ArchivesSpace at the University of Iowa

Scope and Contents

This is the acceptance speech for the award of the International Peace Prize of the German Booksellers Association. The text is contained in the book, "Open Letters" by Vaclav Havel with illustrations by Jiri Kolar. The Sackner Archive holds this important typographic book published by the Cooper Union and Alfred A. Knopf. -- Source of annotation: Marvin or Ruth Sackner.

Scope and Contents

Backer (1925-2003) was the editor of Neue Texte. Adam Lerner contributed a forward to the catalog in which he described Backer as a "life artist" because he devoted the entire body of his life's work to an enterprise that comprised a movement toward a single goal - dedicating his career as a photographer, sculpture, poet and editor to" coming to terms with his teenage involvement in the Hitler Youth and the Nazi Party." -- Source of annotation: Marvin or Ruth Sackner.

Scope and Contents This is the first of Heimrad Backer's books to appear in English, transcript is an experimental Austrian writer's literary confrontation with the Holocaust. transcript is a disturbing document. Using the techniques of concrete and visual poetry, Heimrad Backer 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. Backer'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...