transcript

Translated by Vincent Kling, Patrick Greaney

transcript is a disturbing document. Using the techniques of concrete and visual poetry, Heimrad Bäcker presents quotations from the Holocaust's planners, perpetrators, and victims. The book offers a startling collection of documents that confront us with details from the bureaucratic world of the Nazis and the intimate worlds they destroyed. Bäcker's sources range from victims' letters and medical charts to train schedules and the telephone records of Auschwitz. His transcriptions and reworkings of these sources serve as a reminder that everything about the Shoah was spoken about in great detail, from the most banal to the most monstrous. transcript shows us that the Holocaust was not "unspeakable," but was an eminently describable and described act spoken about by thousands of people concerned with the precision and even the beauty of their language.

Details

Title transcript

Author Heimrad Bäcker

Translated by Vincent Kling, Patrick Greaney

Title First Published 01 February 2010

Format Paperback

Nb of pages 172 p.

ISBN-10 1564785653

ISBN-13 9781564785657

Publication Date 01 February 2010

Nb of pages 172

List Price $16.95

Onix Version 2.1

Excerpt

you would see distraught people on the street: "i forgot my star!" or they would be stopped: "where's your star?" then they would rush to their quarters shielding themselves with their hands held out in front of them.

legal bulletin of the reich 1933, I
legal bulletin of the reich 1933, I
legal bulletin of the reich 1935, I
legal bulletin of the reich 1935, I

...more

Reviews

Press Reviews

Tablet

Heimrad Bäcker's 'documentary poems' turn artifacts of evil into the stuff of art.

Bomb

transcript is an indictment, understanding transcript, evidence of that most human trait, our inhumanity.

Quotations

The cumulative effect of these fragments is harrowing. A letter says: "i probably won't ever see you again, won't hear your voice, won't kiss you. but how i want to see you, if only once!" In the long lists of names, one or two stick out. What did the tailor Zoltan Fleishmann look like? What sort of life did the shopkeeper Bernhard Herskovits have? We read about a camp inmate who was punished with death for not executing with total accuracy the motion of taking off his cap and putting it back on, of another who was shot because he was no longer capable of performing certain kinds of heavy labor owing to his physical condition, and of a little four-year-old Jewish boy who distributed short pieces of string to men and women on the way to the gas chamber—presumably by way of reassurance. Poetry is in the details, we usually say, but so is cruelty.

-Charles Simic

Thus while transcript is extremely effective both as literature and a warning against the horrors of Nazism, it simultaneously leads the reader to question their ability to fully apprehend 'reality' because of the ways in which our experience is filtered through prior 'knowledge' that may be of either a ‘documentary’ or a ‘fictional’ nature.

-Stuart Home

With transcript, a new chapter began for concrete and visual poetry.

-Eugen Gomringer

I consider transcript to be a major work of concrete poetry and, beyond that, proof that its methods can convey reality much more intensively than the methods of description.

-Friedrich Achleitner

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