Literary critic Ulrich Greiner turns into eighty | EUROtoday

When the newly based Hofmannsthal-Gesellschaft met her first convention in Frankfurt in September 1968, Ulrich Greiner was current: on the tender age of 23 and as a rapporteur of the FAZ, the literature a part of which was then led by Karl Heinz Bohrer. Greiner complained in regards to the plush -charged membership environment of the occasion, lacking sober scientific and warned of the very willingness to adore among the many roughly 140 individuals who known as as much as keep away from the looks of an esoteric circle of associates who, as a substitute of “practicing critical argument, decays in veneration and cult”. He didn’t need to consolation him that there was discuss of the “secret of poetic message” within the opening contribution. Back then, literature and coping with her didn’t need to be understood as arcane science. Soberness was known as his commandment.

A nearly half a century later, he opened one in all his quite a few contributions to Frankfurt anthology with the query of why poems could be learn in any respect, and offers the reply himself: “Because the encounter with a poem can become a moment of happiness. And the poem is as infinite as the chance of happiness.” That sounds nearly enthusiastic. Passion is now known as his commandment.

A contradiction? No, as a result of Ulrich Greiner is a type of comfortable literary critics who, even after a few years of labor, have by no means been misplaced about love for criticism. Staying enthusiastic is a present that the critic deserves by researching and opening the causes of his personal enthusiasm. With others, with Ulrich Greiner’s phrases: “The reader does not fall in the lap”.

Two years after his article on the Hofmannsthal Society, Greiner joins the FAZ function editorial group. A yr earlier than he leaves her once more to maneuver to Hamburg to the “Zeit”, the place he ought to first lead the feuilleton after which the literary division, the critic strikes an evening within the “Dorian Gray” for a report within the “Images and times” grey stress complement, then one of many nation’s largest discotheque. What pursuits him will not be the music, however a sociology of the viewers, a milieus research. The discotheque seems to him as a machine for collective noise manufacturing, though a collective doesn’t exist right here: “Narcissus in the disco-donner” was the heading of the 1979 article, which defines the discotheque as a booming playground, on which the tradition of workers practices the managed extra: “Democratic as a supermarket, that freedom without consequences at best”.

Greiner has at all times caught to seek for phenomena the place the situation of society may be learn and its change may be illustrated. Before his books on literature, together with a “reading guide” (2005) and a “poetry guide” (2009), he publishes cultural -critical glosses and essays entitled “The State of Things” (1987). In 2014, “loss of shame – from the change in emotional culture” and in 2022 the band “serving messengers – from butterers to the angels” adopted. But there’s a turning level between these books: With “homeless – confessions of a conservative”, Greiner publicly takes the break with the positions of the left or social -liberal intellectuals, which he had represented all his life.

The events are numerous and vary from “adaptation moralism”, which he sees in lots of main media at work, a few supposedly failed migration coverage since 2015 till marginalization and exclusion of conservative positions in public discourse. Ulrich Greiner has at all times been controversial, to contradictions and to endure them. This Friday he can be eighty years outdated.