Life
Walter Boehlich was born in Breslau, Silesia, as a son of writer Ernst Boehlich. During the Nazi regime, Boelich was discriminated at school because of his Jewish background. After World War II, he read philology at the University of Bonn and became the assistant of Prof. Ernst Robert Curtius, an expert on Romance studies and literary theory.
He worked as literary critic for the weekly newspaper Die Zeit and for the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung. As chief editor at Suhrkamp Verlag, he played a crucial part in making Suhrkamp a leading publishing house of German post-war literature and theory.
After he had left Suhrkamp after an argument over editors' participation rights in 1968, Boehlich wrote for the German magazine, Kursbuch. His pamphlet Autodafé on literature and its socio-historical background was published as a poster supplement to the magazine in 1968 and became a standard item of wall decoration in students' living communities of the time. Quote:
- Criticism is dead. Which one? The bourgeois kind that prevailed. It killed itself, died with the bourgeois world to which it belonged, died with the bourgeois literature that it slapped on the back, died with the bourgeois aesthetics on which it had set its foundations, died with the bourgeois god that had blessed it.
From November 1979 until January 2001, he wrote a monthly political column for the – otherwise satirical – German magazine, Titanic.
Boehlich translated several French, Spanish and Danish books.
Walter Boehlich was a member of the Deutsche Akademie für Sprache und Dichtung (Darmstadt). He received the 1990 Johann Heinrich Merck Prize, the 1997 Jane Scatcherd Translator Prize, the 2001 Heinrich Mann Prize and the Wilhelm-Merton-Preis für Europäische Übersetzungen (Wilhelm Merton Prize for European Translations).
In 2006, he died in Hamburg.
In an obit, literary critic Martin Lüdke wrote in the Frankfurter Rundschau (April 14, 2006):
- The essence of Suhrkamp Verlag, modern literature and corresponding theory, was owed – amongst others – to him. ... He was an accomplished literature scholar and knowledgeable about theory. That is why he could always tell his colleagues in their face what kind of 'nonsense' they just produced according to his invariably well-grounded opinion. Once I even saw him winning an argument over Marcel Reich-Ranicki and make him leave gulping and speechlessly. ... Seldom has an author made so many enemies with his analysis, especially among his colleagues who sensed how they were losing ground. With Walter Boehlich, one of the last great intellectuals of the old Federal Republic has died. Even though he had many enemies, there are many who have to be thankful to him – and are.
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