On the Death of Fritz J. Raddatz: The unrest spirit – tagesspiegel

20:15 clock Gerrit Bartels

sharp tongue, brilliant mind: Fritz J. Raddatz, the great German columnist of the postwar era, writer and literary critic, died on Thursday at the age of 83 years.

In retrospect, he reads then but otherwise, his farewell to journalism in general and “goodbye”, the Fritz J. Raddatz has declared in September of last year in the “world” of literary criticism in particular. Probably because he has already guessed that it only remains very little life that it is impossible to get at the passage of time alone. “I have survived me,” Raddatz wrote, “my aesthetic criteria are outdated, the cutlery of the diagnostician rust”, he fell out of the world. He also wrote: “All life has its limit. Everything You too. ” And: “Time to say goodbye”.

There was something strangely implausible when it comes to their own Abgeschafftheit – he really serious about this, we thought at the time to read? On the other hand, swung in the rows already a sad, somehow morbid undertone.

But the aplomb with which Fritz J. Raddatz staged his departure, his coquetry, no Montaigne to have to be a Proust to the beauty not to challenge forever (“The great hunger for beauty degenerates into arbitrariness”), suited him than at any second of the great critics of the guard of his generation, the kingdom-Ranicki, emperor or Baumgarts. Fritz J. Raddatz, who was born in Berlin in 1931 and his mother died in childbirth, was a critic, as in the literature presented in his texts exactly emphasis on style, the union rezensierend panache and elegance, playful seriousness and open vanity with each other , And put it externally on display, with always perfect fitting suits, cufflinks, elegant footwear etc, with tasteful Furnishings and fast sports car; Raddatz was a dandy who took his own importance, but also politically moralized and Barney hit.

“the latest manifestation of the international jet set in the feature” has it the last year died “FAZ” -Herausgeber Frank Schirrmacher called, in 2003, was the. Since Raddatz presented in Berlin Four Seasons Hotel his memoirs “troublemakers ago, he called himself in a” revolutionary in the tailored suit. ” In his diaries, which appeared in 2011, where he handed out properly and duke over many of its prominent companions in the literary world, your own unique feature-social novel !, he brought in a long list nice to the point, as it was ordered to be specially I “Self-pity, slope, to be loved, fear, aggression, feeling of inferiority, sentimentality, arrogance, self-centeredness.”

The awareness of one’s size, the knowledge about being a contemporary of literary historical importance, it has driven him early: as chief editor of the DDR-Verlag Volk & amp; World 1953-1958, deputy head of the Rowohlt publishing house “Time” from 1976 to 1985. “His vanity has given us qualities, but also entices in the sixties and as a features editor of the Hamburg weekly him to the edge to go and Beyond “, described the then” Time “editor in chief Theo Sommer Raddatz ‘work as literary editor. The cultural part was during his time as passionate as enlightened, argumentative and full of surprise – with Raddatz as irritation and sometimes hate figure

With a lot of pleasure and malice is from the competition finally the error recycled, of him his. “time” job costs. In a small, supposedly to read from Theo Sommer Text Book Fair Raddatz located at a railway station in Frankfurt Goethe’s time and sits with his alleged quote by Goethe, a parody of the “Neue Zürcher Zeitung” on. Raddatz receives a – presumably well-paid – author Agreement as “time” -Kulturkorrespondent wonders in a row but often why people are afraid of it or so wicked wrestle with him. Is it his looks? His bisexuality, from which he has never made a secret? His quick wit, his intelligence? Or is it, as he writes in his diary, “my old / eternal problem: I make people feel void inferior; and arouses instinctive aggression “?

In fact, it is today, as journalists books and novels commonplace, are hard to imagine how Raddatz was alone with hostility that he and his fiction debut” cow’s eye “1984 changed sides, as scornfully and evil the book was panned. “You know how we all depend on you, but you really want to be literary editor or novelist?” He was asked in the publication. And just as he was “Abortion” sits on his third novel, he tells of self-doubt, nibbling at it ever since, “How outrageous, even ridiculous it really is, after all the giants of world literature from Flaubert to Joyce sit down and Prose ? to write – insolence “

As the boy’s trilogy again in 2007 published, this gets the About entitled” An education in Germany, “and that’s what it is: an everyday saturated worth reading education and development of novel of difficult-specific, also sexual nature. Raddatz tells of growing up his hero and alter egos Bernd Walther in Berlin during the Nazi and war time, sometimes in very splayed language of the Allied bombing raids on Berlin, how Bernd by bringing himself and the terminally ill father with the black market, as it is for journalists.

The war experiences and the motherless growth bring Raddatz an existential sadness that he is able to cover that his evolving, “not parierenden, not stooping self-consciousness” may be little harm. He studied at the Humboldt University in East Berlin, “political conviction,” makes his state examination in 1953, graduated 1958 on Herder’s concept of literature and settled in the west to conflict with the GDR state apparatus. He writes early on a biography of Karl Marx and later Gottfried Benn wins during his time at Rowohlt authors as Hubert Fichte, James Baldwin, Walter Kempowski, Rolf Hochhuth and Elfriede Jelinek, is a close friend of spruce and Peter White, with Inge Feltrinelli and Mary Tucholsky, fight and is reconciled with Grass, Walser, Johnson, Rühmkorf, Enzensberger and all the other

In the nineties he looks like a character from yesterday -. only in the subsequent decade in its uniqueness to be even more appreciated than his memoirs and his diaries appear (and some other books anymore). Belong to illness and old age, he said in an interview in 2012, “that you might also determines the end itself,” even that could have style, “in the sense of courage, dignity and decency”. Fritz J. Raddatz took his own life in Switzerland. On Thursday, when the message is known of his death, an advance copy of his book about the “years with Single”, the great Rowohlt publisher appears in the “time”. He probably planned it that way.