Der Kanon

Edited by the literary critic Marcel Reich-Ranicki (1920–2013), he called the anthology, announced on 18 June 2001 in the German news magazine Der Spiegel under the title "The Canon of worthwhile German Works", his magnum opus.

[1] Reich-Ranicki sought to differentiate his anthology from previous compilations in his hope to imagine a "reader judge" such as teachers, students, librarians, who would need to draw from this canon because they were in the "first line of those who deal with literature professionally.

Reich-Ranicki included not just essays in a classic sense, but also a wide variety of critical works including criticism of film, literature, music reviews, theater reviews, essays, speeches, diaries, letters, ephemera, and aphorisms, spanning both fictional and nonfictional literature.

The "essay" canon contains 255 articles from 166 authors covering a wide variety of subject matter.

For his book, he analyzed the texts of the twenty volume novel-box of the series, calculated their average sentence length (18 words), and, with the help of a computer script, generated a book that only contained these average sentences.