Heimrad Bäcker uses documentary material to recount a minor historical episode from World War II: the crew of a German submarine comes upon three men on a Norwegian lifeboat and refuses to take them on board. She also presents quotations from the Holocaust's planners, perpetrators, and victims

Heimrad Bäcker, Seascape, Trans. by Patrick Greaney. Ugly Duckling Presse, 2013. [1985.]

Heimrad Bäcker’s Seascape uses documentary material to recount a minor historical episode from World War II: the crew of a German submarine comes upon three men on a Norwegian lifeboat and refuses to take them on board. Bäcker’s account of Nazi inhumanity uncannily echoes Un coup de dés, Marcel Broodthaers’ A Voyage on the North Sea, and other nautical texts of the avant-garde.


0800  Qu. AL 0175, SW 4/5,
         heavy rain, moderate
         seas, poor visibility.

0430 Quad AL 0196, SW 5,
        dry, rough seas, good
        visibility, broken
        clouds.


Have you ever killed anyone?
This was the question a journalist recently reported asking a convicted serial killer. Not to drag biography into it, but criminal lawyers know better than to ask such stupid questions. For, not to drag cogitography into it, but who amongst us has not killed someone, or, better still, anyone. Assuming, as we must assume, the proper collective historical perspective.
But first, to drag biography into it: Heimrad Bäcker was an Austrian artist, poet, and editor. Born in 1925, Bäcker was a propaganda officer in the Hitler Youth; at 18, he joined the Nazi Party. In 1968, Bäcker began collecting quotations and documentary materials about the Shoah, presenting these materials as concrete and visual poetry. Seascape, a brief documentary account of a U-boat’s failure to rescue three Norwegian sailors, was originally published as a single-themed edition of Bäcker’s journal neue texte, then included in a self-selected book of collected works, published in limited edition. For his part, he deemed the work a piece of concrete poetry. Ugly Duckling Presse has published it in another two limited editions, 500 bound by the Presse ($25), 26 bound in boards by Paper Dragon Books ($125).
We can start then with the proposition that Ugly Duckling Presse has presented this lovely book object as a thoughtfully concretized material object, for one thing the National Socialists well understood was that materiality is inseparable from animus. As a contemplative aside, this, in the person of Leni Riefenstahl, was the great art lesson of the time: that aesthetics could not be segregate from ethics as a formed and formal proposition. Along with Duchamp, Riefenstahl altered the landscape of all art après. Bäcker, then, may be also understood as one who understood both their art lessons. The thing, and not for nothing can we use das Ding here, is art because it works as art within the context of art, and the thing as art always speaks as a thing about its event-culture. Fountain works perfectly as a pissoir, which of course renders a public service. While all art is inherently excremental, the readymade captures the aura of excrescence that mass-produces art for appreciation by the cognoscenti and pissing-on by the masses. Fountain in particular thus bears eloquent witness to Hegel’s observation that the penis is Nature’s naïve conjunction of “the organ of its highest fulfillment, the organ of generation, with the organ of urination.” Switch out art for poetry and we can stop nattering on about what is or isn’t poetry and return to our retinal proclivities and attendant camps.
The double vaulted pages of Seascape, coupled with its creamy thick paper and letterpress gray typeface, Century font, ReichTM paper throughout, could be no other way. All text is as text: the formal citation that appeared in the original exhibit document is transcribed along with the more informational portion. Charles Bernstein’s afterword sits as a single folded broadsheet of gray-backed cardstock, tucked in an envelope slitted (or tipped, as you wish) in a back flap. The book’s pages are (hand) bound by a single gray cord that runs between two holes punched on the left hand side. The cover includes the work as part of UDP’s Lost Literature series (#11). The poems themselves are largely data, beginning with the subtitle:

B. 36. War log, size: DIN A3

to poems reiterating the ongoing theme of ongoing weather, such as:

0800Quad AL 0175, SW 4/5,
heavy rain, moderate
seas, poor
visibility.

And the turn, the narrative bit that is to give allegorical heft to the rest, the reported sighting of a Norwegian motor tanker, the John P. Pedersen, “drifting under sail,” three survivors lying within, who stated that:

their ship had been torpedoed 28 days before. I turned
down their request to be taken aboard, provisioned the
boat with food and water and gave them the course and
distance to the Icelandic coast. Boat and crew were in
a state that, in view of the prevailing weather, offered
hardly any prospect of rescue.

And the denouement, a simple citation (“Reference: IMT (International Military Tribunal: Nuremberg, 1949), Vol. XIV, 340-41; Vol. XXV, 623-25.”) in which it is revealed that these clips are taken (were taken?) from documentary evidence introduced in the trials.
Thus we have the creamy fetish of the wide open seas, a Weltgeschichte of negative space, and the empty vaginal folds of the uncut pages, implying that something more generative could have come from the excremental narrative at hand. All in all, a lovely and useless object.i So far, so good.
As a historical aside, the text in Seascape was taken more specifically from documentary evidence introduced against Erich Raeder, Admiral of the Third Reich, charged with waging a war of aggression and violating international law in conducting his U-boat war. Raeder’s defense was that the navy was a military operation, and that any reduction in restrictions on naval warfare was justified as a response to enemy actions. Third Reich Vice Admiral Schulte-Mönting, commander of the Norwegian North Coast, testified in Raeder’s defense. The Seascape incident was used to impeach Schulte-Mönting’s claim that the navy fought a “clean war.”
Or, as I found in the Nuremberg trial transcripts themselves (not included in Seascape itself):

SCHULTE-MONTING: I observe that the commanding officer did what he could, in view of the weather which he described when he said that in view of the bad weather he could not rescue them. He threw provisions to them in a sack and gave them the course to the coast. I do not know what there is about that that is inhumane. If he had left without giving them food and the course, then you might make that accusation.
MAJOR JONES: But he could have taken them aboard, you know. These were three men who did…
SCHULTE-MONTING: No, I believe you cannot judge that. Only the commanding officer himself can judge that, the man in charge of the U-boat. I would have to look at the weather, because it says here “Medium swell.” That could also..
MAJOR JONES: But you see here the U-boat commander must have spoken to these people and physically it must have been possible to take them aboard, but he left them to their fate, you know, knowing quite well he was leaving them to die.
SCHULTE-MONTING: No, not at all. Then he would not have needed to give them any food and to give them the course to the coast. What makes you think that they had to die? By the way…
MAJOR JONES: The last sentence is a clear indication that the U-boat captain knew he was leaving them to die. I am suggesting to you that he could have taken them aboard and should have done so if he had the elements of humanity in him.
SCHULTE-MONTING: No; I do not know the condition of the U-boat, whether the boat was in a position to take prisoners on board. I believe that you have never seen conditions on a U-boat; otherwise you would not judge it like that. Considering that the crew of a U-boat is under water for weeks and uses every last bit of space and is exposed to the greatest dangers day and night, one cannot simply say that it would have been a humane act to take these additional men aboard. Besides, the commander himself says there was hardly a chance of rescue in view of the prevailing weatherii

There is no indication in Bäcker’s work as to when the incident occurred, though a quick search shows that the Pedersen was sunk on May 20, 1941, about 160 miles south of the tip of Greenland. There were two lifeboats launched, 16 survivors in one and 21 in the other. The boat with 16 survivors was found three days later by a Danish rescue ship and taken to Reykjavik; the other lifeboat, according to British Navel records, was never found.iii The Norwegian tanker was auxiliary to the British Royal Fleet, and was carrying 9100 tons of Admiralty fuel oil at the time of its sinking.
It is unclear whether the ships’ sailors (regardless of nationality) would have been considered non-civilians, even if they were non-combatants, under the 1929 Geneva and 1899/1907 Hague Conventions. In any case, the 1929 version of the Geneva Conventions mandated that wounded or sick enemy combatants who fall in the hands of the enemy should be treated as prisoners of war (chp. 1, art. 2), and non-combatants were to be treated humanely in all circumstances (art. 3). The 1910 Brussels Conventions more broadly required the captain of any vessel to “assist” any shipwrecked person. According to the 1929 Geneva provisions, there is an affirmative duty to “lend help and support” the shipwrecked, which, as noted in a 1960 Commentary to the 1949 Geneva Conventions, contains “an implicit obligation to collect them.” This obligation was made explicit in 1949, though submarines and “fast torpedo-boats” were given special dispensation relative to rescue duties because of the limited nature of their equipment and accommodations. “Generally speaking, if a warship is forced to leave shipwrecked persons to their fate, it will endeavor to provide them with the means to enable them to await rescue or reach the coast: life-boats, food, water, a compass, charts, etc.”iv
As a further aside, there was the Laconia incident in September 1942 in which a U-boat torpedoed the civilian vessel; when area U-boats began to provide rescue operations, they were attacked by a US bomber. The U-boats were then ordered to stop rescuing civilians, thus initiating officially unrestricted submarine warfare for Germany—although the Germans argued that the Americans had been engaging in unrestricted warfare since the beginning of the war. To cut a bit to the case’s chase, Admiral Raeder was acquitted of the specific charge of unrestricted submarine warfare based on affidavit evidence by the then-commander of the U.S. Pacific Fleet, acknowledging that the United States had engaged in unrestricted submarine warfare from the beginning. Convicted of the charges of war crimes and of waging a war of aggression, Raeder was sentenced to life, his subsequent request to be executed denied.
Note that this has not been so much a poetry review as such to date, but a rather linear historical exegesis, and a complication of guilt. To digress for a moment, let us consider in this context the relatively recent publication of Joseph Kaplan’s Kill List, in which a number of contemporary poets were described as either “rich” or “comfortable,” the titular implication being that come the rebellion, these individuals would be targeted for assassination by, presumably, the proletariat. Leaving aside the Bolshevik-belt gag of the work, and its function as a piece of primary institutional critique, what was interesting was how quickly ideology engulfed the imaginary in its reception. There was a dutiful outcry on social media about the poem and its particulars, including some pained individual protests against being labeled as rich/comfortable. But as Brecht knew, the ones who protest their innocence are the guiltiest of all, and as Obama knows, kill lists are by rights idiosyncratic, and as history proves, death is inevitable in service of revolution. So what is objected to in the objection is precisely animated by a bourgeois sense of individual entitlement, that is to say, that death ought be deserved, or at least comprehensible. This was the error that Simone Weil fell into in 1940 when she protested the Nazi prohibition against Jews teaching with her three-part objection: 1) such a ban was idiotic; 2) she was not Jewish; and 3) she didn’t want to teach anyway.
Back to poetics. As noted, Bernstein’s afterword is slotted in a slit, raising the question of whether pocket change changes the pants. Throughout his deft disquisition of Seascape as a piece of “after writing,” i.e., prose that cannot place itself “before,” i.e., “the writing of witness, that which places itself before, in front of, the event,” Bernstein repeats his resistance to characterizing the piece as poetry. It is an Adorno-born resistance: to characterize the work as poetry would be, in Bernstein’s words, “to accept that barbarism is before us, staring us in the face.” Bernstein thus preserves a special place for poetry as potential redeemer; despite its smutted face, the angelus novus, as Benjamin opined, “must look just so.” Aber warum?
In this, my argument is not with Bernstein’s reading—in this, all allegorical readings are as all allegorical readings—but rather with its conservatism. To slightly rephrase the lesson harrowed on our Western backs by Wittgenstein, there is not aesthetics without ethics, there is not ethics without aesthetics. There’s no preservation of poetry in any case, especially not this one: poetry is not reserved for morality or ethics, if there is a difference, and what would that difference be? The aesthetic point of Un coup des dès, the most obvious Continental precursor to Seascape, was whether the captain will cast his dice into the abyss, knowing that such a toss is meaningless, a tribute to pure chance. In Mallarmé’s preface to Un coup de des, he said that his verses demanded their surrounding silences to void narrative and suspend time. And this is precisely what the abyssal and creamy Seascape does: showing the moment when the die is cast without hope. Not out of a desire for this or that histoire (written, as always, in retrospect) but because one must, in the end, always cast the die. It could be asided here that coup also is a blow, as you know, as in de grâce, which may be also a mercy killing. In other words, what do we make of fate where there is no futurity?
At the end of his afterword, Bernstein writes, “Ich bin ein Norwegian.” What Kennedy more fully said was: “All free men, wherever they may live, are citizens of Berlin, and therefore, as a free man, I take pride in the words, ‘Ich bin ein Berliner.’” So we have the problem of the citizen, as noted by Arendt and dilated upon by Agamben. If I am a Norwegian, I am yet a citizen, yet an ally. I deserve a certain form of treatment because of my citizenship. For that is the boat that cannot, must not, be sunk, according to this formulation. But we know how torpedoes go, and how Das Boot is in a storm. The allegory provoked by Seascape is thus perhaps less the humanity or inhumanity of Captain Flacksenberg’s actions, but Bäcker’s poetry therein. Bernstein’s afterword begins. “to write prose after Auschwitz is barbaric.” But surely the question of poetry after Auschwitz over-composes the point: the point of Seascape is that it is absolutely poetic.v
And absolutely fetishistic: there is a poetic sort of comfort in the press of the letterpress in this book-object, in the creamy heft of the pages, in the way the work flirts with a kind of Nazi-porn that makes the work that much more problematic. The rough definition of the pervert is that he knows what le grand Autre wants—how to reach the big O of the big other, as it were. There is something of that erectile quality here: we are to trill at the sign of the swastika, as if that sign is not a sign of civilization but a sign of barbarism. And by this same token, the prettiness of this particular poésie is its pockmarked preservation. A preservation sealed not just by the lushness of the book-object, but also by the imprimatur of ideological (aesthetic + ethic) purity provided by the construct of the Afterword as last word: the absolution that can only be provided for the Western audience by having a famous American Jewish poet judge the text a judgment. Of guilt, natürlich.
In this sense, Seascape works as a demonstration of the dispositif in the expanded Foucault con Agamben sense, where disquisitions of juridical and philosophical propositions have seamlessly confounded with the apparatuses of literature and language.vi Producing here, a poetry that cannot be even recognized as poetry, just as the art of Riefenstahl cannot be recognized as art. In other words, the sign of the Nazi renders all that occurs under the sign of the Nazi an atrocity. But in this Arendt was right, the sign of the Nazi is (and this is its truly pedestrian horror) the sign of a government. And the sign of wartime.vii As well, as here, the sign of the individual signature, which is also the sign of the poem. We put our hand to all of it, and why not? After all, as Foucault noted (and he was not wrong about this), you are either a symptom or are available as a symptom. Given the ambiguities properly left open by Seascape, a poem of particularly post-war indeterminacy.viii
In other words, clearly Adorno was wrong, there was most certainly poetry after Auschwitz, a veritable North Sea’s worth.ix We’re drowning in the stuff. Thus, the next question becomes what is the poetry of Auschwitz.x The poetry of Bäcker and beyond, the dispositif of all manner of adrift—or, put another way, especially today, perhaps the ideal is to say: Ich bin ein Musselman. But, if one is very brave indeed, to simply and stupidly repeat: Ich bin ein Berliner.
___
ⁱ A fetishization duly embraced by The Poetry Foundation’s Harriet: “Oh how we are fawning over Seascape by Heimrad Bäcker… More on the fawn later on.
ⁱⁱ http://www.loc.gov/rr/frd/Military_Law/pdf/NT_Vol-XIV.pdf, at p. 341. As another aside, I am not sure what Bernstein means in his afterward when he describes the “original of which SEASCAPE is an echo” as being neither the transcript nor the captain’s diary as these are “themselves commentaries.” It seems Bernstein is considering the event as such to be the only original, but there is no event sans document—which is one of the lessons in M. NourbeSe Philip’s Zong. It’s not a nice lesson.
ⁱⁱⁱ The missing lifeboat had contained 13 Norwegians, 2 Dutch, 2 Swedish, and 4 British crew, including the master. http://www.uboat.net/allies/merchants/935.html
^iv http://www.loc.gov/rr/frd/Military_Law/pdf/GC_1949-II.pdf, pp. 89-90, 130-131.
^v Shifting the focus from barbarism (a discussion of incivility) to aestheticism (a discussion of the civilized), perhaps dodges the bullet-laden question of formalism in de jure citizenship. The aesthetic citizen is not necessarily a Volk, yet not quite an outsider, bearing something more akin to a cosmopolitanism that, duly effete, rests on exposure and appreciation rather than authenticity and its dopey twin, fidelity.
^vi The French writer Franck Liebovici has developed a poetics of the dispositif as part of his “poetics of documents,” detailed in his book, Des documents poetiques. (Al Dante/Questions Théoriques Collection: Paris, 2007). As described by Christophe Hanne, Liebovici’s document poem is a document that is intentionally created “to respond to a new need for information of another kind,” i.e., a document that functions poetically insofar as poetry is language that functions in and as an aura of something more than the spare utility or communicability of its language. Christophe Hanne. Nos dispositifs poetiques. (Questions théoriques Collection: Paris, 2010), pp. 177-178. Stupidly demonstrated here when setting Seascape into its Anglicized (i.e., un-compounded) initials, SS.
^vii It is perhaps a comfort to consider this particular wartime so very different from another wartime. Or, alternatively, that there could be acts of warfare that are innocent under the rules of warfare. Or, alternatively, that guilt cannot be painted with so broad a brush, even if the brush belongs to the victors. The refusal to entertain these other propositions is perhaps part of the dispositif of war itself. A bit of which is that war is presented as a by-product of other dispositifs, rather than one in itself.
^viii I’m not sure if the argument about prose versus poetry is inherently interesting, although it may be of interest insofar as poetry had maintained (and here is where Bernstein comes in), a kind of moral preserve as part of its historical mandate. A preserve yet clung to by a passel of present-day poets, including those who would reserve avant garde poetics for the proper sort of politics, which they are happy to identify for you and explain to you, and those who oxymoronically damn the workings of capital viz poetry within the confines of Facebook or any other capitalized platform without personally blinking, or those who take the spread-footed stance, commonly seen at less aestheticized urinals, as they explicate what is and what is not poetry as they see it. Of course, we could just call the whole thing conceptual, and call it over. For the only real problem or puzzle in Kaplan’s list is that it is so very exclusive. All or none, as they say.
^ix Part of Adorno’s error might lie in what he considered poetry; given his own aesthetic preferences for a high modernist Wahrheitsgehalt, where the object itself contains the conditions of its dialectical truth-telling. When Adorno wrote in Minima Moralia (1945), “The increasing impossibility of the representation of what is historical speaks to the extinction of art,” he was right enough, but then again wrong. Just as we have now our zombie poetries.
^x How might poetry of Auschwitz differ from the poetry of the Shoah, for example, or the Holocaust, which may be two different things? - Vanessa Place

Oh how we are fawning over Seascape by Heimrad Bäcker (Ugly Duckling Presse 2013), which “uses documentary material to recount a minor historical episode from World War II: the crew of a German submarine comes upon three men on a Norwegian lifeboat and refuses to take them on board. Bäcker’s account of Nazi inhumanity uncannily echoes Un coup de dés, Marcel Broodthaers’ A Voyage on the North Sea, and other nautical texts of the avant-garde.” It’s reviewed at Molossus by David Shook:

Each page of this letter-pressed edition features a single log entry:

1215   Quad AL 1973, SW 4/5,
    heavy rain, rising
    sea, moderate rough
    swell, clear

These brief, specialized annotations give way just once, to an extended—contextually, at exactly 90 words—account of the submarine happening on three Norwegian sailors in the lifeboat of a torpedoed tanker. Rather than allowing the men, who had been adrift for four weeks, to board the submarine the U-boat captain “turned down their request to be taken aboard, provisioned the boat with food and water and gave them the course and distance to the Icelandic coast,” before noting his opinion that given their condition and the weather their rescue was unlikely (read: impossible).
It is easy to speculate that the precise language of the logbook reflects and perhaps even contributes toward the detachment demonstrated by the terse prose description of the small book’s central event. Patrick Greaney, an associate professor of German at the University of Colorado Boulder, achieves a straightforward translation from the German, and offers a brief contextualizing note at the book’s end, noting that Seascape is the first of Bäcker’s four works cannibalizing and recontextualizing texts about Nazism and the Shoah. Bäcker’s “concrete poetry” could be a work of contemporary Conceptual Writing: there is nothing new under the sun. The sudden intrusion of human narrative, which could only have been uncovered through exhaustive research (Bäcker cites pages 340 – 41 of Vol. XIV and 623 – 25 of Vol. XXXV of the trial transcripts.), endows the work with a didactic quality without blatant moralizing: this is the dehumanizing nature of war, now you decide how to feel and respond.
In a tipped-in, two-fold broadsheet, Charles Bernstein declares, after Adorno, that “To write prose after Auschwitz is barbaric,” then explains that Bäcker’s nachschrift literally means after writing. After briefly cataloguing precedents and influences—Swedish poet Åde Hodell’s Orderbuch (1965) is a particularly haunting example—Bernstein writes that Bäcker’s nachschrift “feels for the ground of a post-Englightenment, aftermodern poetry, as a blind person feels for another’s face.” He’s right, and Seascape succeeds not just as aftermodern poem, but as an emotionally compelling work of literature.

And if you’re in Denver or near: Check out the coordinating exhibition, Landscape M, at Museum of Contemporary Art Denver, up until January. They give us a brief bio:

The photographer and poet Heimrad Bäcker (1925-2003) dedicated his life to documenting the remnants of Nazism and the Holocaust. Bäcker’s photographs look away from the scenes usually associated with the Shoah—barracks, gates, train tracks—and focus on the minute and incidental traces left behind in the Austrian landscape: indentations in stone, twisted steel rods, and concrete foundations. His examination of Austrian history is also a self-critical reflection on his enthusiastic participation, as a teenager, in the Hitler Youth and the Nazi Party. Landscape M focuses on Bäcker’s works related to Mauthausen, the largest concentration camp in Austria. MCA Denver’s exhibition is the first of Bäcker’s work in the US, and it is the first to show the body of work left behind after his death.

Bäcker also influenced Rob Fitterman’s Holocaust Museum (Counterpath Press), which Charles Bernstein thoroughly covered at Jacket2 last year. He discusses there another Bäcker work, Transcript:

Transcript, first published in 1986, is a work made up entirely of quotations or citations (collages of found texts, as Walter Benjamin envisioned), which are often visually arranged in a manner that resembles the grid lists of concrete poetry. These found linguistic shards confront, without summarizing or representing, the Systemic Extermination. In contrast to Reznikoff’s elegiac event-moments in Holocaust, Bäcker’s source texts (which overlap with those used by Reznikoff) are sampled, fragmented, constellated. Narrative is under erasure, but ineradicable. Transcript’s sources are documented in notes that form an integral part of the text. - Harriet Staff 

Taken merely at face-value, this nautical report portends that this day might be a relief after what might have been a bad storm. Though the seas seem to be a little choppy, at 0430 hours, the visibility is relatively clear and cloud cover is breaking up. Despite the highly technical format, any poet or prose writer might have penned a similar poetic start to a narrative. Except, in context, this is hardly the beginning to a beautiful day. What seems like a simple weather report develops into something quite different – a narrative that is shockingly minimal in its portrayal of wartime indifference and a text that, in his broadsheet tucked into the back cover entitled “After Writing,” Charles Bernstein twice claims an unwillingness to refer to the text as a poem.
But, in the lineup of texts that have been reviewed by the Found Poetry Review, Seascape falls in among those that question the very idea of what a poem is and what it can do. In only 20 letter-pressed pages, Greaney’s translation of Bäcker’s SEËSTUCK (originally published as neue text #32), challenges definitions of poetry in the same mode as Jeff Griffin’s Lost and while creating the portrait of human indifference that invokes the entirety of Srikanth Reddy’s Voyager. It calls back to the transcribed inflection points that are the heart of Goldsmith’s 7 American Deaths and Disasters. If these kindred texts are accepted as poems, it follows that attaching the term to Seascape is not only warranted but begged.
Though both a translation and a transcription of World War II German submarine records, it does the same transformative work that is expected of any found text.
Though it may be somewhat brash to refer to Seascape as a long poem, it certainly is a kind of long-form data-driven narrative poetry. In an age when many are conditioned to look at the “story” that data tells, it is not at all beyond claiming Bäcker’s transcription as such. The data-story that confronts the reader is that of German submarine data of U-boat U-71, helmed by Captain Walter Flaschenberg on its first patrol in the Atlantic Ocean. After several pages of roughly benign status reports of changing position and weather conditions, the rhythm is broken by the only prose block of the entire book which appears on its sixth page which acts as the climactic moment of the narrative in which the U-boat encounters three survivors of a torpedoed ship along its patrol route in the northern Atlantic Ocean who had been afloat for 28 days. Amidst the surrounding status reports, the sudden contact comes and goes as briefly as an open-ocean flare. Flaschenberg, a notorious pack captain, reports that he “turned down their request to be taken aboard, provisioned the boat with food and water and gave them the course and distance to the Icelandic coast.”
To hasten reaction times and organize their patrol activity, the Kreigsmarine (WWII German Navy) employed a grid system designating various quadrants with two-letter signifiers placing the crew between the “AL” and “AK” regions, placing the encounter southwest of Iceland. Though in close proximity to the coast, Flaschenberg admits that there are “hardly any prospects of rescue” given the exhausted state of the crew and a “view of the prevailing weather” that seemed to be worsening from the pre- and proceeding passages. After this isolated incident, the crew pushes on eastward, leaving the three Norwegian survivors to their fate. Four pages of records close the book as conditions progress from “southerly swell, / hazy” to a closing report nearly 24-hours removed from the first –

0400 Quad AK, NW 5-6,
dry, rough seas
poor visibility, over-
cast.

What is there to write about a narrative that ends nearly the same way it begins? Despite the brief encounter with the adrift Norwegian sailors, ostensibly the only factor that undergoes any change is cloud cover. Seascape is almost infinitely re-readable – and not simply due to its slim page count. The very minimalism of the book suggests the kind of surprise that the events contained within confer; when presented with the simple choice of taking on lost and lonely souls in need of shelter and the basic promise of survival, human indifference stands in stark relief to the strange wave-like rhythm of the sterile notes made in the captain’s log. The casual note dismissing the fate of the stranded sailors betrays either a stark human indifference or a kind of razor-sharp focus on war. Interpreting the text either way is disturbing.
Even the simple act of reference to “(EXHIBIT GB-481),” a document used as part of the Nüremburg Trials creates the notion that there is a level of complicity in the fact that Flaschenberg, though acting as captain, is certainly not alone in his knowledge of the incident, nor likely in his judgment to send the men they encounter at sea in a lifeboat to their deaths in the pursuit of the impossible goal to reach Iceland. Bäcker seems to be saying to the reader that there is no act that goes unwitnessed. For those that are implicated – no matter how small the crime may seem – at least history is always watching through the legacy of documents left behind.
Much like the translation of text itself, history will translate intent to its most horrifying essentials.
Inserted into a pocket at the back of the beautiful letterpress edition is the “talk-back” entitled “After Writing” that is a natural way to help a reader handle the experience of such a text rather than acting as a justification for it – the danger of providing such a companion piece to a text as short as Seascape. As a capstone, it works well to create a reading experience out of the text that generates a trail of associations and lines of inquiry that establish new contexts around Seascape that endow it with new connotations and mental footnotes reading after reading.
Though published in 1985 in Austria, Patrick Greaney’s more contemporary translation to English creates a tight piece out of an already-sparse work that speaks to the simple horror and shock of the narrative contained within. The 20 pages of Seascape are all that are needed to communicate the simple message that even the smallest act taken for granted can echo through history. As Bernstein states in his after-reading piece, it admits that “to write poetry after the Second War is to accept that barbarism is before us, staring us in the face.” - Douglas Luman

Heimrad Bäcker, whose book transcript has been featured on molossus, first published Seascape as an entire 1985 issue of his magazine neue texte. Composed from the text of the 1949 International Military Tribunal in Nuremberg, Seascape (Ugly Duckling Presse, $25) recontextualizes the captain’s log of a German submarine during World War II. Each page of this letter-pressed edition features a single log entry: 
1215   Quad AL 1973, SW 4/5,
heavy rain, rising
sea, moderate rough
swell, clear

These brief, specialized annotations give way just once, to an extended—contextually, at exactly 90 words—account of the submarine happening on three Norwegian sailors in the lifeboat of a torpedoed tanker. Rather than allowing the men, who had been adrift for four weeks, to board the submarine the U-boat captain “turned down their request to be taken aboard, provisioned the boat with food and water and gave them the course and distance to the Icelandic coast,” before noting his opinion that given their condition and the weather their rescue was unlikely (read: impossible).

It is easy to speculate that the precise language of the logbook reflects and perhaps even contributes toward the detachment demonstrated by the terse prose description  of the small book’s central event.  Patrick Greaney, an associate professor of German at the University of Colorado Boulder, achieves a straightforward translation from the German, and offers a brief contextualizing note at the book’s end, noting that Seascape is the first of Bäcker’s four works cannibalizing and recontextualizing texts about Nazism and the Shoah. Bäcker’s “concrete poetry” could be a work of contemporary Conceptual Writing: there is nothing new under the sun. The sudden intrusion of human narrative, which could only have been uncovered through exhaustive research (Bäcker cites pages 340 – 41 of Vol. XIV and 623 – 25 of Vol. XXXV of the trial transcripts.), endows the work with a didactic quality without blatant moralizing: this is the dehumanizing nature of war, now you decide how to feel and respond.

In a tipped-in, two-fold broadsheet, Charles Bernstein declares, after Adorno, that “To write prose after Auschwitz is barbaric,” then explains that Bäcker’s nachschrift literally means after writing. After briefly cataloguing precedents and influences—Swedish poet Åde Hodell’s Orderbuch (1965) is a particularly haunting example—Bernstein writes that Bäcker’s nachschrift “feels for the ground of a post-Englightenment, aftermodern poetry, as a blind person feels for another’s face.” He’s right, and Seascape succeeds not just as aftermodern poem, but as an emotionally compelling work of literature. - David Shook

Heimrad Bäcker, transcript, Trans. by. Patrick Greaney & Vincent King. Dalkey Archive Press, 2010.


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.

“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

In transcript Bäcker collects and reorganizes quotations from Holocaust planners, perpetrators, and victims. An arresting collection of poetry in itself, it’s also a commentary on the translation or appropriation inherent to all poetry. The book’s genesis is also interesting: as a teenager Bäcker was himself active in the regional leadership of the Hitler Youth, joining the Nazi party at age 18; beginning in the late sixties coming to terms with his wartime activity began to consume his literary output. Not at all offered as an apology of forgetting, transcript is an acknowledgement of intense misdeed. Its medium allows it to stand as a most intimate memorial. - David Shook

Adorno wrote that there could be no lyric poetry after Auschwitz; Duchamp made art an afterword. Between these two maxims lies Heimrad Bäcker’s transcript, a slim volume of what passes for poetry, but is more poetic for being art’s unadorned postscript. Bäcker (1925–2003) was a propaganda officer in the Hitler Youth at 17. At 18, he joined the Nazi Party. In 1968, he started collecting documents and quotations related to the Shoah. In 1986, the year former Wehrmacht officer Kurt Waldheim was elected president of Austria, Bäcker published nachschrift, now translated into English by Patrick Greaney and Vincent Kling. transcript is a series of statements taken from these documents, presented as poetry: each page contains one item that would bear witness, if witness could really stand to be born. Items spare and terrifying as a strip of razor (i need more freight trains if i’m going to take care of things quickly_), as immediately cruel as mortality itself (_you will find my body before you get to the school, it’s by the street watchman’s house, where albegno is, before the bridge. you can come and pick me up right away). The font is Minion Pro, the case lower, the white spaces vertiginous. There is no gratuitous gloss on the words, nothing put between you and your brute understanding:
66 min / 87 min / 106 min / 74 min / 65 min / 53 min / 70 min / 5 min / 66 min / 87 min / 65 min
Either you know what this means or you don’t. If you do, then you are guilty too, for you can conceive of what happened as happening. Guilt, like art, is a verdict rendered after a series of facts. It is, like poetry, a rhetorical pronouncement. What has happened is no longer inconceivable, no longer inarticulable—in fact, it doesn’t even completely need to be said. Scribbled among his loose notes on transcript, Bäcker wrote: “There is no other anthropology of fascist/terrorist systems except the analysis of their language.” The materiality of language in transcript is solid as a chopping-block. Dalkey has chosen not to print a bilingual edition, since to see the German in situ might have alleviated the force of these poems by allowing a little linguistic buffer. And in an elegant aperçu, the translators have quoted existing English translations rather than generate new ones, so as to keep closer to its point of origin.
Concrete poetry traditionally considers the word as object; it (necessarily) monumentalizes as it objectifies. Bäcker thought of nachschrift as concrete poetry and even Eugen Gomringer, one of the field’s initiators, praised the work as “a new chapter […] for concrete and visual poetry.” Yet transcript does what conceptual poetry does: recontexualizes, re-engages, forces an allegorical confrontation with the excess of text and rhetoric itself. War is a discourse, genocide is rhetoric with a body count. transcript does not make a memorial that risks becoming a monument. But it does reuse and reframe, and in so doing, regurgitates the awful glut and smutch of language that, with the corpses it produces, is history’s compost.
Thus, transcript takes without apology, and without adding anything to that which needs no introduction or interpretation. Too, there is no need for the endnotes providing the sources for the various items; their inclusion obliquely suggests that proof is needed, or that we might forget context. Our understanding of the poems is all the proof we wish we did not have, and it is our duty to recollect. Celan fractured language to show its brokenness in the face of evil; Bäcker replicates it as a face broken by war, needing no further breaking.—Vanessa Place

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.
Transcript is in fact so powerfully realised that it enforces a retrospective reading of the output of the Vienna Group. If you take from them their exuberance and provocativeness, it can seem as if they are an avant-garde without a subject. Most of them were born between the years 1930 and 1940—children during the war. It is remarkable how seldom their work directly refers to the war itself. Images from torn pornography magazines, or of deformed foetuses, may suggest the horrors of war, but from a distant and ironic angle. Much of their work, after reading Transcript, seems locked in the particular case of post-war Austria, unable to universalize or even to address the causes of their art. - Giles Goodland

Heimrad Bäcker (1925-2003) was an artist, poet, and influential editor of the Austrian avant-garde. He is the author of seven volumes of poetry, including transcript (Dalkey Archive Press, 2010). He published major works by Austrian artists and experimental writers in his journal neue texte (1968-1991) and under the imprint of Edition Neue Texte (1976-1992), the publishing house that he ran along with his wife Margret Bäcker. Most of his literary works draw on the methods of concrete and visual poetry to present documentary material about the Shoah. These books were historical and literary, and they were also part of a critical autobiography, an examination of Bäcker’s enthusiastic participation in the Hitler Youth and the Nazi Party. Seascape was Bäcker’s first book; it was published in German in 1985, when he was 60.