He was 92 years old
Writer Jürgen Becker is dead
November 10, 2024 – 4:05 p.mReading time: 1 Min.
The writer Jürgen Becker in his garden in 2014. (Archive image) (Source: Marius Becker/dpa)
He was known, among other things, as a poet and author of radio plays. Jürgen Becker has now fallen asleep “peacefully at home”.
The writer Jürgen Becker died at the age of 92 in his home in Cologne. His son, the photographer Boris Becker, told the German Press Agency this. Jürgen Becker “fell asleep peacefully at home in my presence” on Thursday, he said.
Becker became known as a poet, prose writer and author of radio plays. He later also worked as a publishing editor and journalist. He was born on July 10, 1932 in Cologne and spent his childhood during the Second World War and in the post-war period in Erfurt. In 1947 his family moved to the Bergisches Land before he returned to Cologne in 1950.
His prose volume “Felder” from 1964 made him known as an author of experimental literature. For Becker, the reunification of Germany was a central theme in his works. Even before the fall of the Berlin Wall, he remembered Thuringia in 1988 in the “Poem about the Reunified Landscape”. In 1993 the volume of poetry “Foxtrot in the Erfurt Stadium” was published.
Becker received numerous awards for his literary work. These include, among others, the Group 47 Prize, various literary prizes and the Georg Büchner Prize in 2014. The justification for the Büchner Prize said: “His poems live from a sensitive, sensual, curious approach to the world and a perfect, very unobtrusive linguistic art.”
