Since the first episodes of the “literary quartet” have been available on YouTube, it has happened that younger female culture critics who were born too late for this television event have been sending each other links. Subject line “WTF”. The abysmal lack of humor of the male critic popes that can be seen there, the authoritarianism manifested right down to the seating arrangement, the boasting, the panic in judgment: Even before all literary critical considerations, one cannot believe that people were still talking to each other like this so short time ago . And for entertainment! Sigrid Löffler sits in the middle of this ice hell.
She is the intellectual of the group, knows the world literatures in addition to the canon of the post-war period, has access to new aesthetics, talks about Elfriede Jelinek, Paul Auster, Michel Houellebecq, unexpectedly falls into the role of spoilsport among the polemicizing, pointing with the index fingers men and doesn’t even get upset about all this.
When you see this, you feel deep gratitude, as is often the case for the battles that previous generations fought: without them, our current sensitivity to toxic styles of conversation and gender justice would not have been possible either. Maybe, one might think with these videos, Sigrid Löffler has done emancipation a special favor in addition to literary analyzes that endure: In the early “literary quartet” she never gives in to the urge usually instilled in girls, a situation by smiling or laughing to defuse. Beneath the fashionably broad shoulders of the Eighties, which have seldom seemed so plausible as they are as protective clothing for this show, she retains the tension of her cool seriousness. You can see how she is subtly amused by her colleagues Marcel Reich-Ranicki and Hellmuth Karasek.
Slumbering in the newspaper archives, hopefully forgotten forever, are the misogynistic attributes with which such an attitude could apparently still be described in the 1990s. And although she is the heroine of this story today, it didn’t end well in the end. The scene in which Sigrid Löffler quarrels with Reich-Ranicki over a Haruki Murakami novel is one of the most famous in German television history. Quick-witted, while still on the show, she separated literary criticism from personal disparagement and left the “Literary Quartet” in 2000 after twelve years.
However, before she became a television critic, she already had a career in journalism. Born in Aussig, today’s Ústí nad Labem, in 1942, she grew up in Vienna. Her father, a teacher, her mother, a housewife, and the milieu later described her as philistine, keen on culture, and spoke of her early hunger for music, theater, and books. She was not suitable as a teacher and joined the editorial staff of the Austrian newspaper in the 1960s Press a, foreign policy department. She saw the Prague Spring and the Northern Ireland conflict as a reporter.
After that she was editor of the magazine for 21 years, between 1972 and 1993 profilewhere at some point the 18-year-old young professional Eva Menasse appeared, who later in an interview with the daily mirror remembered: “And then the editorial conferences! I stood in the doorway, stiff with shyness, there sat all the heavy smoking, important men, and right in the middle was Sigrid Löffler.”
The new millennium of literary criticism began with “Literatures”.
There, and as a juror at the Berlin Theatertreffen, she became a cultural critic. In a collection of her “Criticisms, Portraits, Glossen”, which appeared as a book in 1995, she says in the introduction that as a female critic in Austria you were as good as invisible: “What you write is not noticed, but they gossip about and with it made known. To be known by looking away – the Austrian form of recognition.” Her catchphrase of “Aushaidering Austria” was not easily forgiven either. In 1993 she became profile quit.
In mockery of the affable reactionary, Sigrid Löffler has always shone particularly well. Her takedown of the Büchner Prize to Martin Mosebach in 2007 is legendary: “Since the feuilleton has moved from the thinker’s room to the bourgeois salon and has made itself comfortable there in Biedermeier style, Mosebach’s anti-modern affects have also become socially acceptable. His admirers see it as a pleasing representation of what consider them to be bourgeois values of yore.” The milieu criticism would have remained weak if it had not referred to language criticism: “Moreover, Mosebach insisted on writing the sofa and the elephant consistently with ph.”
She could only stand up to the dominant world of critics in her own magazine. After an interlude as head of the feature section timewhich ended in 1999 after only three years, was founded by Sigrid Löffler in 2000 together with Hanna Leitgeb and Jan Bürger literatures: A magazine about books, the plural of the name should be the program, they were looking for a “style of critical thinking” that had something to do with the “networks and permeability of today’s world”. Thus began the new millennium in literary criticism.
“Literary criticism is something different than journalistic service.”
The German media landscape is closer to the idealized model of a New York Review of Books never came: In literatures wrote, alongside selected critics, WG Sebald, Homi K. Bhabha, Susan Sontag – among others. Werner Hamacher wrote about Gilles Deleuze, Gisela von Wysocki about Marguerite Duras, but also Moritz Rinke about the Kaffee Burger and Josef Haslinger about Austria. A cosmopolitan concept of culture materialized that is so shockingly rare in the German-speaking world.
In a book from 2014, Sigrid Löffler then declared the literature of language changes and migration to be the “new world literature” – and had to deal with disappointed readers who would have preferred to have a new canon prescribed. Today one would perhaps understand Sigrid Löffler’s argument better, because postcolonial theory has also popularized terms such as “hybridity” or “telling from the fringes”. If only completely different fronts had not hardened again in the debate.
Sigrid Löffler never seemed stubborn, changed her mind when times changed. For example, about Peter Handke, whom she defended when there were protests against his being awarded the Heinrich Heine Prize in 2006 – while adding her own position as a juror.
The discord in her working life was great. But it didn’t give the impression that it was about vanity, more about the integrity of the criticism: “Literary critics are not literary business noodles, and literary criticism is something different than journalistic service, something different than market-bound adulation and advertising for easy reading. Literary criticism also has to being able to say no,” she wrote in the 2008 editorial of the last issue of literatures, for which she was responsible as editor. She was no longer able to agree with the Friedrich-Berlin-Verlag, where the magazine was published, about its future direction and left. 2011 became literatures to supplement the Ringier magazine Cicero and dissolved.
Since then, Sigrid Löffler has been working as a freelance critic. The time of the critic popes is long gone, but it is still here. On Sunday she will be 80 years old, she reads and writes undeterred. A role model for many who came after her.