Obituary for Jürgen Becker – Nothing going on. How exciting!

A narrator takes on two hundred pages. Two times a hundred pages – blank. He writes down observations and inspirations every day. Individual sentences only. The pages are filling up. For example, with ideas about what you could do. With considerations about what is best not to do. Unknown cats appeared in the garden. The background noise on the phone call, which comes from an island village, is interesting. Or: Beguiling, such a postcard from hot Greece, now, in the middle of the unexpected onset of winter. And up in the house there is the woodpecker, who is finishing off the old room beams. The record “Sing Nachtigall sing” provokes the nice question of what Uncle Heinz did during the war. The loud laughter from the house next door – don’t they know what the world is like? The narrator goes through his address list – the work inevitably ends with significant deletions.

This kind of laconicism is the note of what happens. Perception stands next to perception. Sometimes it almost becomes a little story. Almost. »The emergency doctor races into town with flashing lights. The old neighbors look at each other. Nobody is missing. Everyone is still at the counter.« Jürgen Becker’s journal stories »The following pages« represent the entire work: that kaleidoscope of the fleeting that we live every day, and yet which, in its small meaning, represents the great indomitable of all existence.

“News, tennis courts/ distracted us, and again an illusion arose,/ a trace left by chance.” A line of poetry from Becker, his writing was always a melancholy attempt to unravel those ongoing events that constantly become information. He was never one to write solid stories. In his literature, the poet from Odenthal in the Rhineland transfers added details into a stream of consciousness that changes from the vague to the intentional without losing the charms of his vagabonds.

nd.DieWoche – our weekly newsletter

With our weekly newsletter nd.DailyWords look at the most important topics of the week and read them Highlights our Saturday edition on Friday. Get your free subscription here.

The author, born in 1932, reflects in his books presence in an endless space, an endless novel; his notes are concentrations on what is at hand, whose random character is gently and fervently removed from insignificance. For Becker, reality was that which slowly disappears but remains recognizable at the edges – “Edges” was the name of a book that appeared forty years ago, and Peter Handke spoke of the “basic feature of a hesitant outline”. »Images move through the room, quickly disappearing again in the darkness. They are pictures from a life that shows us what our lives could have been.«

The poetry (“Foxtrot in the Erfurt Stadium”, “Journal of Repetitions”) also tells of meaningful futility. It is recorded in fragments, in waiting loops from sentence to sentence. His long poem “Gray Geese over Toronto” is also called “Journal”. This is consciously reminiscent of the unliterary, it has something of a newspaper and is therefore an invitation to leaf through the pages. »The mirror/ in the hallway changes nothing; it only shows what you don’t want to believe.” The slow weathering. The monotony. You are “on the move without moving.” Well seen – that’s proven by almost every day that we sniff each other. What happened yesterday? Maybe it was better? Did we perhaps have more of what was unique to us back then? Or did your own self only find the opportunity and form of expression in old age?

Becker’s prose and poetry are a reference to everything German of the 20th century. “It’s all in the bucket,/ said the Fähnleinführer and ran away./ Saw him again in the blue shirt of the FDJ.” The eternal dichotomy of people: “one puts the candles/ in the window, the other shoots back.” The invincible cynicism of the simultaneous : “We can book the Mediterranean, the coast guard/ will take care of the bodies”. The precise diagnostic look, sometimes appropriately disdainful: “the anger of the letters to the editor is swelling, the knives are being sharpened in the social network”.

This 20th century is like every year and every day: weddings of woe and good. »Hunkered down under blankets, we held on,/ home front children, until the pile of corpses/ behind the barbed wire told us that we were all/ children of criminals. Then we also steal/ canned goods and coke.« The poetic review reveals a philosophy of practicality: In the so-called great times it is best to build on the experiences of the small village circle and thus to accept the smallness of people – which utopians often malign , which can actually be a great strength in survival. Smallness in beauty? Yes, beauty from wafts of mist and the flight of crows, pear trees and woodpeckers. »Google knows more, but/ not everything. Especially not where the marten is sitting under the roof of the barn.

We live in fragments – and Becker writes against the illusion that the empty spaces between these fragments are full of tension. They are not, but it is precisely this unexciting nature that needs to be experienced as an impulse to excite, because: nothing more was and is not given to us. Carrying this is the difficult part. Province, the core of the whole world. It is only necessary to research in detail again and again the extent to which people are expressions of the conditions of the time, the extent to which they discover the possibilities of life in this way, but at the same time are also deprived of many possibilities. And they beat themselves with blindness: “A fence is rolled around the inner life.” Samuel Beckett put it in the bottomless sentence: “How bearable it all is, my God.”

Always in view: Becker’s own biography. The East-West German period after the war. Moving from Cologne to Thuringia and back. farm boys on the school desks; Because of the clothing shortage, they wore their old Jungvolk uniforms. The aversion to slates. At home the shelves are full of preserving jars. The romantic touch of the attic. Finding bombs and playing with shrapnel. Why did people go back to the West “away from the Soviets”? An early defensive reflex against the East German “offer” to be socialized. Associated with this is the idea of ​​places where “living on the sidelines” is possible with impunity. As if one could settle into the world “in a kind of seclusion that keeps one from participating.” German experience is tormenting: A relative couldn’t keep away from the pressure of the times, someone who was traumatized by the war – “when he later jumped off the bridge, people said that he was always funny, Fritz.”

Becker’s books (“The Door to the Sea”, “Fields”, “Snow in the Ardennes”, “How it went on”) sensitively reflect on the great aftermath that followed the novel in the 19th century. Someone compared the poet’s wait-and-see approach to Wim Wenders’ early films. “There’s supposed to be something going on back there.” Just a sentence like that. It stands alone, this sentence, and we know it, we know this kind of expectation, but the sentence actually says: Nothing is going on and nothing will ever be going on. It is the exciting novel of our lives.

Now the poet, who received the Georg Büchner Prize in 2014, has died at the age of 92.

Become a member of the nd.Genossenschaft!

Since January 1, 2022, the »nd« will be published as an independent left-wing newspaper owned by the staff and readers. Be there and support media diversity and visible left-wing positions as a cooperative member. Fill out the membership form now.

More information on www.dasnd.de/genossenschaft