Dimension2: Jürgen Becker

BECKER, Jürgen: Jürgen Becker grew up in Thuringia and the Harz Mountains, although he was born in 1932 in Cologne, where he has been living since 1950 and "part-time" since German unification, taking up residence also in Odenthal. From 1974 to 1990, he headed the department for radio plays at the Deutschlandfunk in Cologne. As a writer, he began with experimental poetry, such as Felder [1964, Fields] and Ränder [1969, Fringes] developing his subjective style of writing prose poems (in free verse and with "run-on" lines) such as the poems in his 1993 collection: Foxtrott im Erfurter Stadion [Fox Trot in Erfurt Stadium]. In 1990, after the Berlin Wall had fallen, he revisited the Erfurt area in Thuringia for the first time since 1950. The poems in Foxtrott im Erfurter Stadion are about his process of rediscovery. Observing the slow process of rediscovery of a country, he has increasingly written prose texts, such as the novel Aus der Geschichte der Trennungen [1999, From the History of Divisions], for which he was awarded the Uwe-Johnson prize.

Timing und andere Gedichte (Timing and other Poems ) from Foxtrott im Erfurter Stadion : Vol. 1, No. 2

Anniversaries (Jahrestage) from Schnee in den Ardennen (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp Verlag, 2003): Vol. 8, No. 1