Die hundert besten deutschen Gedichte des Jahrhunderts

by Marcel Reich-Ranicki (editor)

Genres: Poetry

124 pages, Paperback

Published January 1, 2017

About the author

Marcel Reich-Ranicki was a Polish-born German literary critic and member of the literary group Gruppe 47. He was regarded as one of the most influential contemporary literary critics in the field of German literature and has often been called Literaturpapst ("Pope of Literature") in Germany.

Source: wikipedia.com

Reviews

[Marc Lamot · Rating 2 out of 5]

More or less from 1960 to 2000 the literary critic Marcel Reich-Ranicki (1920-2013) in Germany was called the pope of literature. He could make or crack a writer. His impact was so far-reaching that in German media he was simply called MR-R, and that the Australian-British publicist and TV figure Clive James even devoted a whole item to him in his Cultural Amnesia: Necessary Memories from History and the Arts. Of course Reich-Ranicki had a lot of enemies because of his outspoken opinions (Gunter Grass was perhaps his most prominent one), but you just couldn't ignore him.

This booklet presents 100 German poems from the 20th century selected by MR-R. It first appeared in 2000 and unfortunately contains no explanation of the criteria used by Reich-Ranicki. I know too little about recent German poetry to make a well-considered judgment about the selection. I can only say that in addition to the classics Rilke and Celan, Ingeborg Bachmann and Robert Gernhardt pleasantly surprised me.