Stoppage Time / Nachspielzeit
Lines and Poems
A new collection of poetry from the Büchner Prize–winner
With his new poems, all produced in 2022 and 2023, Jürgen Becker continues a practice of writing that draws its motifs primarily from the perception of the moment, from the experience of everyday life. As clearly as this writing is shaped by the present, an increasing influence of an earlier era becomes evident, the presence of the past. The lines and poems that arise from this practice typically tell of familiar things that were once taken for granted but are now uncertain and threaten to...
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With his new poems, all produced in 2022 and 2023, Jürgen Becker continues a practice of writing that draws its motifs primarily from the perception of the moment, from the experience of everyday life. As clearly as this writing is shaped by the present, an increasing influence of an earlier era becomes evident, the presence of the past. The lines and poems that arise from this practice typically tell of familiar things that were once taken for granted but are now uncertain and threaten to disappear. And where wars and turmoil rear their heads, the author clings to hope. »Let’s hope for a dry summer, for hay and straw, for gas in the harbours and cherries for the cherry pancakes. Hope is always in season …«
In his unmistakable sound, Jürgen Becker writes inner monologues for listeners. Offering traces, points of access into his own biography. His childhood during and after the war corresponds with the memories of his generation, his current experience with the perceptions of his contemporaries, who are not so young anymore. »Every day writes along with us, and it does not let us read its notes every day.« And that also means that there is always a silence speaking too, where the forgotten finds no words and the repressed chooses not to speak.
In his unmistakable sound, Jürgen Becker writes inner monologues for listeners. Offering traces, points of access into his own biography. His childhood during and after the war corresponds with the memories of his generation, his current experience with the perceptions of his contemporaries, who are not so young anymore. »Every day writes along with us, and it does not let us read its notes every day.« And that also means that there is always a silence speaking too, where the forgotten finds no words and the repressed chooses not to speak.
»Jürgen Becker continues his enchanting chronicle of the everyday.« Norbert Hummelt, Der Tagesspiegel
»Jürgen Becker continues his enchanting chronicle of the everyday.« Norbert Hummelt, Der Tagesspiegel
2024, 112 pages
Persons
Jürgen Becker
Author
Jürgen Becker was born in Cologne in 1932. After abandoning his studies at university, he began working as a freelance writer and for years he made his living with various jobs. He worked for the broadcasting station WDR and for the publishing houses Rowohlt and Suhrkamp. He was head of the radio drama department of Deutschlandfunk for twenty years, until 1993.
Jürgen Becker received great attention with his first work of prose, Felder (1964), while the two subsequent books Ränder (1968) and Umgebungen (1970) consolidated his reputation as an author of experimental literature. At the same time, he contributed to the emergence of the New Radio Play with his first radio plays. In the 1970s and 1980s, Jürgen Becker focused his attention on...
Jürgen Becker
Author
Jürgen Becker was born in Cologne in 1932. After abandoning his studies at university, he began working as a freelance writer and for years he...
© Jürgen Bauer
OTHER PUBLICATIONS
Latest first
Year of Publication: 2022
Jürgen BeckerYear of Publication: 2022
Collected Poems
To mark Jürgen Becker’s 90th birthday on July 10, 2022, Suhrkamp presents this collection of all the volumes of poetry published between 1971 and 2022 alongside an extensive...
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Rights available for this compilation
Year of Publication: 2022
Jürgen BeckerYear of Publication: 2022
The Return of Habits
In this book, written in 2020/21, poems, notations, series of sentences and short prose come together to form a journal co-written by everyday events, the experience of crisis and the continuing effects of the past. »Instants decide where things go, the direction in which events move ... sentences from a past that has not ceased to have a say in the here and now«....
Year of Publication: 2017
Jürgen BeckerYear of Publication: 2017
Grey Geese over Toronto
This poem is made up of a number of short poems – a contradictory context that comes about when writing follows the leaps of associations, the permanent change of times, the back and forth between topicality and memory. Journal-like writing that searches for the components of biography and where they appear in everyday events, in the repertoire of media and images, in manners of speaking...
Year of Publication: 2015
Jürgen BeckerYear of Publication: 2015
Now the Scenery of Back Then
»Thinking about my life and the memories of it, all I can think of are sentences, sometimes just a few, sometimes a few more.« This is the sentence Jörn Winter says at the end of the book, in which a journal of moments and memories is created from individual sentences and whole stories. Both the experience of the moment and the memory of the past create the space of simultaneity...
Year of Publication: 2009
Jürgen BeckerYear of Publication: 2009
From the Bay of Cologne
»In the poems in this volume, which were written over the course of four decades, the Bay of Cologne speaks to us, its monstrousness, its damaged beauty, its wealth of contradictions, of images and constant sounds, its never-ending fascination... The Bay of Cologne is not a poetic theme, it has not given rise to a literary tradition, and it does nothing to contribute to this of its own...
Year of Publication: 2009
Jürgen BeckerYear of Publication: 2009
The Sea in the Radio
With this book, Jürgen Becker moves within the liminal space of literary possibilities. After the journal novel Schnee in den Ardennen and the journal stories Die folgenden...
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English world rights (Seagull)
Year of Publication: 2006
Jürgen BeckerYear of Publication: 2006
The Following Pages
The narrator worries that he is not being kept busy enough. The television presenter decides to become a travel writer without leaving his home. A flat is cleared out, but it never seems to become truly empty. Names that everyone seemed to have forgotten reappear. Hanna, for example, but is that certain? The guests seem to have been invited by the zeitgeist, at least that’s what their...
Year of Publication: 2003
Jürgen BeckerYear of Publication: 2003
Snow in the Ardennes
An attic in a remote homestead is the space of imaginings and memories. This is where the narrator begins his »journal«, and what he records are events in the immediate surroundings and in the distant past, in dreams and in reality. Jürgen Becker’s observations roam the hilly landscape of his Rhenish homeland, wander to Berlin and the German East, focus on images of the...
Year of Publication: 1999
Jürgen BeckerYear of Publication: 1999
From the History of Separations
Jürgen Becker’s first novel would not have been written without the fall of the Berlin Wall, without reunification. Since then, Jörn Winter has been travelling back and forth between the Elbe and the Oder, Rügen and the Thuringian Forest. He is drawn to Lake Schwieloch in the Mark Brandenburg, where his mother died. Fifty years after her death, which was never solved, he...
Year of Publication: 1997
Jürgen BeckerYear of Publication: 1997
The Missing Rest
Having returned from a trip to Berlin, Jörn talks about ice skaters on the frozen Lake Wannsee, and soon his recollections turn to the wartime winters of his childhood.
Jörn is concerned with those memories that are like little islands in the sea of the past. Linking them together and expanding them is his narrative impulse, whereby, after initially uncertain tactile...
Jörn is concerned with those memories that are like little islands in the sea of the past. Linking them together and expanding them is his narrative impulse, whereby, after initially uncertain tactile...
Year of Publication: 1995
Jürgen BeckerYear of Publication: 1995
Collected Poems
In Jürgen Becker's literary oeuvre – which includes prose and radio plays – poetry has become dominant by now. Becker has found a poetic way of speaking that makes his poems...
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Non-exclusive selection: English world rights (Black Lawrence Press)
Year of Publication: 1977
Jürgen BeckerYear of Publication: 1977
Don't Tell Me About the War
»This is not a war diary but a story about our everyday life, in a city with its surroundings, about continuing to live in the midst of a crisis of which I know that it is not just mine...
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France (Actes Sud)
Year of Publication: 1968
Jürgen BeckerYear of Publication: 1968
Edges
Jürgen Becker’s Edges don’t correspond to familiar literary categories. But unlike in Fields, Becker uses stylistic devices instrumentally in this book: to express a...
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Previously published in the respective language / territory; rights available again: Sweden (Bonniers)
Year of Publication: 1964
Jürgen BeckerYear of Publication: 1964
Fields
In 1964, Jürgen Becker published his first book: Fields. Ever since then, this polyphonic, subjective topography of a city (Cologne) belongs among those texts of contemporary German...
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Previously published in the respective language / territory; rights available again: France (Éditions Denoël)