The past year saw the publication of the eleventh, penultimate volume of selected writings by the film critic Frieda Grafe, Ins Kino! Münchner Filmtips 1970–1986 (“To the Movies! Munich Film Tips, 1970–1986”; Brinkmann & Bose) – a project initiated by her husband, Enno Patalas, five years ago, shortly before her death. It is rare for so-called secondary texts to be honored with such a definitive edition, but Grafe’s criticism deserves it. She retold films and other artistic projects as movements of thought, associations of ideas and intuitions, and in so doing she created them a second time. Combining the roles of artistic defender and ideal viewer (she never published negative reviews, choosing other means to communicate what she didn’t like), she was able to draw out textures and nuances from works that even the artists who made them could barely have dreamed of. Going beyond auteur theory in this way brought about the emergence of Grafe’s own writerly universe, which not only contained a literary world in its own right – albeit one fashioned from the films and books of others – but, above all, engendered the most beautiful prose I have read in German in years. With the small tribute here, this reviewer hopes to bring her writing to the attention of non-German-speaking readers: It would be a just recompense for an author who herself knew – in translating Artaud, Sternberg, Hitchcock, and others – how to make the most elegant German sentences from those in French and English.