EUROWEENIE ANTISEMITISM ALERT: German literary critic Martin Walser has a new novel coming out, said to be the first antisemitic novel published in Germany since the War. The book, Death of a Critic, features a thinly disguised version of a real person, well-known German (Jewish) critic Marcel Reich-Ranicki. Here’s what the Times says about it:

This being Germany, there is one other element in the book which has sent shock waves through the literary world. It is anti-Semitism. The principal character in Death of a Critic is a Jew — and not just any Jew. He is, in the words of Die Welt, “not a man, but a monster of corruption, of vulgarity, vanity and lubricity. He personifies the Jew as an object of hate.”

So this is more than just an attack on Reich-Ranicki, it constitutes an assault on his race as well. It is the first anti-Semitic novel to be published in Germany since the war. Realising this, the publisher of the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung has hurriedly cancelled his plans to serialise it, describing the book as riddled with “anti-Semitic clichés”.

His nervousness is not surprising. Reich-Ranicki himself is not just any Jew. He survived the Warsaw Ghetto in the most dramatic of circumstances. As a young man in July 1942, he was deputed to take the minutes as Sturmbahnführer Hermann Höfle determined which Jews were to be “resettled in the east” and which would be kept back. Reich-Ranicki was allowed to stay. His parents were not. They did not survive.

So Walser’s attack is more than just an injured writer hitting back; it is, as the current literary editor of Die Welt, puts it, “an execution, a settling of scores, a document of hate”. The editor was particularly repelled by a sentence towards the end of the book where the critic’s wife observes that “getting himself killed would be out of character”. As a comment aimed at the sole survivor from a family destroyed by the Nazis it was, he noted, “nothing short of horrifying”.

And, sadly, not especially surprising these days.