Böttcher is a German director, screenwriter and a painter know also under the pseudonym Strawalde (name of the village where he grew up). Growing up in Germany during the WW II made a great influence on him. He studied painting at the Art Academy in Dresden from 1949 to 1953 and afterwards taught in school. He did not manage to find his place among the at that time popular socialist-style painters (in 1961 he was thrown out of the Association for Applied Arts) and he began studying film directing in Potsdam Babelsberg. He wanted to make films under the influence of Italian neorealism but began his career directing documentaries. His first documentary Drei von vielen (1961), about his artist friends, was made for the DEFA film studio. He continued to work for DEFA until 1991 and directed many different documentaries.  His only feature film is Born in '45 (1965), but he was not allowed to finish it and therefore, the film exists only as a working copy because it was banned from screening until the fall of the Wall in 1990. He directed feature documentaries Konzert im Freien (2001) about the park Marx-Engels-Forum in Berlin and Die Mauer (1991) about the fall of the Wall. During the East-German political regime, his career was constantly balancing between condemnation ad recognition (by the audience and colleagues. However, in 1992, he received the Filmband in Gold, the greatest film award the state can give to a film author in Germany. As a painter he was allowed to have his first solo exhibition in 1978 and could freely paint only after the fall of the Wall.