Schirrmacher, Frank

Journalist, publisher of the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung (FAZ)

Born: 05.09.1959 in Wiesbaden

Died: 12.06.2014 in Frankfurt am Main

Schirrmacher was considered one of the most important publicists in the Federal Republic of Germany. He graduated from the Humboldt School in Wiesbaden in 1979. After studying German and English language and literature in Heidelberg and philosophy and literature in Cambridge, he completed his master's degree in 1984 and his doctorate in 1985 with a thesis on Franz Kafka.

At the suggestion of Dolf Sternberger, Joachim Fest (1926-2006) brought him into the cultural editorial department of the FAZ as a trainee. From 01.07.1985 he became features editor and from 01.01.1989, as successor to Marcel Reich-Ranicki (1920-2013), head of the "Literature and Literary Life" editorial department. In 1994, he took over from Fest as the editor responsible for the features section of the FAZ. In this role, he stimulated numerous cultural debates and published several books that were also politically influential, such as "Das Methusalem-Komplott" (2004), which sparked the demographic debate, as well as "Payback" (2009) and "Ego - das Spiel des Lebens" (2013), in which he described the social dimensions of digital change. Schirrmacher has received numerous awards, including the Jacob Grimm Prize for the German Language in 2007.