Heimrad Bäcker, Documentary Poetry

Translated and with a preface by Patrick Greaney. (Winter Editions, 2024)

Documentary Poetry is a collection of poet Heimrad Bäcker’s writings from the 1980s and 1990s. By their economy and clarity, they offer useful insight to anyone committed to the role of poetics and language in coming to terms with history. In a consistent demonstration of its principles, the work contains essays that focus on a method that Bäcker termed transcript, by which he meant direct citation without paraphrase or gloss. Given that he is working on language from the bureaucratic management of the Shoah in the Third Reich, Bäcker’s insistence on the presentation of language as its concrete form has a definite agenda. Bäcker’s stated goal throughout is to bring to the fore the potential violence of ordinary language. To suggest that this is relevant today is to simply state the terrifyingly obvious.

Cover, Heimrad Bäcker, Documentary Poetry (Winter Editions, 2024).

            Bäcker, born in Austria in 1925, was an enthusiastic member of the Nazi party, an active participant in Hitler Youth, and never hid or denied that aspect of his profile. Quite the contrary, he engaged with these facts to examine the force of language, most particularly, the ordinary language to which he so willingly and eagerly succumbed as a young man only to come to terms later with how effective it had been. He remained committed to understanding his own fascination with Nazism and its capacity to attract and absorb individuals to its beliefs and cause.

            The crux of Bäcker’s argument is what I would term the instrumentalization of ordinary language and its capacity to enact (as well as conceal) atrocities at scale. This is where Bäcker’s work gains traction in our current circumstances. Not through facile comparisons of one historical figure to another contemporary one, but by calling attention to the systemic production of highly seductive authoritarian power.

            Bäcker was the editor of the avant-garde journal neue texte and with his wife Margret, publisher of the imprint with the same name.[1] But his work as a photographer and writer is what forms the core of Documentary Poetry. Self-identified as a “concrete” poet, Bäcker expressed his affinity with the “constellations” for which one of the founding figures in that movement, Eugen Gomringer, for instance, is well known. In concrete works the spatial arrangement on the page is structurally integral to the semantics of the text, not in a decorative or pictorial mode, but as an attempt to collapse meaning and form into a single inseparable unit. In Bäcker’s essays, the citations of lists, tables, and other instances of administrative language provide a graphic example of the way he extends the principles of “concrete” to the works he cites. Bäcker does not craft elaborate visual poems, rather references concrete poetry for its principles of graphical instantiation. This resembles the critical position expressed in minimalist sculptor Donald Judd’s definitive 1965 essay “Specific Objects”. Judd called for sculpture that was as “specific” as possible–by which he meant work without decoration, associations, references, or affect, an object that was the thing in-itself. This aesthetic move was a deliberate refusal of the expressionist engagement with interior life and, in poetics, the personal voice that had dominated mid-20^th century art.

            Patrick Greaney, who curated a major exhibit of Bäcker’s work after this death for the Museum of Contemporary Art in Denver, translated these essays and wrote a preface for this edition.[2] “Landscape M” documented the concentration camp at Mauthausen, one of the largest in Austria, along with Gusen, the other major focus of Bäcker’s photographic documentation. Bäcker had begun taking photographs by the end of the Nazi era, and included in this publication is a 1943/44 image titled “Closing Ceremonies,” which captures a tightly framed sea of young men all facing forward, aligned, their bodies in tight formation where they are seated on the ground, their well-brushed hair gleaming in the sun. They are alive with health, hygiene, the vital energy of youth in service to the Fatherland. A statement about the exhibit notes that Bäcker’s photographs of Mauthausen focused on traces of labor, details of remains in which human activity could be discerned, rather than on the usual “barracks, gates, train tracks” that form the standard Holocaust references. This echoes Bäcker’s interest in concrete information materially instantiated rather than on symbols or signs of larger narratives. The lived and the ordinary are where history and information reside and remain.

            Six essays by Bäcker and an interview provide the material that presents Bäcker’s positions. “Documentary Poetry,” the first essay in the book, begins with a reference to the Biblical narrative of Cain and Abel and the language in which Cain refuses to take responsibility by saying “Am I my brother’s keeper?” For Bäcker this statement is a linguistic act by which Cain evokes “an ethical category and deploys it for something completely different.”[3] This move repeats itself over and again in the language of National Socialism, Bäcker suggests, selecting multiple phrases authored by Reinhard Heydrich “in his invitation to the Wannsee Conference, where the ‘implementation of the desired Final Solution to the Jewish Question’ was set in motion.”[4] Bäcker makes clear that the inventory of statements is not a collection of euphemisms, but “language as an administrative act of violence, language that reproduces its own formulaic character and conceals victims of perpetrators.”[5] So the statements read with as ordinary formulations of actions without any affective resonance:

in the interest of the achievement in particular

already through ongoing transports

about the preparatory measures all

necessary preparations

[…]

Bäcker goes on to explain that his appropriation of this language is meant as an act of exposure. He argues that the “literary intent” of his citational practice is to bring the language he is quoting into view which “enables it to be recognized as that which it does not want to be recognized as: a language of radical substitution.”[6] The substitution is on the level of selection, the production of a semantic banality that allows the language to “go about its work.”[7] And that work is genocidal violence at a mass scale. For Bäcker these acts of quotation are the only way to restore this language “to its authentic dimensions” since it does not paraphrase, restate, excuse, or alter the text. This is “documentary” poetics as Bäcker defines it, and of course he is not alone, other poets, such as Helmut Heissenbüttel, cited by Bäcker, and Charles Reznikoff, also understood the power of citation as a way of bringing history into view through the language in which it was made or recorded.

            Bäcker continually reiterates this commitment to the transcript. He is not interested in reports about events but rather the direct citation of the language within the events. Thus the coded numerical system by which death camp exterminations were recorded in a combination of Roman numerals and serial counting that obscured the scale of killings is presented directly, without gloss. He seeks to “paralyze the literary impulses” that rework historical evidence and bring forward the “public and private mediocrity” that underpin these documents. Statistics, reports, the specific practices of “abbreviation, spatial positioning, sequencing” and so on are all part of what gives the documents their concrete identity.

Of the nine pieces that compose the collection, several are demonstrations of Bäcker’s transcript principle: “Seascape” and “Transcript Z” are citational works, almost undecipherable since they contain only linguistic traces of events codes in their original format. For example, in “Seascape” the first piece consists of this line, alone on the page: “B. 36 War log, size: A3”. While some of the information is self-evident, the whole remains cryptic, a sign of something concealed rather than communicated in the bland-seeming statement.

            In “Mirroring,” Bäcker takes up Hannah Arendt’s positions, the assertion that it is “average human beings” who are perpetrators, not exceptional ones. With this in mind, Bäcker examines his own youthful enthusiasm for “banal sloganeering” and its effect on his thinking and actions.[8] He remains committed to this project throughout, continually addressing the impact of “everyday language” and, again, its capacity to be instrumentalized. The function of literature, for Bäcker, is this examination and exposure, this calling to attention of the “apparently nonliterary elements” to make us see them, understand what they are, how they function as language that enables action.[9] Arendt’s statements about the banality of evil have become clichés, almost empty of significance—that is, of the capacity to signify–because of their repeated invocation. Bäcker wisely eschews easy use of her work, and instead concentrates on specific instances of language without attributing them to “evil”–as if that were some other element or agent than the discourse itself.

            “The Topography of Mauthausen” is a terrifying essay because it describes the erasure of historical remnants, the prettying up of the camp, turning its entry gate into a “lovely” residential villa, for instance, even as the sites of quarrying and hard labor were altered to eliminate their functions. To counter such obfuscation, Bäcker again reverts to citation, to the records in which the circulation of prisoners from camp to camp were encoded in succinct abbreviations just as counts of the dead were neatly ordered in a Roman numeral and counting system that he presents at length to assure that it registers on the eye and mind.

            The fragments in “Notes” offer glimpses of his own thoughts. These are the closest any of the texts in the collection come to a personal voice. They include reflections on Hitler, Nietzsche, members of the Reich and observations of participants in historical events taken from, for instance, the volume of Last Letters from Stalingrad written by soldiers at the front, hewing to the transcript approach.

            In “Concrete Poetry” various reflections on language and speech, the historicity of words, and their existence/persistence across time, are closer to more familiar tenets of avant-garde and experimental poetry—the need for new language, for language to be fresh, and the potential of visual features to inform a text. But throughout, Bäcker remains focused on language as linguistic data, something in-itself. This is the real focus of his thought and practice,  and at the end of these reflections comes a potent formulation:

            “[…] aesthetic information does not provide additional information about a piece of semantic information; that is, an aggregate of meaning is not aestheticized after the fact, but rather: something unified is sought and displayed.”

            In this statement, the kernel of Bäcker’s concrete aesthetics is fully formulated. His aesthetics is remote from issues of judgment or beauty, and emphasizes perception of something in its concrete identity. Casting the role of the writer into that of transcriber also allows Bäcker’s formulation of his position to be clear: “My starting point is the defeated individual facing the collective’s distorted grimace.” Nowhere in these texts is there a whiff of personal chagrin, apology, or effacement. Instead, the actuality of being a historical subject, a “human being living historically,” informs every sentence in its forthright declarative mode. The subjunctive has no place in this accounting and Bäcker’s acute attention to statistical tabulation applies to language as well.

Ultimately, as Greaney states in his preface, Bäcker perceived “concrete poetry as a reaction against ‘pre-formed speech,’” and in this his goals align with those of the classic avant-garde with its commitment to resisting the mindless formulaic utterances of normative syntax and consumable forms. But as the tenets of the avant-garde have hardened into their own orthodoxy, with generations of young artists formed in the crucibles of academic programs and their formulaic catechisms, the standard positions repeat with deadening familiarity—that the political work of aesthetics is to resist the normative mode of standard syntax (poetics) or consumable imagery (visual art practices). Bäcker’s refusal to take this easy path, and his lack of didacticism, provides not only credibility but authenticity to his statements. Rather than adopting the all-too familiar Adorno-esque stance of “difficulty=resistance,” Bäcker remained resolutely committed to straight statements whose lack of obscurity makes obfuscation impossible. Non-normative? For Bäcker the insidiousness of normativity is in the way it is overlooked. Pay attention.

The cover image of the book shows the “Death Staircase” at Mauthausen, a flight where hundreds of prisoners died from the combination of hard labor, beatings, and executions. The staircase twists, its long flight grimacing even as the unrecoverable events in its history remain at the level of details, a dent, a crack, the sagging worn effect of many labored feet. No sentiment lingers in the photograph, just a documentary presentation, a concrete image that attempts to provide a transcription of a physical place. Just a stone staircase.

In the current moment, the obvious need not be stated. Bächer’s work has an exemplary clarity and his refusal to make it about him could not be more welcome. His work is a reminder of our complicity in ongoing events through the most ordinary means. Bäcker’s work stands as a lesson—that it is not the avant-garde and its self-conscious acts of de-familiarization and the all-too-formulaic commitment to “the subversion of normativity” that is the work of the writer. Instead, attention to the instrumental violence of familiar language might be what is most urgent.   

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[1] https://mcadenver.org/exhibitions/heimrad-backer

[2] Patrick Greaney is a Professor of German Studies at the University of Colorado, Boulder.

[3] Bäcker, “Documentary Poetry,” p.17.

[4] Bäcker, “Documentary Poetry,” p.19.

[5] Bäcker, “Documentary Poetry,” p.20.

[6] Bäcker, “Documentary Poetry,” p.20.

[7] Bäcker, “Documentary Poetry,” p.21.

[8] Bäcker, “Mirroring,” p.27.

[9] Bäcker, “Mirroring,” p.29.