Jurek Becker is one of the best-known authors from the German Democratic Republic (GDR) writing today. While his early works are concerned with the problem of Jewish identity in postwar Germany, his later pieces are highly critical of the societies that have developed on both sides of the Berlin Wall since 1961. Although Becker became disillusioned with the GDR and left in 1977, he also criticizes the Federal Republic of Germany. Like many writers living in exile, Becker is caught in the middle, a victim of his feelings of ambivalence toward both his old and his new country; but, unlike many others, Becker must also reconcile being German and being a Jew.

Born in 1937, Becker grew up in the Jewish ghetto of Lodz in Poland and in the Ravensbrück and Sachsenhausen concentration camps; his mother died in the camps. In 1945 he and his father settled in East Berlin...