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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 18 March 2023
JUREK BECKER, THE THIRD AUTHOR from the German Democratic Republic to visit Oberlin in recent years (the first being Christa Wolf in 1974, followed by Ulrich Plenzdorf in 1975), moved from East to West Berlin last December. He is in possession of an unusual two-year exit visa that enables him to go back and forth from the West to East Germany, where his two teenage sons live. To date, he is the only East German writer to be permitted such freedom of movement outside that country. In November of 1976, Becker became embroiled in a human rights conflict with the government when he — along with eleven other East German writers — publicly protested the forced exiling of dissident poet-singer Wolf Biermann. In the ensuing months, he resigned from the powerful Writers’ Union, was thrown out of the Communist party, and subsequently was barred from making public appearances and publishing his writing in East Germany.
The son of Polish-Jewish parents, Jurek Becker was born in Lodz (Poland) in 1937. After the German invasion of Poland in 1939, he lived with his parents in the Lodz ghetto; from the beginning of 1943 until May of 1945 he was in concentration camps at Ravensbrück and Sachsenhausen. At the end of the Second World War he and his father (the only survivors of the immediate family) moved to Berlin, where young Jurek began to learn German and attended school for the first time at the age of nine. After completing his Abitur in 1955, he spent two years in the military service, then studied philosophy at the Humboldt University (East Berlin) until 1960 when he was expelled for political reasons. From this time on, Becker has earned his living as a freelance writer; before establishing himself as a novelist, he mainly wrote texts for political cabaret as well as screenplays for television and film.
International recognition came to Becker following the publication of his first novel, Jakob der Lügner (1969), which has been translated into twelve languages and made into a motion picture of the same title. It is the story of Jakob Heym, a middle-aged Jew in a Polish ghetto during the German occupation, who is forced by fate and circumstances to become a “liar.” Quite by accident, Jakob overhears a radio broadcast announcing that the Russian army is very close by, which means that the ghetto may soon be liberated.
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