German writer Martin Walser, a figure of contemporary literature in his country, died at the age of 96, according to the German head of state who lamented on Friday the loss of “a great man and a world-class writer.
“We mourn Martin Walser. We will not forget him,” Frank-Walter Steinmeier writes in condolences to the writer’s widow, Käthe Walser. “His work spans more than six decades and he decisively marked German literature over this period,” he added in this text transmitted by the presidency.
He died overnight from Thursday to Friday in Überlingen, in southwestern Germany, where he had lived since the late 1960s, according to public television channels ARD and ZDF as well as the newspaper German Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung.
Martin Walser is considered one of the major post-war novelists in the same way as Günter Grass or Heinrich Böll, even if he never achieved the international notoriety of the latter two.
“Genius and provocateur”, according to the ZDF, he caused a scandal in the late 1990s when he admitted in a speech to having had enough of the “permanent representation” of the Nazi past, triggering a great fundamental debate in Germany on the work of memory horrors of the Third Reich.
In particular, he said he “looks away” when Nazi crimes are shown on television and denounced an “instrumentalization of Auschwitz for present purposes”, a “moral cudgel” that would be constantly brandished at Germany.
Accused of wanting to repress the Nazi past, he defended himself, but affirmed that a constant repetition of the representations of these crimes trivialized their horror.
In 2002, in Mort d’un critique, this time 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 led him to be suspected of anti-Semitism.
Documents from the central file of the Nazi Party show that he joined the latter in January 1944 and he was a soldier in the German army.
Born on March 24, 1927 in Wasserburg, Martin Walser excelled in the description of petty-bourgeois microcosms, from which he himself came.
After the war, he passed the baccalaureate and then studied literature, history and philosophy. He made a name for himself in 1955 with a collection of short stories, then, two years later, with his first novel and great literary success Des Mariés à Philippsburg, which launched his long and prolific career.
“As a brilliant analyst of human inner worlds, he never ceased to question himself in writing, and to engage readers in this process,” the German president said in his condolences.