A European man of letters: Karl Heinz Bohrer

The German literary critic, writer and journalist Karl Heinz Bohrer died on 4 August. It was the end of a difficult decade in which he had been ill many times. He had succumbed to Covid, emerged a weaker man, only to suffer a massive stroke. He was in hospital for forty days, but never properly recovered consciousness.

Frequent illness had not slowed down his productivity. The extent of his bibliography is stunning: twenty-eight books, and not just any books. There is a breath-taking density of thought about them and an ability to muster the entire repertory of classical literature from the Greeks to today. There is even a last book in production, a posthumous work from Karl Heinz, a message from beyond.

Karl Heinz was my friend. He entered my life nearly twenty years ago, after his first wife, the writer Undine Grünter, died in Paris. He was soon to remarry one of my best friends: Angela Bielenberg, née von der Schulenburg. All I knew of him at the start was contained in some kind words he had written about my biography of Frederick the Great. I am by no means an expert on German literature, the field he professed and in which he was one of the world’s greatest authorities. I am sorry to say that large amounts of his oeuvre went unfathomed.

He was born in Cologne on 26 September 1932, the only child of an economist and his flighty wife. He attended a humanist gymnasium or grammar school where the curriculum was based on Greek and Latin and attributed his occasionally surprising weakness in English to that. Latterly he boarded at the Birklehof, a liberal school in the Black Forest, where he adopted a beret and existentialist philosophy. He also developed an abiding love of France, just across the Rhine.

Bohrer proceeded to university at Cologne, Göttingen and Heidelberg, taking his doctorate at the latter. He then slipped out of university life to run the arts and books pages of Die Welt in Hamburg, followed by the most prestigious German daily, the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung. He worked at the FAZ between 1968 and 1974, until he was ousted by the publisher Joachim Fest, who replaced him as literary editor with the redoubtable Marcel Reich-Ranicki.

It was a time of great turbulence in Germany…Karl Heinz was controversial for a short-lived association with Ulrike Meinhof from the bloodthirsty Baader-Meinhof terrorist group, but he distanced himself from her when she took up arms against the state. Fest sent him to London to cover cultural affairs and he shocked German sensibilities once again by supporting Mrs Thatcher’s Falklands War. Karl Heinz was no pacifist.

In 1977 he prepared to slip back into academic life by taking his second doctorate or Habilitation at the University of Bielefeld. The subject was the early writings of Ernst Jünger (then and now controversial for his complex role in Nazi Germany) and the aesthetics of terror. From 1982 to 1987 he occupied the chair of modern German letters at Bielefeld. In 1984 he became editor of the forbiddingly intellectual monthly Merkur. After standing down at Bielefeld, he continued to teach doctoral students for a semester a year at Stanford in California.

His experiences of growing up under the Nazis, and above all during the war, formed the background to his first volume of autobiography, Granatsplitter (Shrapnel, 2012). Five years later he published a second volume: Jetzt (Now). Karl Heinz’s autobiography unsurprisingly revealed a more light-hearted side of his character. On two occasions I worked for him writing essays for Merkur. I could see that he would have been an inspirational tutor. He helped me shape the essays, and gave me fascinating suggestions as to what I might read. One formed part of a special issue on heroism, a subject close to Karl Heinz’s heart, as he was not in agreement with the intellectual Left’s refusal to accept the existence of heroics.

Quite recently he fired up at an intemperate letter to the Spectator suggesting that Stauffenberg and his fellow plotters against Hitler had been Nazis interested only in saving their own skins. His response was impassioned and categorical.

The German papers are filled with obituaries to Karl Heinz. It is a sad truth that I have learned so much more about him now he is no longer here. For the most part the English and American press has been silent. I offered an article to the most highbrow paper in Britain. They told me that Karl Heinz would mean nothing to their readers. They were probably right, but it is an admission to a terrible provincialism in this country when it comes to the broader world of knowledge. Only one of his books has been translated into English to date: Suddenness, and that was forty years ago.

As it was, Karl Heinz spent two long periods of his life in England, not to mention many years in Paris, whence he commuted to Bielefeld for work. Latterly he was heaped with honours: The Lessing Prize, the Thomas Mann Prize, membership of the German Academy, the Bundesverdienstkreuz (I was at the German ambassador’s residence in 2014 to see him receive it). Many disagreed with him, but he was always hugely respected.

Karl Heinz was not the easiest man to define, although critics were able to agree that he fitted into no definable category. Reich-Ranicki mocked (he always mocked) that no one would understand him. The most touching obituary comes from Germany’s greatest living intellectual: Jürgen Habermas in the FAZ. Habermas admits that they never saw eye to eye, but liked his fellow Rhinelander none the less for it.

Karl Heinz comes across as an outsider, who chose to live out his life in voluntary exile in Paris and London. In England he admired the rather more dilettante non-university-based approach to scholarship that possibly struck horror in his former colleagues. He was no stock German academic — far from it. His career in journalism helped. In some ways he came closest to Heine, who observed his fellow Germans with sadness and occasional satire. Heine, however, does not figure in Bohrer’s triumvirate of gods: Jünger, Hölderlin and Baudelaire.

To his obituarists, Karl Heinz was perceived as a radical aesthete above all – a “gentleman anarchist” or a “nihilist revolutionary” who made light of Germany’s bland leaders, Helmut Kohl and Angela Merkel in particular. The philistine provincialism of Germany irked him; garden gnomes, trellises, the “comfortable” in general, and the comfortable Left in particular; he took aim at a particularly Teutonic brand of vulgarity. He rejected critical theory, which has taken hold of our universities too. On a more positive note, they pointed out that Karl Heinz stood for a number of aesthetic concepts that he applied with a broad brush to literature, such as the terror of appearing and expectation, the aesthetics of horror and evil, pessimism in romanticism, the limits of aesthetics, the aesthetics of the state and (of course) irony.

Much of what I read in the German papers cast Karl Heinz in a stark new light. But for me he was above all an affectionate apparition, balancing a steaming trencher of goulash in one hand and a bottle of red wine in the other; and quite possibly the warmest, kindest, most intellectually alert man I have ever met.

T his tribute first appeared on Giles MacDonogh’s website here. It and the portrait by Michael Daley are reproduced by kind permission of the author and artist.

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