Rolf Becker started at the Cologne city gazette, but he was a writer. He had already written radio plays, Suhrkamp had published two heavily existential stories, but then in 1959 he went to the mirror, where he stayed until 1991. Becker put himself at the service of literature and put himself under a bushel in return. The news magazine had little space for literature, so the authors who appeared in it became all the more important. Becker, always polite, confident in style and taste, was the man in the background, but he had enormous influence on the literary scene in the Federal Republic. Those were the great years of Enzensberger, Grass, Walser, Handke. Becker himself wrote little, reviewed books by Vladimir Nabokov, Golo Mann, Walter Kempowski and the admired Uwe Johnson, wrote about Dallas and the commissioner.
With an astonishing staying power, he has the schemer’s barn mirror endured all setbacks and humiliations under changing leadership, even those about which he did not speak. The founder Rudolf Augstein as “the most thoughtful writer of the Mirror” Georg Wolff, head of the humanities department, was a former SS Hauptsturmfuhrer, “a National Socialist in every respect”, as his superior confirmed in 1940, and was involved in the shooting of hostages in Norway as a Gestapo collaborator. After his retirement, Becker turned back into the writer he was for the mirror had hung in the closet for over thirty years. In the autobiographical story “Tamara” (1994) he recalled, in a Nabokov tone, the summer of 1938 on the Baltic Sea when he was ten years old, the part of his family he never saw again, told how his father died and leaving the Jewish mother unprotected. Transport to the concentration camp was already imminent when a doctor friend of hers admitted her to the hospital and faked an operation necessary to survive. “We still have memories, our dead aren’t dead yet. Soon they will be.” As has only just become known, Rolf Becker died on May 9th in Hamburg at the age of 94.