On the death of the literary critic Volker Hage: Bombing war and goat song

Hage wrote this in his diaries and wasn’t sure what Reich-Ranicki meant, “half seriously, half in jest; you never know for sure.” And he remembered another sentence from his teacher: “The literary critic must pursue his work with dogged seriousness, otherwise he is not one.”

Hage then stayed at “FAZ” for five years under Reich-Ranicki, later moving to “Zeit”, where he served until 1992, and was then primarily responsible for literary reporting at “Spiegel” until 2014. So you didn’t necessarily have to know Büchner’s date of birth in order to have a career as a literary critic. Marcel Reich-Ranicki was wrong, also when it came to his “dogged seriousness”.

Hage knew them all

Hage pursued his profession very seriously, but pleasantly without doggedness, with many, many reviews of novels by all the great authors of his time, whether Martin Walser, Siegfried Lenz or Max Frisch, whether Philip Roth or Saul Bellow. These were always critical when necessary, but prudent and sometimes lenient in argumentation.

Rarely did anyone want to get to him like so many of his guild did, especially Reich-Ranicki, especially since Volker Hage was a friendly, sociable person anyway. But he also saw himself as a critic who wanted to get to know the authors and read their books against the background of their respective biographies, as can be seen in his author portraits published in 2019 and 2022.

Reich-Ranicki tears up Grass novel

And as a “Spiegel” man, he was always interested in making big impressions in the debate and literary world: he was responsible for the Reich-Ranicki review including the cover (in which MRR tears the book) of Günter Grass’ novel “The Wide Field”, the Botho Strauss essay “Swelling Bocksgesang” or a cover story about the “literary Fräuleinwunder”, a formulation that was unfortunately embarrassing enough even back then, in 1999 was.

In 2003, Hage refuted the writer WG Sebald, who at the time complained that the Allied air war against Germany had not been reflected in German-language literature, with his book “Witnesses to Destruction” that he edited and wrote that this gap was “less one of production than of reception”.

Numerous other books, for example about Max Frisch, John Updike and Walter Kempowski, are thanks to his literary criticism. Only after Hage retired from “Spiegel” in 2014 did he venture into his own novel projects and wrote the novel “Free Love” and the Arthur Schnitzler biography “The Fifth Act of Life”. Volker Hage died on Wednesday in Hamburg as a result of cancer. He was 76 years old.