How does one begin to atone in writ­ing for being — how­ev­er briefly — a Nazi? A for­mer Hitler Youth acolyte, Heim­rad Bäck­er spent his entire artis­tic career writ­ing and pho­tograph­ing phys­i­cal and tex­tu­al rem­nants of the Shoah. He was par­tic­u­lar­ly obsessed with doc­u­ment­ing the dis­ap­pear­ing remains of the Mau­thausen Camp near his home­town of Linz, Austria. 

Bäck­er was not alone in this obses­sion. Ques­tions regard­ing expi­a­tion and mem­o­ry have pre­oc­cu­pied many Aus­tri­an writ­ers of the post – World War II era, from Thomas Bern­hard, to Elfriede Jelinek, to Peter Hand­ke and beyond. 

What is the aesthetic/​ethical val­ue of such an obses­sion? What prob­lems does it solve? Does it val­i­date our own (Jew­ish) strug­gle to under­stand and move past the Shoah, or does it only exac­er­bate it? Who decides?

Bäck­er high­lights rather than resolves these ques­tions in this dis­parate col­lec­tion, which includes an inter­view, an aca­d­e­m­ic con­fer­ence paper, pho­tographs, and writ­ten mate­r­i­al — all of which inten­tion­al­ly blur the lines between found poet­ry, prose poet­ry, quo­ta­tion, anno­ta­tion, and transcription. 

For exam­ple, a poem in the sec­tion ​“TRAN­SCRIPT Z” reads as follows:

5.

Z

Zm+

ZM

ZM-

NZ

Notes at the end of the sec­tion explain that these let­ters are racial nota­tions, which mean ​“Gyp­sy,” ​“Mixed Race Gyp­sy, and ​“Non-Gyp­sy.” 

Anoth­er per­plex­ing piece is a list poem cre­at­ed from a con­ver­sa­tion between Ger­hard F. Rudi­ger and Meg­gy Patay-Reinhart:

i’m not able to answer that

i don’t have any answer

i did not explain that

i have to say i can’t remember

i can’t remem­ber anymore

no

i had noth­ing to do with the prisoners

i have only a dim recollection

num­bers this large were not, to my knowledge,

no that is not my signature …

Bäck­er men­tions both Hans Arp and Kurt Schwit­ters, mem­bers of the avant-garde DADA con­sor­tium. Like them, Bäck­er seeks not to expli­cate, but to com­pli­cate, to make uneasy, to con­fuse, and to oblige the read­er to ask a wide range of ques­tions about Aus­tria and Bäcker’s own past — a his­to­ry that he dis­cuss­es open­ly in the inter­view sec­tion of the book. 

The ratio­nale for this approach becomes clear in the text of the lec­ture that Bäck­er gave in 1996 on the topog­ra­phy of Mau­thausen, which is the most impor­tant Shoah memo­r­i­al site in Austria:

When a his­tor­i­cal object becomes part of our sense of muse­al clas­si­fi­ca­tion, the process often white­wash­es, smooths out, aes­theti­cizes.… The camp’s appear­ance today, with its flaw­less exter­nal walls, a few flaw­less­ly pre­served bar­racks, the stone build­ings, and the flaw­less­ly restored ​“Death Stairs” — what a con­cep­tu­al pair, flaw­less and Death Stairs — here­in lies the irony. 

If nation­al his­to­ry, and the com­mer­cial con­cerns work­ing in con­cert with that nation, want to smooth out the past, Bäck­er wants to hold onto its rough­ness, its messi­ness, and its ter­ror. As the gen­er­a­tions who remem­ber this peri­od of his­to­ry first­hand pass away, Doc­u­men­tary Poet­ry warns us against resolv­ing the past too neat­ly. Bäcker’s pho­tographs resist era­sure of the land­scape, and his poems dis­play the naked bar­barism of Nazi language. 

How do we memo­ri­al­ize with­out sim­pli­fy­ing? This ques­tion mat­ters for all of us as we try to make sense of such a trau­mat­ic top­ic. Bäcker’s com­pi­la­tion of pic­tures and words is a valu­able, if chal­leng­ing, addi­tion to the archive of Holo­caust literature.