Jurek Becker. The author of “Jacob the Liar”

From the ghetto to East Berlin author
 

After the war, the Bekkers, father and son, settled in East Berlin, where the father renamed himself “Becker”, using “Max” as his first name. They spoke only German with each other in order to learn the language more quickly. For a future writer, Becker’s progress in learning German was anything but ideal. According to Gilman, his biographer, it was not clear what his native language really was. As a child, he spoke Polish, but also learned Yiddish through his parents, before coming into contact with the “camp language” – the drills and commands used in the camps. Becker retained the words in his memory which at that time were essential in order to survive, such as alles alle (“nothing left”), antreten – Zählappell (“report for muster – roll call”), or dalli-dalli (“quick-quick”). In his own words, when his father found him again in 1945, he spoke Polish like a four-year-old, not an eight-year-old.[5]

First and foremost, however, it was important to master the language of his new homeland so that he would be able to engage with the other children in school. Another problem was that as a result of the war, Becker did not start school until he was nine. This meant that he was a whole head taller than the other children, while at the same time, he was way behind them when it came to his language abilities.[6] As he would later recall: “There was no school achievement for which my father praised me more than for good grades in dictation and essay writing. Together, we developed a clear reward system: for one page of writing, the highest reward was a total of 50 pfennigs, while every mistake was punished with the deduction of five pfennigs.”[7]

In 1955, Jurek joined the Free German Youth (Freie Deutsche Jugend, FDJ), and became a member of the Socialist Unity Party of Germany (SED) in 1957. However, this in no way meant that he always agreed with the political system. In 1960, he took leave of absence from his studies of philosophy at the Humboldt University in Berlin, and was expelled from the university as a result. Allegedly, he was involved in physical fights while spending time on a farm helping with the harvest, although political reasons were also given for the measures taken against him.[8]

The author of “Jacob the Liar”
 

During this period, he also took his first steps as a writer. As a script writer working as an employee for the DEFA (Deutsche Film AG, the publicly owned film company in the GDR – translator’s note), he wrote several plays and scripts for TV, including “Jakob der Lügner”. After the script for “Jakob der Lügner” was rejected, he converted it into a novel, and in so doing, produced his most famous work. In 1974, the script was filmed after all, with Armin Mueller-Stahl, who would later become a world star, in one of the main roles. Together with his later novels, “Der Boxer” (1976, English translation: “The Boxer”, 2002) and “Bronsteins Kinder”, (1986, English translation: “Bronstein’s Children”, 1999), “Jacob the Liar” became part of what the critics referred to as the “Holocaust trilogy”. In the last interview he gave before his death, he talked to the magazine “Der Spiegel” about “Jacob the Liar”: “For me, the book was a great piece of good fortune. It was so successful that my life as a writer became a bed of roses.”[9]