Walter Boehlich


Walter Boehlich was a German journalist, literary critic, literary editor and translator.

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:
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. 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.
In 2006, he died in Hamburg.
In an obit, literary critic Martin Lüdke wrote in the Frankfurter Rundschau :

Works