Marcel Reich-Ranicki - Mein Leben

It is one of the moving survival stories of the Holocaust and one of the great love stories of the 20th century: Marcel Reich-Ranicki's autobiography adaptation 'My Life' with Matthias Schweighöfer in the leading role. In flashbacks, the film tells the early life story of Marcel Reich-Ranicki, who was born in 1920 in Wloclawek, Poland. After his school days in Berlin, he was denied the opportunity to study in Germany as a Jew. In the autumn of 1938, a few months after graduating from high school, he was deported to Warsaw, and in 1940 he was resettled in the ghetto, where he also found the love of his life in great need: the wedding anniversary with Teophila - called 'Tosia' - coincided with the beginning of the evacuation of the ghetto. Marcel's parents, his brother and Tosia's mother were deported to the extermination camps and killed there. In February 1943, Marcel and his wife managed to escape from the ghetto to the Warsaw underground. In the 1950s, they both decided to take an unusual step: they returned to the Federal Republic of Germany. Marcel Reich-Ranicki becomes the German 'critic pope'. Despite everything, his love of the German language and literature has remained with him.