Heimrad Bäcker, Patrick Greaney (translator), Vincent Kling (translator), Friedrich Achleitner (editor) · 1986 · PDF · Calibre ID 9312
Resurfaced in Except in Sequence, Repetition, Omission (2026-10-19).
Role in the triad
Center: the documentary method with no commentator; cites Kraus in its own notes.
Why this book
Does what Kraus’s Preface claims, without a Grumbler: Nazi documents isolated on blank pages by the methods of concrete poetry; argues against ‘unspeakability’. Internet Archive OCR scan; quotations checked against the OCR layer.
Quotations
Verified against the book’s own text on the day of the reading.
- “Every part of transcript is a quotation; anything that might seem invented or fantastic is a verifiable document. Slight changes and omissions (which allow the unaltered contents to stand out in sharper relief) are not explicitly indicated.” (notes headnote, p. 131)
- “…sometimes to the point of a methodical gibberish that replicates a deadly gibberish.” (p. 131)
- “Himmler’s language reflects the progressive logic of the system: in 1942 being emigrated meant to be destroyed.” (note 16, p. 132)
- “Documents are literature that writes itself and is recognized as literature.” (Bäcker in Achleitner’s afterword, p. 148)
- “the card file on the dead was larger by far than the one on the living.” (p. 127)
Themes
being emigrated · concrete poetry · documentary poetry · Holocaust · ineffability · lists · Nazi bureaucratic language · permutation · quotation · Vienna Group