Documentary Poetry

Heimrad Bäcker

Austrian poet and photographer Heimrad Bäcker's essays, collected here along with a selection of his photographs and two of his documentary poems, explore the poetic, philosophical, and political stakes of his investigation into the memory of the Holocaust. A prominent member of the Austrian avant-garde, Heimrad Bäcker (1925-2003) devoted decades to the development of a singular documentary style. For most of his adult life, Bäcker directed a publishing house for avant-garde literature, collected materials for the four books of documentary poetry that he began publishing at age 60, and took thousands of photos of the memorial site and ruins of Mauthausen, Austria's largest concentration camp, a short drive from his home in Linz. The essays collected here for the first time in any language systematize his thinking about documentary poetry and photography and their relationship to history and memory. Bäcker's writings constitute a singular source for considering the critical potential of contemporary literature.

'The formal contribution of Heimrad Bäcker’s documentary poetry is as original as Thomas Bernhard’s unbreakable paragraphs, and as a moral contribution it remains incomparable.' – Joshua Cohen