The German writer Martin Walser, a central figure of contemporary literature in Germany, is died at the age of 96 in Uberlingen in the southwest of the country, where he had resided since the late 1960s.
Is considered one of the major German novelists of the postwar period like Gunter Grass or Heinrich Boll, even if he never achieved the international fame of the latter. “Brilliant and provocative,” according to the ZDF, he caused a scandal in the late 1990s when he admitted in a speech that he had had enough of the “permanent representation” of the Nazi past, sparking a huge substantive debate in Germany about the horrors of the memory of the Third Reich .
In particular, he had stated that he “looked away” when i Nazi crimes were being televised and denounced an “instrumentalisation of Auschwitz for present purposes”, a “moral mace” which would be constantly brandished against Germany. Accused of wanting to repress the Nazi past, he defended himself but said that a constant repetition of representations of these crimes it trivialized its horror.
#The word for Sunday speaks Martin #Walser pic.twitter.com/4pPCIJCvOm
— storymakers (@mz_storymakers)
July 28, 2023
In 2002, in “Death of a Critic,” he attacked Germany’s most famous literary critic, Marcel Reich-Ranicki, a Jewish survivor of the Warsaw Ghetto, which created a new scandal in his country and made him suspect of anti-Semitism. From the documents of the central archive of the Nazi party it appears that he joined the latter in January 1944, he was a soldier in the German army.
Born on March 24, 1927 in Wasserburg, Martin Walser he excelled in the description of petit-bourgeois microcosms, from which he himself came. After the war he obtained his baccalaureate and then studied literature, history and philosophy.
He established himself in 1955 with a collection of short stories, then, two years later, with his first novel and great literary success, “Des Married à Philippsburg”, which launched his long and prolific career.
The news of the death, anticipated by some television stations, was confirmed by a message from the President of the Federal Republic, Frank-Walter Steinmeier who spoke “of a great man and a world-class writer”. “We mourn Martin Walser. We will not forget him,” wrote the German president in his condolences addressed to the writer’s widow, Kathe Walser. “His work spans more than six decades and made a decisive mark on German literature in this period,” he added. “As as a brilliant analyst of human inner worlds, he never ceased to question himself in writing and to involve readers in this process”, estimated Steinmeier in his condolences.