Becker, Jürgen (Cologne, 1932- ), lived from 1939 in Erfurt and returned in 1947 to West Germany. During the 1950s Becker had various jobs before engaging in radio and publishing work. From 1975 to 1994 he was head of the department for radio plays at the Deutschlandfunk in Cologne where he had settled in 1950. Becker began with experimental, anti-grammatical poetry (see Heissenbüttel, H.) before expanding the range of his techniques which include prose poems (Langgedichte) and the description of real places drawn from his own experience. Typically, he chooses to look outwards from some confined space at open country. This is already perceptible in the experimental texts of Felder (1964), in which the city of his birth represents the point of vantage, and Ränder (1968). Although attempts pointing to ‘visual poetry’ (see Konkrete Poesie) rarely recur, the idea of presenting perceptions as ‘pictures’ remains an essential part of Becker's writing; in Eine Zeit ohne Wörter (1971) photography replaces language altogether, though he was equally drawn to paintings and in Fenster und Stimmen (1982) wrote the poems for the volume's pictures by his wife Rango Bohne. Windows are a frequently recurring concrete image in his poetry, prose and verse, effecting dual perspectives in a variety of contexts, similar to the also prominent borderline dividing landscapes: ‘Da bin ich von Bildern umgeben, mit denen im Kopf ich angefangen habe etwas zu sehen’, is a comment in Die Türe zum Meer (1983) that sums up a technique which made him a commentator on his time and, especially in his shorter verse contained in Das Ende der Landschaftsmalerei (1974) and Erzähl mir nichts vom Krieg (1977), a keen social critic. However, his basic mode of writing has remained subjective. In the volume Gedicht von der wiedervereinigten Landschaft (1988) he expresses his yearning for the Thuringian city in which he spent his boyhood. He did not then think that he would see it again in the first autumn after the unification of Germany; the poetry of Foxtrott in Erfurt (1993), which ranks among his best, retraces the locations of a wartime childhood in a process of changing perspectives in time and space, betraying a pervasive sense of insecurity and fear, to arrive at a ‘preliminary topography’.

Other volumes include the poetry of Schnee (1971), In der verbleibenden Zeit (1979), the collection Gedichte 1965-1980 (1981), Odenthals Küste (1986), and Das englische Fenster (1990); the prose of Umgebungen (1970) and Erzählen bis Ostende (1981), one play and about twelve radio plays (contributions to the ‘Neues Hörspiel’, see Hörspiel), published between 1969 and 1982.

The Oxford Companion to German Literature. Copyright © 1976, 1986, 1997, 2005 by Oxford University Press. All rights reserved.