Walter Becker

In 2019, three books from Walter Becker's library could be returned.

Walter Becker was born in Essen on 1 August 1893. He devoted himself to art from an early age and studied at the Großherzoglich Badische Kunstschule in Karlsruhe from 1915 to 1918 and at the Kunstakademie Dresden in the early 1920s. In 1923, he married Yvonne von König, with whom he initially lived in Berlin, but shortly afterwards moved to the south of France.

The Beckers returned to Germany in 1936 and lived in various places in southern Germany. Although Becker's works were considered “degenerate” during the Nazi era and some of them were burned, he was offered a position as a teacher in 1941 at the suggestion of the director of the Badische Landeskunstschule. However, before he could take up the position, the SS sealed his studio and forced him to resign from his employment contract. In 1938, the Beckers moved to Tutzing.

Defamed as a “cultural Bolshevik”, Becker almost completely ceased his artistic activities until 1945. It was only after the end of the war, in 1951, that Becker finally became a professor at the Karlsruhe Art Academy. Yvonne Becker died in 1957, Walter Becker in 1984.

It is unclear how the volumes entered the holdings of the Central and State Library and it has not been possible to trace them. The objects were recovered from the special collections of the Amerika-Gedenkbibliothek.