News at Eleven: At the same time

that Günter Grass was trying to write a future for Germany by repoliticizing the novel, at the same time Peter Handke was denouncing Grass's outward approach to politics and was instead writing inward, [Heimrad] Bäcker invented a terminus for both: the personal and political. His genre, which would be called Dokumentarliteratur (documentary literature), or dokumentarische dichtung (documentary poetry), signaled a formal contribution as original as Thomas Bernhard's unbreakable paragraphs, but it is as moral contribution that it remains incomparable.

Here the banality of evil becomes the sublimity of a poem; here Bäcker incriminates by verse:

if jews required to wear the insignia live in an apartment whose owner is not required to

from Tablet: Repurposed

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