BECKER, JUREK

BECKER, JUREK (1937–1997), German writer of Polish-Jewish background. Born in Lodz, Becker grew up in the Lodz ghetto and the concentration camps of Ravensbrueck and Sachsenhausen. In 1945 he moved with his parents, who had survived the war together, to East Berlin. He joined the Freie Deutsche Jugend Communist youth organization and the Communist Party (SED) while studying philosophy. In 1960   he was ousted from the university for political reasons. After he studied at the Film School of Babelsberg he worked as a playwright and writer in East Berlin. Becoming more critical of the East German regime and defending dissidents publicly, he was thrown out of the Communist Party in 1976. A year later he left East Germany and, after a brief stay in the United States, settled in West Berlin. Becker's best-known book is his first novel Jakob der Lugner (1968; Jacob the Liar, 1996), which tells the story of Jacob, who owns a radio in the Warsaw ghetto and invents hopeful stories about an imminent liberation. It became the basis of one of the most successful East German movies. Der Boxer (1976) describes the new existence of a concentration camp survivor, while Bronsteins Kinder (1986; Bronstein's Children, 1991) deals with the revenge of survivors against their Nazi torturers. In the 1980s and 1990s he became well known as a scriptwriter for many German TV comedies. Becker never denied his Jewish background, which is apparent in most of his major works, but stressed that in his life, Judaism played no active role. -BIBLIOGRAPHY: S.L. Gilman, Jurek Becker: A Life in Five Worlds (2003). (Michael Brenner (2nd ed.)