“You clear case, if you were to ask me if the day we first met was a special day in my life, every fiber of my body would scream: Yes, yes, yes! And I would love to explain what the fate of that day was. But whatever the reason, nobody asks me such fundamental questions.”
The addressee of the postcard that begins with these sentences is Christine Becker. It is dated January 31, 1997 and was written by the writer Jurek Becker. Only a few weeks later he will die in his country house in Sieseby, Schleswig-Holstein, as a result of colon cancer. The parents of a common son were a couple for 14 years, twelve of them were married. Everyone can read this wonderful postcard to the end, it is in the volume There’s a lot going on on the beach in Bochum (Suhrkamp) that Christine Becker published in 2018 – together with many other polished, funny or sad short messages on cardboard that Jurek Becker wrote to his family and friends.
Now Christine Becker is once again not in Berlin, but in an apartment near Columbus Circle in New York, which she takes care of for her friends. We communicate via Skype and talk to the “legal administrator” of one of the most important German authors of the post-war period. His novels are about the Holocaust, but also about the absurdities of everyday life in the GDR. Especially the three novels Jacob the liar (1969), The boxer (1976) and Bronstein’s children (1986) mark the borderline between humor and the most gruesome crime in history trodden by this great storyteller. Jurek Becker was born in 1937 to Jewish parents in Łódź, Poland. He survived the ghetto and two concentration camps. Unlike his mother. From 1945 he lived with his father in East Berlin. In 1978 he moved to West Berlin with a visa that was initially issued for two years and was then limited to 1989, where he later worked on the screenplays for the successful TV series Darling Kreuzberg worked.
der Freitag: Ms. Becker, you lived with Jurek Becker for seven years in a reunited Germany. He was skeptical, the dream of a better Germany, for which the GDR stood despite all the injustice (the self-proclaimed “unification allergy sufferer” Becker never denied this), was irretrievably over. Was he right in his diagnosis?
Christina Becker: Unfortunately, he was right for the first few years. But he never went so far as to say: “I don’t want the Wall to fall.” That would have been cynical towards the people in the GDR. But he had concerns. The capitalist system had clearly won. But he was also afraid of nationalism and racism. Especially before an increase in right-wing extremism in both parts of Germany. That has partly come true. But that’s not a German phenomenon, it’s similar in the USA. But maybe he was also wrong in parts: This united Germany has become a decent Germany. I think that politicians have done a lot in recent decades to ensure that this country is in a good position, also in dealing with its past. That surprised me.
Not everyone sees it that way. Axel Springer boss Mathias Döpfner, for example, thinks he is in a “GDR authoritarian state”…
This is of course insane. In relation to Corona, people follow the rules in the west as well as in the east. That has absolutely nothing to do with the East past. Bringing the word “GDR” into play here somehow sounds like propaganda.
But the comparison, it seems, does not only refer to the state’s corona measures.
It’s a big mistake to say, “We mustn’t say what we think.” Of course we can. You build yourself obstacles when you think that one or the other is no longer socially acceptable. Everyone imposes this restriction on themselves – and not the state. Almost nothing is forbidden. I see no authoritarian state.
What are you working on in New York right now?
With my life partner, the actor and drama teacher Andy Murray, I adapted two of Jurek’s novels for the theater: Jacob the liar and Bronstein’s children. We are currently working on the world premiere with Volker Schlöndorff. He wants to direct. Now we’re trying to find the right theater in Germany and, above all, the right leading actor.
To what extent does the stage adaptation differ from Becker’s screenplay for “Jakob der Lügner”, which was not implemented immediately at the time, which is why he wrote the novel in the late 1960s in the first place?
You have to convey what’s going on in the characters’ heads differently. In a film script it says “Close up” and then you can see, for example, that someone smiles, doesn’t take something seriously. That’s much easier to show on film. In our stage play, the resolution is a bit more conventional. We stay close to the novel.
Speaking of “Jakob the Liar”: Twelve years ago, a devastating criticism by WG Sebald appeared posthumously. For him, “Jacob the Liar” is a “melodramatic genre novel” because the Łódź ghetto is presented in a “kind of musical scenery”. In addition, Becker is attested to a “remembrance embargo” resulting from the persecution of the Jews. Interesting as Sebald was recently at the center of a debate about cultural appropriation. It was about the fact that a German born after the war repeatedly addressed the fate of Jews persecuted in the Holocaust in his works. How did you take Sebald’s polemic?
I was pretty shocked to have this dug up from his estate and in the magazine sense and form has been published. But I knew the lyrics. The crazy thing is that when Irene Heidelberger-Leonard was preparing a collection of materials about Jurek at Suhrkamp, she asked Sebald if he wanted to write something about Jurek. So he wrote this review. Jurek was furious, but he was more upset about the editor: “You must know how he thinks about me!” I just laughed. Recently I stopped laughing because I realized that Sebald himself no longer wanted the review published. It is absurd that he accuses Jurek of betting on an issue that he has never experienced. Jurek himself said: “I thought it up. Even my father didn’t experience that, it’s fiction.” This book has nothing to do with memories at all. The Germans are doing pretty well. Jurek would never have done that if he had wanted to get close to the truth.
Christine Becker was born in 1960 as the daughter of a publisher (Max Niemeyer Verlag) in Tübingen. She met Jurek Becker in 1983 in Frankfurt am Main, where she was studying publishing. She studied German in Berlin. Since Becker’s death in 1997, she has looked after his estate
The critics always had a little trouble with the novels that are not part of the so-called Holocaust trilogy. The accusation of playing down the GDR was in the air. Marcel Reich-Ranicki, for example, slammed the last novel “Amanda heartless” from 1992 – a public favorite – in an almost manic way in the “literary quartet”. what happened there?
Yes, that was an unbelievable orgy of destruction. You can accuse an author: “Hey, where are the dead people on the wall, you left them out!” But this was an emotional outburst of such intensity that Jurek was very frightened. This also marked the end of their friendship. If you criticize someone in such an unobjective way, there are usually personal reasons. Editing the letters, I realized that after a decade of great friendship, Jurek had made a mistake. At some point he wrote in a letter “Dear Mr. Reich-Ranicki” instead of “Dear Marcel”. But that that was the reason for the slating is only a guess.
Becker’s friend, the writer Peter Schneider, recalled his last encounter with Becker in a text. There is talk of a novel that Becker was working on. What should it be about?
There wasn’t even a concept. The book project was prevented by the illness. It remained a dream of him. And it was a story he threw out to distract friends when they asked what he was up to next. After all, he couldn’t say: “Nothing at all, because I’m going to die soon.” And while Jurek the last Darling Kreuzberg– wrote screenplays, he already suspected that it would be close. The film team shot in parallel, it was a race against time. He laid down the pen in January 1997 and was dead two months later.
Manfred Krug’s diaries from 1996 and 1997 have just been published by the newly founded Kanon publishing house. Becker warns Krug against alcohol consumption – does that have something to do with the fact that Becker’s father fell into depression after the experiences of the Holocaust and drank too much?
That had more to do with the fact that Jurek didn’t care much for alcohol and had little understanding for situations in which friends got drunk in a group. It was more like friendly advice. Even though Krug drank a lot, he never seemed drunk. I can’t remember ever seeing him out of control.
But me: As a boy, I used to bang in front of a restaurant in Berlin-Schmargendorf on New Year’s Eve. Krug came out and yelled, “Stop banging or I’ll bang you!”
(Christine Becker laughs) Krug could do both: when you were drunk, pull yourself together and talk clever things. Or play blue to have more freedom.
1997 was the year Becker died and Krug suffered a stroke. Shortly thereafter, Krug published a book with Becker’s many wonderful postcards to his wife Ottilie and him. It is said that there was a rift between you.
From the distance of 25 years I would say: I was overly sensitive. It all happened too fast for me back then. Jurek was just buried when Krug started tinkering with a book without contacting the family. In hindsight, I did like one thing. Krug said: “I want to see myself in the glory of this friendship and only I can do that on my own. I can’t share that with you.” But we couldn’t reconcile back then. That was sad – for my son too, because I took “Uncle Manfred” away from him.
You were also Becker’s editor. Did your relationship suffer?
It worked brilliantly as long as I gave him a lot of time and he was allowed to read things to me. I should then immediately criticize him verbally. But he hated my “sharp pencil”. So when I went to the texts in writing, there was trouble. For example, if I wrote: “This construction doesn’t work, it’s not plausible”, he would get furious: “What are you imagining!”. Yes, the whole thing was not good for our relationship. But then he took over some of my sharp pencil.
Did the 23-year age difference ever matter?
No, because Jurek was still quite young – 45 when I met him. And he didn’t live past 59. The crazy thing was that at the end of his life he comforted me, not I him. Because he said, “I wrote everything I wanted to write. I have experienced everything I wanted in life. It’s not so bad if I have to go now.”
Becker’s statements about Judaism are manifold. Perhaps the most famous is this: “Whenever I’ve been asked about my origins and parentage in the past, I’ve replied, ‘My parents were Jewish.'” What were your conversations about Jewish identity like?
Jurek was an ethnic Jew and not a religious one. Even his father wasn’t religious – neither was his mother. You went to the synagogue, at most to have a chat, but not because you were a believer. Jurek saw himself in this tradition; he carried his father’s humor further in his texts. I would go so far as to say our son is half Jewish. He also talks like his father, he has the same sense of humor. It has to do with culture, not religion. But Jurek was always of the opinion: “Others don’t tell me whether I’m Jewish, I decide that myself.”