On Bäcker’s Transcript
ISBN 13: 978-156478-565-7
by Giles Goodland
My father kept a big tin coffer full of books in the garage. They were all in German, and were published either in the war, or in the immediate post war period, when he had been a part of the British occupation forces, working on the Denazification of the civil service in the Ruhr area. When he came home, in 1950, he had planned to write a history of this project. Instead, he did other things, like earn a living and raise a family. When you opened the coffer, it smelt of mould. I remember taking one of these books to show him, shortly before his death, when I was 11 or so. To my surprise, instead of being pleased with my curiosity, he became angry. He claimed to be unable to read German any more. This coffer, with its multivolume transcripts of the Nuremberg trials, and ephemeral propaganda leaflets, was never referred to again, and I don’t know what became of it. My father was cremated in 1977, and with him went any chance to find out more.
But reading Bäcker’s Transcript, based on just the same kind of books and reports, it all comes back. The history of this period that it is both impossible and necessary to write. For those involved, for those who survived, enormous periods of gestation were necessary, lifetimes in order to digest and attempt to make sense of the Holocaust. Heimrad Bäcker was a teenager in Austria at the end of the war, a Nazi party member, Hitler enthusiast, and aspiring journalist. He did not directly harm anyone in this period, but did write adulatory pieces about Hitler. After the war, Bäcker studied philosophy, writing a dissertation on Karl Jaspers. This was a significant choice, since Jaspers and his Jewish wife only survived the Nazi period by chance, and at great personal cost. Jaspers wrote extensively about the importance of constant confrontation with existential issues in one’s daily life. Issues such as death, mortality, and guilt. Later, Bäcker became involved with the Austrian avant-garde, as editor of neue texte. It was not until he was in his late 40s (well into the 1960s) that he started writing the texts that would become this book, Transcript.
The book is a confrontation with the full meaning of the Holocaust, using the techniques of the Wiener Gruppe. Bäcker himself, as publisher and editor, was tangentially related to this group, although a decade older than most of its participants. In terms of visual poetry, it is most reminiscent of the poetry of H. C. Artmann. But it takes the techniques that poets such as Artmann used a lot further, by using what is unique to visual and concrete poetry, its insistence on the materiality of the sign. Each part of Transcript is taken from an actual document or a referenced historical source, but not as might be cited in an academic text. Jammed to the very top of the page, single sentences or fragments are left with the maximum of white below them. Other pieces are columns ot figures, lists, timetables. The pieces insist on the materiality and instrumental use of the word and the sign. Lists, tallies, definitions, timetables, graphs. The Nazi state was an efficient bureaucracy that used the methods of accounting and statistics to enforce terror and genocide.
In particular, the act of defining and labelling the victim. Several poems in Transcript refer to the legalistic process that led to the awarding and enforcement of the yellow star in the pre-war period. One whole page lists all of the parks forbidden to wearers of the yellow star in Vienna. A list so long, you realise there can hardly have been any public space available to Jews in the city.
The material traces that the Nazis left in lawbooks, trial transcripts, and private letters are as horrifying as the gas chambers themselves. Bäcker stresses through accentuation, selection, and layout that the sentences we read here were once performative.
If functioning heaters are present, no more fuel is to be added. If it is a matter of slow-burning stoves (such as tiled stoves), the stove door is to be opened so that the fire goes out while you are still in the jew’s residence. when you leave the residence the fire must be extinguished.
(non-capitalization as in Bäcker). This is the only text on a single page. You, as a reader, have to think: these are instructions, issued to police or perhaps to the military, on how to deal with heaters during visits to Jew’s houses. Several thought occur, such as, this can only be connected with the enforced removal of Jews, presumably to the death camps. Secondly, the rules we are reading are connected to fire safety precautions, the protection of property. The concern in the instruction is to preserve the house from subsequent accidental destruction by fire. If the reader continues to think, it may be on the double significance of terms such as stove or fire in this context. Perhaps in selecting a passage such as this, Bäcker is also highlighting the insistence on petty bureaucratic rules is the backbone of any modern repressive state.
If there are narratives here, the reader has to make the stories. This makes it a significantly different telling of the Holocaust than that of Reznikoff’s Holocaust. Also using documentary sources, Reznikoff focuses on narratives, chiefly those of the direct victims. Clearly, this option would not have been appropriate for Bäcker, the one-time Nazi. There is a kind of grim asymmetry between the two poets: Reznikoff, a Jew resident in America, was an indirectly affected victim. Bäcker, a teenage Nazi party member, was a non-effecting perpetrator. Both books are relentless, focussed, and insistent. For Reznikoff, Holocaust is a book in which the victims are given the ability to speak, to tell their stories. As such, it has a strong place in a US poetics of narrative and story that Reznikoff also used in his epic poem, Testimony. If sometimes reading Holocaust we find we reach a limit, it is because a story is always a re-presentation of something that has taken place before, and as such falls into the category of the many stories that preceded Holocaust. Ultimately, presumably, to Biblical narratives of Genesis and catastrophe.
As presentational rather than representational poems, each one is taken as a unique text without a preceding one. Bäcker takes his sources chiefly from the perpetrators (in one remarkable footnote he even quotes his own younger self). But he does not let anyone tell stories. The visual essence of each poem is that of the table or graph—the figures should speak for themselves. Even before the act of reading and hence interpreting, the texts are present and enacting. As if to back up the full reality of each poem, each page is backed up with an endnote giving the source, and a full bibliography.
Giles Goodland is the author of A Spy in the House of Years (Leviathan), Capital (Salt), and What the Things Sang (Shearsman).