A Rare Bird
Sander Gilman on writing the biography of Jurek Becker

Writing about someone you knew is difficult. I met Jurek Becker in the late 1960s, when he was the darling of young critics in East Berlin. He felt that the tasks of the critic and the writer were very different. The metaphor he often employed for this difference was that of the ornithologist and the bird. I was the ornithologist; he was the bird.

However, my task as a critic is never scientific, rather it is empathetic. I was and am a bird watcher rather than an ornithologist, I am more concerned to watch and speculate than to label and classify. And Jurek Becker was indeed a rara avis. Survivor of the Lodz ghetto and Ravensbrück, he was to a certain degree the abandoned child as described in Jerzy Kosinski's The Painted Bird (1965), a metaphor for the mindless torture that marked human relationships in the Holocaust. But he was also a completely secular Polish Jew transformed into a good if critical German Communist by his upbringing in the German Democratic Republic. After 1977 he was a feature of the literary and media scene in West Berlin and after 1991 he was at home as much as he could be anywhere in the new reunited Germany. His biography, as Jew, Pole, East German and German, as oppositional writer and spokesman for a united Germany, as novelist and scriptwriter, is unusual enough to encompass many of the questions about identity and culture in Central Europe from the 1930s to the 1990s. His novel Jacob the Liar has entered the canon of twentieth-century literature. Together with The Boxer and Bronstein's Children it forms the most important work on post-war Jewish identity in the German Democratic Republic. In Germany he is equally well known as an author of film scripts (including the film of Jacob the Liar) and as a writer for television. As a cultural critic and a literary historian, I had written about him and his work analytically, but after his death in 1997, aged 60, I wanted to capture his life and understand his writing in all of the registers in which he wrote. I felt it was necessary to make sense of his life as well as his texts, yet this was an approach he himself truly feared. He did not want his works reduced to the 'biographical sources' that critics love to find.

Jurek had reason to fear people rummaging about in his life. His childhood was a mystery to him. Separated from his parents, he was claimed after World War II by a father he was never sure was his. No exploration would leave the scars he bore untouched and the records of his early life are not only fragmentary but inherently contradictory. As an adult he became the object of quite the opposite fascination. One of the most articulate spokesmen for reform within the German Democratic Republic, he received the attentions both of the Stasi, the Ministry of Security, which shadowed him for over two decades, and of the West German intelligence service.

This autumn my biography of him - Jurek Becker: Die Biographie - will be published by Ullstein. For contemporary Germany, Becker's reputation rests on his having written one of the most successful and intellectually challenging television series ever seen in Germany: Liebling, Kreuzberg. The series was an attempt to examine life in the island city of West Berlin before (and then after) the fall of The Wall through the focus of the law. Unlike American legal dramas it did not concentrate primarily on either the police or the courts but on the role of the lawyer, Robert Liebling, as the honest broker in German society. But the importance of his writing rests essentially on the trilogy of novels about the Holocaust that are truly unique in post-war German literature. They are the first and best German-language attempt to capture the world of German (and Eastern European) Jewry from the Holocaust to the 1970s. Focussing on the Eastern experience of the Holocaust and then the world of Eastern German Jewry, Becker's novel provides a kaleidoscope of the fractured experiences of this world, a world which he inhabited but from which he also felt separate.

The initial shadowing by the Stasi provided constant intrusion into his private life and into his psyche and presented me with a peculiar moral problem, for I was forced to explore the complex life of a man I admire through the eyes of those who were spying on him, and to make sure that the Stasi documents I had to view actually reflected the sense and the texture of Jurek's life. So I undertook extensive interviews with virtually all of those quoted in the Stasi documents, including some of those who wrote reports as 'unofficial co-workers' of the Stasi. Jurek had provided me with a key to their names.

In my biography I have tried to point at aspects of Jurek's life that are incorporated in the novels, but only as reference points. Each is adapted and changed in the narratives that Jurek created in his novels, his films, and his television programmes. I have not pointed toward any of Jurek's works and said: here is a truth about Jurek's life. What I hope I have done is to illustrate the stories that he told about his life and to show how they too became part of his creative world.

The Boxer (New York: Arcade Publishing, 2002)

Bronstein's Children (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999)

Jacob the Liar (New York: Picador, 1990)

Sleepless Days (Colorado: Paladin, 1989)

Sander L. Gilman is a professor of the Liberal Arts and Medicine at the University of Illinois in Chicago and the director of the Humanities Laboratory. A cultural and literary historian, he is the author or editor of over sixty books.