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Informationen zum Autor Heimrad Backer (1925-2003) was a poet, a photographer, and the editor of the journal neue texte and the Austrian avant-garde press Edition Neue Texte. As a teenager, he was active in the regional leadership of the Hitler Youth and joined the Nazi party when he turned eighteen. After the war, he studied philosophy and wrote his doctoral dissertation on Karl Jaspers. Beginning in the late 1960s, Backer attempted to come to terms with his wartime activity. Friedrich Achleitner is a poet and architecture critic who has taught at the University of Applied Arts Vienna. Patrick Greaney is assistant professor of German and comparative literature at the University of Colorado at Boulder. Vincent Kling is professor of German and comparative literature at La Salle University in Philadelphia. Klappentext The first of Heimrad Backer s books to appear in English, transcript is an experimental Austrian writer s literary confrontation with the Holocaust. Zusammenfassung "transcript" is a disturbing document. Using the techniques of concrete and visual poetry, Heimrad B?cker 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. B?cker'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.
