Aestheticization and the Shoah: Heimrad Bäcker's "Transcript"

Bäcker explicitly recognizes aestheticization as a risk in this remark from a text about preserving Mauthausen: "Macht man das historische Objekt zu einem Element unseres musealen Ordnungssinnes, so wird häufig beschönigend, glättend, ästhetisierend vorgegangen" (If one makes a historical object into an element of our museal sense of order, often this is done in a euphemizing, flattening, aestheticizing way).5 Aestheticization appears here in a series of terms that Bäcker surely would not have used to describe his work, yet, despite this intimacy between aestheticization and these other operations, he often emphasizes the formal nature of the texts that he cites; for instance, in a note in nachschrift he laconically observes of a list of casualties in Sobibor that its "Kreuzform ist ein Ergebnis der Statistik" (cross form is a result of statistics).6 And, in the text on Mauthausen, he presents his aesthetic consideration of lists of the dead as a conscious choice: "Sie ernst nehmend als ästhetisches Phänomen, erschließt sich schnell die metaästhetische Szenerie" (If one takes them seriously as an aesthetic phenomenon, then a meta-aesthetic landscape opens up).7 Even if aestheticization is only a means to an end, there is something unsettling about appropriating the aesthetic qualities of texts related to the Shoah, especially the documents that Bäcker focuses on: not only lists of the dead but also accounts of the functioning of gas chambers, reports from experiments conducted in the camps, and the correspondence of Nazi leaders.