son is a professor of mathematics at the University of Edinburgh, UK. Reich-Ranicki lives today in Frankfurt am Main. (Sb)