Day of remembrance

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

Influenced by Concrete Poetry, Bäcker’s main work interweaves quotations from historical written sources of National Socialist persecution and extermination policies and the Holocaust to create a documentary poetry of its very own kind. Text fragments from official announcements, orders, confiscation, deportation and execution lists, statistics, letters and records of perpetrators as well as victims. Taken from 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, into the outside space.

More at ns-dokuzentrum-muenchen.de

Client: NS-Documentation Center
Video content and concept : Betty Mü
Project management and technical realization: WE ARE VIDEO
Photos: Connolly Weber Photography