Ulrich Becher: Männer machen Fehler [Men Make Mistakes], 1932
![Book cover: Ulrich Becher, Männer machen Fehler [Men Make Mistakes].](/KIE/Content/EN/SpecialExhibitions/UlrichBecher-en/Images/Objects/maenner-machen-fehler.jpg?__blob=normal&v=1 "Book cover: Ulrich Becher, Männer machen Fehler [Men Make Mistakes].")
Ulrich Becher: Männer machen Fehler [Men Make Mistakes], 1932
In ‘33, following the takeover of Germany by an Austrian occultist, my Rowohlt book was graced with the label “degenerate” and thrown onto the pyre of books burning under the lime trees blossoming in front of the University of Berlin by a couple of fellow students whom I knew personally. (ed. trans.)
Ulrich Becher in his essay Finnegan’s Wake, 1978
Ulrich Becher was just 23 years young in the spring of 1933, when he claimed to have watched a number of staunchly Nazi-minded fellow students throw his first book Männer machen Fehler (Men Make Mistakes) into the fire; this was a volume of short stories that had been published at the end of 1931. Articles about Becher also repeat the story that when he fled from Berlin, he was the youngest author to have had his books burnt by the Nazis. Becher himself cultivated this topos throughout his life. However, no documented evidence of this has ever been found. Becher certainly does not appear on the relevant blacklist compiled by the librarian Herrmann (although his namesake Johannes R. Becher does, which led to unpleasant misunderstandings even after 1945). However, there is no doubt that the rise of the Nazis and the book burnings of 1933 marked a significant hiatus in Ulrich Becher’s career.
With the collection of stories released by the prestigious publisher Rowohlt Verlag, which features a drawing by the author on the cover, Becher appeared to have made a breakthrough and the way seemed to be open for an illustrious career. Peter Suhrkamp, who had been Becher’s pupil in the 1920s when he was teaching at the progressive boarding school Freie Schulgemeinde Wickersdorf, reviewed the work in the literary supplement of the Vossische Zeitung, praising the author’s “world of feeling” and the “young person’s view of the world” presented in a manner that was “like a rope dancer” and “not without a number of somersaults”.
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