The Cologne writer was an important poet

The writer Jürgen Becker is dead. He died at the age of 92 in his home in Cologne, his son, the photographer Boris Becker, told the German Press Agency. Jürgen Becker “fell asleep peacefully at home in my presence” on Thursday. The “Kölner Stadt-Anzeiger” had previously reported.

Becker made a name for himself as a poet, prose writer and author of radio plays. He was born on July 10, 1932 in Cologne, and spent his childhood in Erfurt during the Second World War and in the post-war period. In 1947 his family moved to the Bergisches Land and in 1950 Becker returned to Cologne. In addition to his work as a writer, he worked, among other things, as a publishing editor and as a journalist.

Reunification was the central theme

His prose volume “Felder” (1964) made Becker known as an author of experimental literature. Reunification was a central theme for him. Even before the fall of the Berlin Wall, he had already remembered Thuringia in 1988 in his “Poem about the Reunified Landscape,” and in 1993 the book of poems “Foxtrot in the Erfurt Stadium” (1993) was published.

Becker has received many awards. These include the Group 47 Prize, literary prizes from the cities of Cologne, Bremen, Berlin and Düsseldorf, the Bavarian and Thuringian Literature Prizes, the Heinrich Böll Prize, the Uwe Johnson Prize and the Schiller Ring.

Becker “persistently remeasured and changed the genre boundaries of poetry and prose,” said the justification for the Georg Büchner Prize awarded in 2014. “His poems live from a sensitive, sensual, curious approach to the world and a perfect, yet completely unobtrusive art of language.”