Johannes Robert Becher (1891 – 1958) 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 (from which he would later disassociate himself). With the rise of the Nazi Party in Germany, Becher escaped to Paris, then in 1935 to the Soviet Union. After WWII, he returned to the eastern zone of Germany; he was made Minister of Culture in 1954. His business had become the suppression of young dissidents such as he himself had once been. He wrote the national anthem of the German Democratic Republic. In his memoirs, unpublished until thirty years after his death, he renounced not just his service to the East German Stalinist government but to socialism itself as the great mistake of his life.