Heimrad Bäcker
Documentary Poetry
- Translated by Patrick Greaney
$20.00 | September 2024 | ISBN 978-1-959708-07-0
In stock
The essays of Austrian documentary poet and photographer Heimrad Bäcker (1925–2003), collected here along with a selection of his photographs and two of his documentary poems, explore the poetic, philosophical, and political stakes of representing the Holocaust, and constitute a crucial source for considering the critical potential of contemporary literature.
A prominent member of the Austrian avant-garde, Bäcker devoted decades to the development of a singular documentary style. For most of his adult life, Bäcker directed a publishing house for avant-garde literature, collected materials for the four books of documentary poetry that he began publishing at age 60, and took thousands of photos of the memorial site and ruins of Mauthausen, Austria’s largest concentration camp, a short drive from his home in Linz. The essays collected here for the first time in any language systematize his thinking about documentary poetry and photography and their relationship to history and memory.
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“The formal contribution of Heimrad Bäcker’s documentary poetry is as original as Thomas Bernhard’s unbreakable paragraphs, and as a moral contribution it remains incomparable.”
—Joshua Cohen
Rarely has documentary poetry been so stark or so relevant. Heimrad Bäcker’s appropriated language is irrefutable in its presentation of realities that any other approach would soften. His reflections on historical utterances are apt for thinking about the distortions of reality proliferating in our current moment. This short collection sinks into consciousness with terrifying force and provides a wake-up call for anyone engaged in poetic or linguistic practice—which is all of us.
—Johanna Drucker
At the vanishing point of the Viennese avant-garde, Heimrad Bäcker produced some of the most enigmatic texts of conceptual writing by amplifying the dynamics between the concrete and the abstract, the ephemeral and the remnant, the decontextualized and the historicizeable, witness and participation, quotation and ventriloquism, what cannot be depicted and what cannot be avoided. Bringing together Bäcker’s essays, along with related works, and an interview, Patrick Greaney has, with one stroke, lent readers a guiding hand and issued a stern challenge.
—Craig Dworkin
Bäcker’s rigorous attachment to his sources systematizes a poetics where others systematized crime. His poetry of the detritus, of the rubble, of the remains of history, crumbles the unspeakable to reveal the monumentality of the horror in the language of “the final solution.” What Victor Klemperer analyzed, Bäcker puts into practice in the form of an austere, sharp, and even dry, but tremendously moving poetry. Bäcker’s reflections, which do not avoid delving into the acts of his own past, could not be timelier today when the dialectic of victim and victimizer takes on unexpected edges, and where the fragility of memory confronts us with a bitter crossroads.
—Carlos Soto Román
Heimad Bäcker negates negation (in Jean Amèry’s fateful phrase) in a sublimely futile attempt to cancel the uncancellable historic catastrophe. His concretizing texts and photographs actively turn on his participation, as a young Austrian, in the annihilation of the European Jews. Documentary Poetry presents a small selection from a lifelong practice of witnessing witness (Celan’s phrase). Backer painstakingly—and repeatedly—samples, fragments, slashes, echoes, and reconstellates short piercing details from Nazi documents: metonymy as elegy and epitaph. His work brings to mind, also, Hodell, Gomringer, Heißenbüttel, and Reznikoff, with debts to Arendt and Hilberg.
—Charles Bernstein
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Heimrad Bäcker (1925–2003) was a poet, photographer, and the editor of the journal neue texte and, together with Margret Bäcker, the avant-garde publisher edition neue texte. As a teenager, he was active in the regional leadership of the Hitler Youth and joined the Nazi Party when he was eighteen. After the war, he completed his doctoral studies in philosophy with a dissertation on Karl Jaspers. In the following decades, Bäcker collected materials for the four books of documentary poetry that he began publishing at age 60, and took thousands of photographs of the memorial site and ruins of Mauthausen, Austria’s largest concentration camp, a short drive from his home in Linz. The author of seven books of poetry, his work has been translated into French, Swedish, and Turkish. English translations of his work include transcript (Dalkey Archive) and SEASCAPE (Ugly Duckling Presse). Solo exhibitions of his photographic and sculptural works have taken place at The Upper Austrian State Museum (2002/2003), Museum of Contemporary Art Denver (2013/2014), the Museum of Modern Art in Vienna (2019/2020), and the Munich Documentation Center for the History of National Socialism (2021).
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Patrick Greaney is Professor of German Studies at the University of Colorado Boulder. He is the co-editor and translator of An Austrian Avant-Garde (Les Figues Press) and the author of Untimely Beggar: Poverty and Power from Baudelaire to Benjamin and Quotational Practices: Repeating the Future in Contemporary Art, both from University of Minnesota Press. He is the co-translator (with Vincent Kling) of Heimrad Bäcker’s transcript (Dalkey Archive).