Marcel Reich-Ranicki, Literary Critic, Is Dead at 93 Marcel Reich-Ranicki, a survivor of the Warsaw ghetto who left Poland to become a powerful cultural figure in postwar Germany as a distinguished literary critic and a popular television talk show host, died on Wednesday in Frankfurt. Boris Roessler/Agence France-Presse Marcel Reich-Ranicki, a leading cultural figure often called Germany's "literary pope," with the Goethe Prize in 2002. The Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung reported the death but gave no further details. He had a long association with the newspaper, contributing reviews and columns as recently as last year. A Polish-born Jew who grew up in Berlin, Mr. Reich-Ranicki had a lifelong love for the German classics. He read the poetry of Goethe and Heinrich Heine even while enduring the cruelest months of Nazi terror, when he saw SS troops march his parents off to the Treblinka gas chambers. Over six decades he produced a stream of witty, sometimes barbed but consistently erudite commentary in a career that saw Germany through the cold war and national reunification. He became Germany's leading literary arbiter, and in the process he helped pave the way for Jews to again play an important role in the nation's culture and politics. He said he lived with the irony of loving the masterpieces, even of artists whose views he detested. "The biggest anti-Semite in the history of German culture was Richard Wagner," Mr. Reich-Ranicki once told an interviewer. "And the greatest opera I know is his "Tristan and Isolde." " The novelist Günter Grass once questioned Mr. Reich-Ranicki at a literary conference. What are you really - a Pole, a German or what? Mr. Grass asked. "I am half Polish, half German and wholly Jewish," Mr. Reich-Ranicki replied. He later said that the statement was untrue, that he felt himself an outsider everywhere. It was a lifelong tension with his own identity that energized his work. Mr. Reich-Ranicki could be an irascible critic, fearless in defense of scathing judgments. Mr. Grass became a particular target. In 1995, four years before Mr. Grass won the Nobel Prize, a photograph of Mr. Reich-Ranicki appeared on the cover of the newsmagazine Der Spiegel showing him physically tearing apart Mr. Grass's latest novel, "Too Far Afield," which dealt with Germany's moral struggle to reconcile itself with its terrible past. Asked at the time by a correspondent for The New York Times whether he understood that he had insulted Mr. Grass, Mr. Reich-Ranicki said, "Of course." "He wrote a book that he considers to be the most important of his life, and he has to read in every newspaper that it's junk," Mr. Reich-Ranicki added. And in 2012 - six years after Mr. Grass stunned Europe when he revealed that he had been a member of the Waffen SS during World War II - Mr. Reich-Ranicki lashed out at Mr. Grass again, this time over a poem he had published, "What Must Be Said," accusing Israel of being a threat to world peace. Mr. Reich-Ranicki called it "disgusting." Mr. Reich-Ranicki was born Marcel Reich on June 2, 1920, in the industrial town of Wloclawek, Poland. When his father's business failed in 1929, Mr. Reich-Ranicki was sent to live with relatives in Berlin, where he attended high school, became fluent in the language and grew enthralled by German literature and music. He read voraciously and attended the opera, even as conditions grew harsher for Jews in the 1930s. As a Jew he was not permitted to attend college; his sweeping grasp of German culture since the Enlightenment was a product of his own self-study. In 1938, the Nazis arrested and deported him to Warsaw, where he rejoined his parents and brother. In the ghetto, he saw German soldiers kill Jews on the street. Working as a translator, he was a witness to crucial meetings between the Jewish and Nazi authorities. In one instance he typed out the transcript of a July 1942 meeting as a Nazi SS officer, Hermann Höfle, ordered Jewish leaders to assemble thousands of Jews every day for "resettlement" to death camps. Recounting the episode later, Mr. Reich-Ranicki noted that Nazi troops waiting outside in the streets had set up a gramophone to amuse themselves with Viennese waltzes. Hearing that translators, and their wives, were exempt for the time being, Mr. Reich-Ranicki married his sweetheart, Teofila, that same day. The marriage lasted seven decades; his wife died in 2011. In September 1942, Mr. Reich-Ranicki watched his own parents board cattle trucks bound for Treblinka. "My father looked at me helplessly, while my mother was surprisingly calm," he wrote. I knew I was seeing them for the last time.