Biography:

Günther Rücker was born on February 2, 1924 in Reichenbach (now Liberec, Czech Republic). In 1942, he was drafted into military service and then served time as a British POW.  After his release in 1945, he went to Leipzig, where he worked as a teacher. From 1947 to 1951, Rücker studied directing at the Leipzig Theaterhochschule. While a student in Leipzig, he also wrote radio dramas. At the beginning of the 1950s, he moved to Berlin and earned his living as a freelance author.

In the mid-1950s, Rücker started working for the East German DEFA Studios. He wrote commentaries and scripts for documentaries and scenarios and scripts for feature films. His first feature film script was for Günter Reisch’s comedy Junges Gemüse. Both artists collaborated on two more films, Wolz – Leben und Verklärung eines deutschen Anarchisten, based on the life of rebel and anarchist Marx Hoelz, and Die Verlobte, a moving story about a female prisoner under the Nazis. Rücker also co-directed Die Verlobte, before his directorial debut, Die besten Jahre, a film that takes place in postwar Germany.

Rücker wrote together with Wolfgang Kohlhaase the script for Gerhard Klein’s Der Fall Gleiwitz, an investigation of events leading up to the outbreak of WWII. Rücker also collaborated with many DEFA directors and authored scenarios and scripts for important DEFA films that were shown at prestigious international film festivals, including the love story Der Dritte (dir. Egon Günther), the marriage drama Bis dass der Tod euch scheidet (dir. Heiner Carow) and Hilde das Dienstmädchen (dirs. Jürgen Brauer, Günther Rücker), about the fate of a young woman whose love for a resistance fighter is doomed to failure.

Günther Rücker was also the author of numerous radio dramas, plays, novels and short stories. His work often recounted autobiographical events against the backdrop of historic events. Critics described his writing as laconic, sad and sometimes ironic.

In 1972, Rücker joined the East German Academy of Arts, where he headed the Art of Writing and Language Cultivation Department from 1974 to 1982 and was also a memeber of the Academy of Arts presidium. In 2000, Rücker withdrew from public life and writing, and moved to Meiningen in Thuringia, Germany. After a seven-year break from writing, he published three short stories in Erste Liebe und anderes (2007, First Love and Something Else) shortly before he died on February 24, 2008.