Johannes R. Becher

Johannes Robert Becher (22 May 1891, in Munich – 11 October 1958, in East Berlin) was a German politician, novelist, and poet. He was affiliated with the Communist Party of Germany (KPD) before World War II. At one time, he was part of the literary avant-garde, writing in an expressionist style.

With the rise of the Nazi Party in Germany, modernist artistic movements were suppressed. Becher escaped from a military raid in 1933 and settled in Paris for a couple of years. He migrated to the Soviet Union in 1935 with the central committee of the KPD. After the German invasion of the Soviet Union in June 1941, Becher and other German communists were evacuated to internal exile in Tashkent.

He returned to favor in 1942 and was recalled to Moscow. After the end of World War II, Becher was allowed to leave the Soviet Union and returned to Germany, settling in the Soviet-occupied zone that later became East Berlin. As a member of the KPD, he was appointed to various cultural and political positions and became part of the leadership of the Socialist Unity Party. In 1949, he helped found the DDR Academy of Arts, Berlin, and served as its president from 1953 to 1956. In 1953 he was awarded the Stalin Peace Prize (later the Lenin Peace Prize). He was the culture minister of the German Democratic Republic (GDR) from 1954 to 1958.

Johannes R. Becher was born in Munich in 1891, the son of Judge Heinrich Becher and his wife Johanna, née Bürck. He attended local schools.

In 1910 he and Fanny Fuss planned a joint suicide; Becher shot them both but survived. His early poetry was filled with struggling to come to terms with this event.

From 1911 he studied medicine and philosophy in college in Munich and Jena. He left his studies and became an expressionist writer, his first works appearing in 1913. An injury from his suicide attempt made him unfit for military service/ and he became addicted to morphine, which he struggled with for the rest of the decade.

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