Documentary Poetry - Heimrad Bäcker

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Documentary Poetry

by
Heimrad Bäcker

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Title:	Documentary Poetry
Author:	Heimrad Bäcker
Genre:	Non-fiction
Written:	(1973-2001) (Eng. 2024)
Length:	111 pages
Original in:	German
Availability:	Documentary Poetry - US
	Documentary Poetry - UK
	Documentary Poetry - Canada

	directly from: Winter Editions

Translated and with a Preface by Patrick Greaney
With numerous photographs by Bäcker

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Our Assessment:

B+ : good introduction to the author's fascinating approach and project(s)

See our review for fuller assessment.

The complete review's Review:

       Documentary Poetry collects a variety of pieces by Heimrad Bäcker. In several he addresses the documentary approach he took to re-presenting and considering the perversions of the Nazi regime; there are also several examples of his techniques in practice, as well as an interview.
       Born in 1925, Bäcker joined the Nazi party when he was seventeen, and was active in the Hitler Youth-programme -- finding himself caught up in that cleverly-designed: "incremental ensnarement of young people". (In the interview included here Bäcker says he was eighteen when he became a party-member, but he was apparently officially granted membership on Hitler's birthday (20 April) 1943, a few weeks short of his eighteenth birthday.)
       In the interview included here he notes that:

Although we were just a few kilometers from Mauthausen, we didn't really know what happened there. As a member of the Hitler Youth, I myself never witnessed or participated in any act of violence. I could have just been lucky. However, I must say, the final two years were risky for me, because the authoritarian habitus had taken shape in me too. Even if I didn't commit atrocities, I would have become someone who acted in an authoritarian way.

It took him a while to shake the Nazi indoctrination:

At the end of the war, I was taken to Mauthausen by the Americans and saw what took place there. I didn't understand the full extent of it. Only through continuous reflection and by noticing the long-lasting susceptibility to Nazi ideology's ideal-filled nonsense did I gradually distance myself from that way of thinking.

Nearby Mauthausen remained a locale of great significance to Bäcker, and he engaged with its history and how that history was handled in the post-war years extensively -- with the longest piece in Documentary Poetry a lecture he gave 'On the Topography of Mauthausen'. Here he discusses how poorly much of the large grounds of the concentration camp-complex have been preserved, with only selective preservation, ignoring much of what Bäcker considers significant areas of the complex. Here he also describes his own 'linguistic topography' of Mauthausen, explaining how:

Using the differentiation made by Droysen and Hoffmann, the deathbooks of the Mauthausen concentration camps are monuments from the era; my concrete texts are memorials to the era. They are extracted from materials in those death books, materials from the era, the daily entries about what happened.

Elsewhere, he provides more theoretical background and information about his approach -- notably in the title-essay, as well as in the excellent piece on 'concrete poetry'. The abuse of language in the Third Reich -- the lingua tertii imperii famously analyzed by Victor Klemperer -- is repeatedly noted, beginning with the: "alphabet of continually recurring formulae" used by the Nazis, with Bäcker explaining his method of taking the texts and documents and concretizing them.
Bäcker turns away from familiar 'creative' writing, as he found, essentially, that words have too often lost all meaning: "what good can a word be once it is 'used,' once it lies around only in order to be fit into a speech, to be an object, a seat for something" he asks. Instead, he turns to the purely documentary, to use words and texts as they already exist -- following, for example, the lead of a concrete poet such as Bob Cobbing:

more than anything, bob cobbing would like to spray printer's ink through a screen to be free of society's most cumbersome relic: preformed speech, which reduces language to formulae that appear en masse. repeating these formulae and estranging them through repetition is the first step of concrete speech; the second, reflecting and breaking open the brutality of the familiar; the third, formulating material in a new way.

Documentary Poetry provides several examples of Bäcker's own concrete work, from Bäcker explaining it with some examples in his Mauthausen-lecture to the full text of 'Seascape' (previously published by Ugly Duckling Presse (2013) and 'Transcript Z'. The powerful 'Notes' is also an effective collection of observations and thoughts, if not as stark as the transcript-style texts.
This is an interesting collection, and a good introduction to and overview of Bäcker's fascinating life-project. Numerous photographs -- all by Bäcker -- complement the texts and Bäcker's approach as well.

- M.A.Orthofer, 13 October 2024

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Links:

Documentary Poetry:

Winter Editions publicity page
Documentary poetry - the essay, with an afterword by Sabine Zelger (and both texts in the original German as well)

Reviews:

Other books by Heimrad Bäcker under review:

transcript

Other books of interest under review:

See Index of German literature

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About the Author:

Austrian author Heimrad Bäcker lived 1925 to 2003.

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