Philip Oltermann 

Frank Schirrmacher obituary

Former publisher of the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, whose writing on culture and technology spanned the ideological divide
  
  

Frank Schirrmacher, journalist, former publisher of the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung
Frank Schirrmacher was the first journalist to interview the German novelist Günter Grass about his membership of the Waffen SS. Photograph: Fredrik von Erichsen/EPA Photograph: Fredrik von Erichsen/EPA

Frank Schirrmacher, who has died aged 54 after a heart attack, was not just one of the leading lights of German letters, but also an intriguingly paradoxical figure. As the publisher of the professorial newspaper Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, with a doctorate on Franz Kafka and a string of widely discussed essays and books under his belt, he seemed to fit perfectly the traditional mould of the bourgeois European intellectual.

In his writing, he often conjured up a world in which the cultural values of old Europe were under attack, particularly from Silicon Valley and Wall Street, but his efforts to understand these new forces often far outstripped those of their cheerleaders. When it came to modern science and technology, his inherent scepticism could rarely restrain his curiosity.

Schirrmacher's instincts were often conservative. His 2004 book Der Methusalem-Komplott (The Methuselah Conspiracy) warned about the demographic shock that would hit Germany between 2010 and 2020. He could have sided with the youthful minority that would have to work harder to shoulder the economic burden; instead, he rallied to the defence of growing army of octogenarians.

But in recent years he increasingly freewheeled across the ideological divide. "I am starting to believe that the left was right", was the title of one of his essays in the wake of the financial crisis. "The crisis of so-called bourgeois politics, a politics which has kidnapped the bourgeoisie in the way communism once kidnapped the proletariat, is developing into a confidence crisis for political conservatism," he wrote.

Born in Wiesbaden, son of Halina and Herbert Schirrmacher, he grew up in a petit bourgeois household; his was father a civil servant. After academic stints in Heidelberg, Cambridge and Yale, he gained his doctorate at the University of Siegen in 1988, with a thesis on Kafka, Harold Bloom and deconstruction that would come back to haunt him later in his career: in 1996, Der Spiegel published an article alleging that Schirrmacher had cut corners on the way to his PhD, recycling previously published material.

By then, he was already known as the "child emperor" of German letters. Having joined Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung straight after university, he became the paper's youngest ever literary editor, aged 30. It was a daunting task: his predecessor was postwar Germany's most influential critic, the "literary pope" Marcel Reich-Ranicki.

In 1994, Schirrmacher was made the youngest-ever editor of Frankfurter Allgemeine's Feuilleton (culture) section and one of the five co-publishers listed underneath the paper's masthead. That year, Time magazine listed him as one of the world's 100 most influential people.

What Schirrmacher published on his pages often set the agenda across Germany, such as when he accused the influential novelist Martin Walser of toying with antisemitic cliches and became the first journalist to interview Günter Grass about his membership of the Waffen SS.

Der Methusalem-Komplott was an instant national bestseller, as were its successors Minimum (2006) and Payback (2009), the latter subtitled "How the information age forces us to do things we don't want to do, and how we can win back control over our thoughts".

His most recent book, Ego: The Game of Life, published last year, saw him trying to settle scores with neoliberal economics. It argued that the Randian, cold-war-era view of the world, which broke down human relations into a series of equations and game-theory scenarios, had subconsciously been carried over into the information age and allowed capitalism to run unrestrained. Real economics, typified by the German Mittelstand (the country's medium-sized businesses), could provide a path to a better future, he hoped.

His management style at Frankfurter Allgemeine would prove as controversial as his theses, with Schirrmacher not averse to dictating copy over his colleagues' shoulders. An illustrious cast of editors left the Feuilleton under his command in the late 1990s, after complaining to the editorial board that the office had become a place "that one enters with anxiety in the morning and leaves with relief in the evening". One of them went on to write a crime novel in which a character seemingly modelled on Schirrmacher was murdered and eaten by badgers.

Over recent years, Schirrmacher increasingly steered the paper's arts pages away from their literary roots, turning them into arguably the country's leading forum for debate on digital issues. "In terms of cultural coverage of digital issues, there was simply no competition to FAZ – not in Europe and not in the US – and it was all Frank's achievement," said Evgeny Morozov, one of the writers supported under Schirrmacher's editorship. "For me, Frank was always the spiritual connection to the great Frankfurter Zeitung of the Weimar era – the one that gave employment to such great thinkers as Walter Benjamin and Siegfried Kracauer."

Schirrmacher is survived by his wife, the journalist Rebecca Casati, and their daughter, as well as a son from his previous marriage, to the author Angelika Klüssendorf.

• Frank Schirrmacher, journalist, born 5 September 1959; died 12 June 2014

 

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