In celebrating the 20th anniversary of the peaceful revolution that brought down the Wall, we will profile over the course of 2009 important East Germans who have shaped beyond all physical borders the cultural, intellectual and political life of postwar Germany and Europe. 

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"At my desk I am able to fly a little bit," Jurek Becker once said in an interview with "Der Spiegel" Magazine.

(© picture-alliance / akg-images / Binder )

The dissident Jurek Becker was a widely acclaimed author and screenplay writer.  The recipient of the Order of Merit of the Federal Republic of Germany was born the son of Jewish parents in Lodz, Poland.  His exact date of birth is unknown because his official documents were destroyed during the war, but it is presumed to be September 30, 1937.  He died of cancer on March 14, 1997, in Sieseby, Schleswig-Holstein, at the age of 59.

Becker, who lived with his father in the GDR following the war, came into conflict with the communist state early on as a member of the Socialist Unity Party of Germany (SED).  He was expelled from Humboldt University in Berlin shortly before completing his studies in philosophy and was monitored by the state security apparatus (Stasi) as a “victim of fascism.”  After signing an open letter, along with 11 other writers, to protest the move by the communists to strip the lyricist and songwriter Wolf Biermann of his citizenship in 1976, Becker was expunged from the SED party.  A year later, with the approval of the GDR authorities, he resettled in the West and turned to writing there.  By that time, his books were no longer published in the GDR and his film projects were rejected.

In his early works, Becker primarily dealt with life during World War II and the difficulties people had to confront during that time.  One such example is his successful debut novel Jacob the Liar, which has been translated into more than 20 languages.  The novel, published in 1969, tells of the grim life in a Polish ghetto.  Jacob, a shoemaker, claims to have hidden a radio and uses it to give the other prisoners hope and courage to live by inventing news stories about a speedy liberation by the Russians.  Although Jurek Becker was in the Lodz ghetto as a child and his mother was murdered by the Nazis, he portrays life in the ghetto with much humor and light-heartedness.  He does not trivialize or sugarcoat, but views it all with a certain degree of distance and irony, making it possible to cope with the life-threatening situation.

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Jurek Becker, seen here in a photo from 1993, was a unique voice in German literature.

(© picture-alliance / akg-images / Niklaus Stauss )

Becker was awarded several literary prizes, even in the GDR, for the extraordinary success of his novel.  In 1974, Jacob the Liar was made into a film by the GDR director Frank Beyer.  This was the only film of the GDR DEFA production studio that was ever nominated for an Oscar, and it ultimately went home empty-handed.  After Hollywood became aware of the screenplay, it produced an American remake in 1999 with the actors Robin Williams and Armin Mueller-Stahl.

In the late 1980s. Becker achieved great popularity in West Germany through the television series Liebling Kreuzberg (Dear Kreuzberg), for which he wrote the script.  In the series, the actor Manfred Krug – another artist who resettled in the West from the GDR and a good friend of Becker – plays a headstrong attorney from West Berlin.  Becker received the Adolf-Grimme Award in Gold, one of the most prominent prizes for German television programming, for his script.

Related Links:

Jurek Becker - Publisher Suhrkamp / Insel (in German)

Biography of Jurek Becker – CineGraph (in German)

Jurek Becker articles and interview - Spiegel Online

1974 DEFA Film “Jacob the Liar” by director Frank Beyer - German Films

1974 DEFA Film “Jacob the Liar” by director Frank Beyer - IMDB

1999 Film “Jacob the Liar” by director Peter Kassovitz - IMDB