Frank Schirrmacher, who has died aged 54 after a heart attack, was not just one of the leading lights of German letters, but also an intriguingly paradoxical figure. As the publisher of the professorial newspaper Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, with a doctorate on Franz Kafka and a string of widely discussed essays and books under his belt, he seemed to fit perfectly the traditional mould of the bourgeois European intellectual.
In his writing, he often conjured up a world in which the cultural values of old Europe were under attack, particularly from Silicon Valley and Wall Street, but his efforts to understand these new forces often far outstripped those of their cheerleaders. When it came to modern science and technology, his inherent scepticism could rarely restrain his curiosity.
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