For the International Day of Remembrance of the Victims of National Socialism on 27 January 2021, the NS Documentation Centre Munich at Max-Mannheimer-Platz will show a video installation on Heimrad Bäcker’s “nachschrift”.

  

Influenced by Concrete Poetry, Bäcker’s main work weaves quotations from historical written sources of National Socialist persecution and extermination policies and the Holocaust into a documentary poetry of its very own kind. Text fragments from official announcements, orders, confiscation, deportation and execution lists, statistics, letters and notes by perpetrators and victims alike. Taken out of their original contexts, he reassembles and rearranges them.

In the arrangement, the projection refers to Bäcker’s poetry. Quotations and passages from “nachschrift” appear on the façade. Sometimes as if typed on a typewriter, sometimes they dissolve and leave individual words behind. Viewers are invited to engage with the excerpts from the story.

 

The video installation also shows photographs by Heimrad Bäcker from the former concentration camps Mauthausen and Gusen. It thus extends the exhibition “Heimrad Bäcker. it may be that they will not kill us and allow us to live”, which was temporarily closed due to the pandemic, to the outside space.