‘I wish I could be allowed to choose who I am’: Jurek Becker, Victim Identity and Identity Crisis in Post-War Germany

Abstract

This essay examines two texts by Jurek Becker (1937–97), who spent his early years in Ravensbrück and Sachsenhausen, later claiming to have no memory of this. Becker’s essay ‘My Jewishness’ reads as a vehement denial of his Jewish identity, which in a post-war German context is synonymous with victim. Becker seeks to disassociate himself from his past and subvert this unwanted social identity. Nevertheless, Becker is still intrigued by his past and mourns the death of his family in ‘My Favourite Family Story’, where the Jewish narrator laments the loss of great family traditions, which he has often heard about but never experienced. This essay suggests that together these two texts show that, for Becker, children of the Holocaust carried the identity of outsiders in post-war Germany. Defined and stigmatised by contemporary society as a victim and ‘other’, Becker could not access this past that continued to construct his social identity. His family and its traditions are reduced to characters in a story for Becker; he is caught in the tension between past and present, at home in neither.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Catherine Piggott

Catherine Piggott completed a Ph.D. on themes of identity in the works of Jurek Becker at the University of Bath before becoming a secondary school teacher of German and French.