Maxim Biller on Lisa Eckhart – the troop supervisor at ZDF

Fun fact, this time of the sad kind: When the retro Austrian and humorous cabaret artist Lisa Eckhart appears in the «Literary Quartet» on ZDF at half past eleven on this Friday evening, the German Jew and Literary critic Marcel Reich-Ranicki finally lost the fight against the Nazis.

That he survived the many attempts at murder by the Hitlerites against him – it doesn’t matter. It was much more important for Börne in the last post-war period to save German literature from them, from its hollow, folkish bourgeoisie. For they hated and feared the books and sentences of the Jews just as they hated and feared the Jews. They wanted no trace of their wild thinking and clear writing to remain in German minds and libraries, so they set their books on fire in front of their bodies. Marcel Reich-Ranicki did not want to accept that. Wherever he wrote or spoke – at Gruppe 47, in “Zeit”, at the FAZ, in Klagenfurt, at the “Literary Quartet” – he pulled the burning works of Feuchtwanger, Roth, Isaak Babel out of the Nazi fire and told the new Germans about them in his wild, clear Jewish way so that they wouldn’t become anti-Semites like their parents and grandparents. He almost made it.