Biography of Jurek Becker

Jurek Becker was a Polish-born Holocaust survivor and an important author of fiction having to do with the Holocaust and German and Jewish identity. During the war, Becker lived in the Jewish ghetto of Łódź and survived periods in the Ravensbrück and Sachsenhausen concentration camps. He settled in East Germany with his father after the war—his mother was killed in the Holocaust—and there he began to immerse himself in the German language. In East Germany, which was administered by the Soviet Union, Becker criticized Soviet policies and censorship. He began to write screenplays in the 1960s for DEFA, East Germany's state-owned film studio. After Becker's 1965 screenplay "Jakob der Lügner" was rejected by DEFA for its portrayal of Jews in the Holocaust, he turned it into a novel—translated as Jacob the Liar—published in 1969. The novel was a success, earning the Heinrich Mann Prize, the Literary Prize of the City of Bremen, and the Swiss Charles Veillon Prize. Such acclaim for Jakob der Lügner inspired the state media apparatus to produce a movie version of the novel. The film was also a success, receiving the distinction of GDR's National Prize Second Class and an Academy Award nomination.

Becker's criticisms of the state culminated in his joining a 1977 protest against the banishment of musician Wolf Biersmann. Becker left for West Germany in December of that year and would reside in West Berlin through the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989. There, he produced novels as well as scripts for television and the cinema. He died in 1997, leaving behind a tremendous legacy for the screen and page. As Sander L. Gilman, who taught with and hosted Becker, and who later wrote a biography of him, puts it, Becker's "was an atypical and exemplary life."

In addition to the prizes that Becker's work earned him in East Germany, Becker also won the Adolf Grimme Prize, Gold, in 1987; the Bundesfilmpreis - Filmband in Gold in 1991; and the Order of Merit of the FRG in 1992.