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transcriptAuthor: Heimrad Bäcker Translators: Patrick Greaney and Vincent Kling German & Austrian Literature Series February 2010 172 pages, Dimensions: 5 x 8 Paperback, 9781564785657 Retail Paperback Price: Our Paperback Price: $13.56 
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Book Description
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.
This forthcoming title is available for preorder
About the Author
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Heimrad Bäcker (1925–2003) was a poet, a photographer, and the editor of the journal neue texte and the Austrian avant-garde press Edition Neue Texte. As a teenager, he was active in the regional leadership of the Hitler Youth and joined the Nazi party when he turned eighteen. After the war, he studied philosophy and wrote his doctoral dissertation on Karl Jaspers. He published six books of concrete and visual poetry. |
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About the Translators
| Patrick Greaney is assistant professor of German and comparative literature at the University of Colorado at Boulder. |
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Vincent Kling is professor of German and comparative literature at La Salle University in Philadelphia. |
Praise
“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