Samuel Beckett was the poster boy in the German press yesterday, his piercing eyes staring out from half a dozen newspapers marking his 100th birthday.
The writers in the German feuilleton pages are known for their florid style and didn't disappoint yesterday, filling inch after humourless inch with Beckett broodings.
"We survived him but we will never get over him," declared Peter Kümmel, the theatre critic of Die Zeit in an eight-page supplement to Beckett, dubbed "The Seer".
Mr Kümmel suggested that Beckett's two contributions to theatre are the end-game dramatic situation, and brevity.
"Beckett found that everything in art had already been said and now it was just about saying it shorter . . . What he left out screamed out, in its absence, to be noticed. No one left as much out as Beckett. He constantly set new left-out records."
The newspaper published a one-page "dramolet", With Sam in the S-Bahn, and an interview with the actors from the legendary 1975 production of Godot at Berlin's Schiller Theater, which was directed by Beckett, apparently a happy collaboration.
"We possess the only photographs showing Beckett laughing," said Stefan Wigger, who played Vladimir.
Klaus Völker, the Schiller Theater dramaturg at the time, reminded readers of the Berliner Zeitung how, in East Berlin, Beckett's plays were considered "inhuman" and the author was accused of propagating a "philosophy of hopelessness".
In the Neue Zürcher Zeitung, John Banville praised Beckett in an essay as "the exemplary literary artist".
As well as newspapers, Beckett was celebrated on two television stations last night, at a reading in Berlin's Deutsches Theater and at a Beckett exhibition in Kassel, home to his cousin, Peggy Sinclair.