not applaud, as confirmed by television footage of the event. Some days after the event, and again on 9 November 1998, the 60th anniversary of the Kristallnacht pogrom against German Jews, Bubis, president of the Central Council of Jews in Germany, accused Walser of "intellectual arson" () and claimed that Walser's speech was both "trying to block out history or, respectively, to eliminate the remembrance" and pleading "for a culture of looking away and thinking away". Then the controversy started. As described by Karsten Luttmer: Walser replied by accusing Bubis to have stepped out of dialog between people. Walser and Bubis met on 14 December at the offices of the to discuss the heated controversy and to bring the discussion to a close. They were joined by Frank Schirrmacher of the and Salomon Korn of the Central Council of Jews in Germany. Afterward, Bubis withdrew his claim that Walser had been intentionally incendiary, but Walser maintained that there was no misinterpretation by his opponents. Death of a Critic In his 2002 roman-à-clef Death of a Critic, Martin Walser denounced the one of the most prominent literary critics in Germany, Marcel Reich-Ranicki, labeling him as a symbol of a corrupted cultural milieu as well as attacking his person. Its publication started a scandal, especially considering Reich-Ranicki's Jewish heritage and Walser's former membership in the Nazi Party. Even before the novel was fully released, the book was hotly debated. On 29 May, months before the book's August release date, Frank Schirrmacher, editor of the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, wrote an open letter to Walser to inform him that contrary to tradition, an excerpt from his book would not be published in the feuilleton of the FAZ: "This book is an execution, a settlement of accounts, a document of hate", he wrote. The FAZ continued to publish expressions of support for Marcel Reich-Ranicki, who was Schirrmacher's predecessor at the FAZ. Its arch-rival daily paper, the Süddeutsche Zeitung from Munich, supported Walser. Reich-Ranicki commented himself in May 2010 in an interview with Der Spiegel: "I don't think that he is an anti-Semite. But it is important to him to demonstrate that the critic, who allegedly tortured him most, is a Jew, too. He expects his public to follow him in this. You see, there never was an anti-Semitic line or remark from Grass, not one. And I certainly haven't written only positively about his books."