Photo credit: ©Lintschinger

Heimrad Bäcker (1925-2003) was an artist, poet, and influential editor of the Austrian avant-garde. He is the author of seven volumes of poetry, includingtranscript (Dalkey Archive Press, 2010). He published major works by Austrian artists and experimental writers in his journal neue texte (1968-1991) and under the imprint of Edition Neue Texte (1976-1992), the publishing house that he ran along with his wife Margret Bäcker. Most of his literary works draw on the methods of concrete and visual poetry to present documentary material about the Shoah. These books were historical and literary, and they were also part of a critical autobiography, an examination of Bäcker’s enthusiastic participation in the Hitler Youth and the Nazi Party. Seascape was Bäcker’s first book; it was published in German in 1985, when he was 60.

Patrick Greaney is the author of Untimely Beggar: Poverty and Power from Baudelaire to Benjamin (University of Minnesota Press, 2008) and In a Near Future: Quotation and History in Contemporary Literature and Art (University of Minnesota Press). He co-translated Bäcker’stranscript and curated Landscape M, the first major exhibition of Bäcker’s visual works outside of Austria, at the Museum of Contemporary Art Denver. He is an associate professor of German and comparative literature at the University of Colorado Boulder.