In a way, her fascination with China saved Tania Becker’s life. The Croatian came to Germany as a guest student at the end of the 1980s. A short time later, war broke out in her home country and she stayed in the German Federal Republic. At the time, Becker was still studying art history and actually had ambitions to write a doctoral thesis at the Ruhr University in Bochum. „At some point, as life would have it, I suffered from severe depression for three years,“ she reports.