transcript
By Heimrad B瓣cker
Translated by Vincent Kling, professor of German and comparative literature at La Salle 勛圖厙 in Philadelphia; and Patrick Greaney, assistant professor of German and comparative literature at CU-Boulder
transcript is a disturbing document. Using the techniques of concrete and visual poetry, Heimrad B瓣cker presents quotations from the Holocausts 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. B瓣ckers 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.
The cumulative effect of these fragments is harrowing. A letter says: i probably wont ever see you again, wont hear your voice, wont kiss you. but how i want to see you, if only once! In the long lists of names, one or two stick out. What did the tailor Zoltan Fleishmann look like? What sort of life did the shopkeeper Bernhard Herskovits have? We read about a camp inmate who was punished with death for not executing with total accuracy the motion of taking off his cap and putting it back on, of another who was shot because he was no longer capable of performing certain kinds of heavy labor owing to his physical condition, and of a little 4-year-old Jewish boy who distributed short pieces of string to men and women on the way to the gas chamberpresumably by way of reassurance. Poetry is in the details, we usually say, but so is cruelty.
Charles Simic
Thus while transcript is extremely effective both as literature and a warning against the horrors of Nazism, it simultaneously leads the readers to question their ability to fully apprehend reality because of the ways in which our experience is filtered through prior knowledge that may be of either a documentary or a fictional nature.
Stuart Home
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