The Postmodern Victim
Binjamin Wilkomirski published in 1995 a book entitled Bruchstücke[1]o "Fragments", in which he recounted a set of fragmented memories referring to the period 1939-1948 in which being a Jewish child who left Riga, passed through a farm in Poland to finally be interned in two extermination camps, Majdanek and Auschwitz and after his liberation in Switzerland where he settled. [2] This work immediately had a great impact in German-speaking countries and was quickly translated into English, French and other languages. The book won prizes such as the National Jewish Book Award in the USA, the Prix de la Memoire in France or the literary prize of the Jewish Quarterly in Britain and its author came to be compared with Primo Levi. Despite all these acknowledgments, in August 1998 a journalist named Daniel Ganzfried denounced the falsity of this story in an article in the Swiss weekly Weltwoche. According to Ganzfried, Wilkomirski was actually a Swiss from Biel and had been sent to an orphanage in Adelboden from which he was removed by a wealthy family from Zurich who eventually adopted him. His name was Bruno Grosjean. From this moment on the "Wilkomirski case" became a matter of great notoriety dominated, of course, by the controversy, since Wilkomirski himself responded by stating that he was a true Holocaust survivor and that his identity had been secretly exchanged for that of an adopted orphan, Bruno Grosjean, upon his arrival in Switzerland. What makes this case truly unusual is a circumstance that occurred in April 1999, when the literary agency managing the rights to Wilkomirski's work commissioned a reputed Swiss historian, Stefan Maechler, an investigation into the veracity of Ganzfried's allegations. In the autumn of 1999 Maechler presented the conclusions of his research, confirming the veracity of what Ganzfried had pointed out in such a way that the literary agency Liepman AG itself in Zurich withdrew the book which Wilkomirski/Grosjean had written and published in 1995. After all this, Maechler's work has remained as an irreplaceable reference when it comes to elucidating whether or not an autobiographical story is true. In 2000 Stefan Maechler's book Der Fall Wilkomirski was published in Zurich and in 2001 the English translation as The Wilkomirski Affair. A Study in Biographical Truth that includes Fragments, a new English translation of the text that gave rise to the controversy. I have followed this edition to delve into the notion of "truth" which is what centers my perspective on the Holocaust scriptures.
Maechler, as a good historian and thanks to the archives and testimonies of many people reconstructed the story of Bruno Grosjean, his birth, the identity of his parents and how he settled in several foster families, then in an orphanage and finally in a family, the Dössekkers of Zurich, who adopted him. So far the reconstruction of the life of a child taken into the care of the Swiss authorities until the time when, according to Wilkomirski's testimony, after his death he had to be replaced by another surviving child from Auschwitz, who was none other than himself. One of the great virtues of Maechler's book is the clarity with which he separates his own testimonial and documentary reconstruction from the story that Wilkomirski himself told him during several interviews in which he agreed to submit to his questions. The first part, the story of Bruno Grosjean rebuilt by Maechler, is compatible in terms of Wilkomirsi's "truth" and according to his account. The doubts begin to arise when contrasting the story published by Wilkomirski under the title of Fragments with some data that Maechler begins to collect little by little. As we will see the first inaccuracies are given in the details.
The chapters in which The Wilkomirski Affair is divided correspond to an excellent methodological composition that breaks down an issue into the parts that constitute it in relation to its truth. One such part is the reconstruction, if possible, of the route that Wilkomisrki had completed from his native Riga. So Maechler moves to Riga and interviews Margers Vestermanis, a famous Latvian historian, who also witnessed the destruction of the Riga ghetto:
"In various conferences and personal conversations Wilkomirski has recounted how in his own visit to Latvia with Ms. Piler and Mr. Bernstein in August 1994, the story about his escape from Riga was essentially confirmed by historian Margers Vestermanis. In May 1999 I was able to make contact with Vestermanis. He told me that he most categorically condemned "the campaign unleashed against the author of a good book" and that " as an interested reader and survivor" he congratulated Wilkomirski on his book. " I am of the opinion that every author has the right to use the form in the first person, even in the case of a mystification of his own identity". But he also acknowledged that "some details of his memories of Riga do not turn out to be very precise"[3]
The testimony of this Latvian historian already shows us that the Wilkomirski case is very special by provoking, with some ease, an ambivalent feeling that reaches even Stefan Maechler himself, who despite having unmasked it - that was his duty as a historian - he does not fail to show sympathy for the person and work of Grosjean-Wilkomirski. Vestermanis also expresses his solidarity with this Swiss orphan by congratulating him on his book. However, he does not refrain to recognize that his story fails in some details. I dare to say that there is a "Wilkomirski effect" that we could place on the opposite side to the one I have been referring to, that is to say to those who pretended to write the truth. The text of Fragments possessed a truth that continued to have value for many of those who had read it and knew later that most of the facts reported as real were an invention of its author. These Fragments could be considered as the Latvian historian himself suggests, a work of fiction and so, without the need to alter a comma, to solve the great problem created by this text, starting first with the journalistic denunciations of Ganzfried and the final report of Maechler. But this could hardly have happened because the quality of this text was to tell facts that, supposedly, had been lived by its author. This is where his success resided. It is Maechler himself who clearly tells us.:
"The exceptional success of the book and the effect that Wilkomirski had on the public was reflected much less in the number of copies that were printed than in the enthusiastic reviews, the awards, the reaction of the audience whenever it appeared in public and the letters sent to it by readers. How to explain this success? Why did everyone believe Wilkomirski? The answers must be found in the same text, both in Wilkomirski's staging of himself as a character and in the assumptions and needs of the audience."
Let's start with the second of Maechler's answers. A critical position regarding the meaning of Wilkomirski's book was that adopted by the journalist Ganzfried who not only questioned the veracity of this work, but the opportunity and value of those reconstructions of the Holocaust, as apparently was this one, who, based primarily on personal experience, set aside the historical nature of the event itself. The story became emotional and could be easily falsified. Consider that Auschwitz is the great evil[4] or its great metaphor or that can be equally explained from the perspective of any victim; all these have been readings that have proliferated since the nineties when postmodernism and the relativism that corresponds to it, took over university campuses in the United States and in Europe. It was in this context that Fragments appeared and this explains, at least in part, its great success as a public event rather than as a book to be read. It is necessary to remember the journey that took, slow and sinuous, the work, so recognized today, of Primo Levi. Jean Améry remained a scarcely known writer and had serious difficulties surviving for many years. Imre Kertész was for many years a cursed writer in communist Hungary and it was only after the fall of the Berlin Wall that he began to enjoy some prestige in Germany. After the award of the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2002 to a literary work like his, which was already extensive, it has given him some notoriety, even if he is still a minority writer. This was not the case with Wilkomirsi, who immediately published his Fragments and achieved enormous popularity.
The truth is that one of the conditions on which postmodern thought has turned the most has been that of "victim", because it has converted women, homosexuals, ethnic minorities, former colonies, nationalities, nature or some religions in entities and conditions through which membership can build a new identity as a "victim". The case of Bruno Grosjean was significant for the vicissitude of his story, a story that arises when he has reached maturity and in which he appears as another person, in this case Binjamin Wilkomirski, a victim in superlative degree. The case is extraordinary to represent the construction of the new postmodern subject that is none other than the victim. This was one of the reasons for the success, not so much of the writing as of the character.
The second of the two questions raised by Maechler in the excerpt I have transcribed concerns the ability of Wilkomirski's narrative to create two things, a staging and a character. The Holocaust scenarios have been well known to the public as many testimonies have been disseminated since the end of the Second World War, also films filmed at the time of their release and there are even photographs taken inside some of the camps, such as in Mauthausen or Birkenau, while they were operational; In short, that the reconstruction of the scenarios was not too difficult for someone with a certain knowledge of all this material. Later Maechler refers to Wilkomirski as a character forming part of the text. It seems relevant to me to see that he does not use the word person but the term "character", which means that it is more a characterization that is only explained in its textual creation. The logical question is: What makes a person different from a character? We could say then that a person turns out to be authentic and that a character is something artificial. Honestly this answer does not convince me, since in the case of the testimonial writings of the survivors of the Holocaust person and character are part of a narrative and since we can not access the facts themselves at the time they happened, our knowledge about them will always be narrative. Then both will have to be considered in the same terms. Now, in this case, not so much the public as the specialists can access other types of testimony that, although they are not the reality, they are facts that as such are closer to it. It is now a question of the document and its ability to bring us closer to reality. That's what Stefan Maechler did in Switzerland. This is a more convincing answer, since the document has the ability to highlight where the person is and where the character is. However, I am even more interested in another perhaps more difficult answer that would lead us to be able to identify the person in his story. Who is person and who is character? This is the question that implicitly at least most of the authors who survived the Holocaust asked.. They could not forget that their personal, tragic and violent journey was an outstanding part of a historic event of extraordinary magnitude.
In this case the person is the one who, by describing his experience as a survivor, can place him within a historical scenario and is singled out in relation to the concrete events that he lived in. The character becomes a prototype person that exists for everyone to notice. The events that involve the character more than lived come to be represented according to standards that come from different sources: literature, art, journalism, the media, internet, etc. Wilkomirski found in writing about the Holocaust, that had already quite abundant literature when he went into action, an inexhaustible source to build their story and include himself as characters into it. Let's see how Imre Kertész lived this same circumstance.
Several years later, Imre Kertész was aware that Auschwitz, as a symbol of the Holocaust as a whole, was going to become a myth and, to his regret, a part of it. On 11 April 1991 Kertész returned with his writing to 10 April 1945, when Buchenwald, where he had been interned after passing through Auschwitz, was released by American troops:
"All this occurs to me now because yesterday, 11 April, forty-seven years have passed since I was released from the Buchenwald concentration camp. At that time I did not think at all about the myth. However, the winds of world news already touched me the day after dusk. The speakers on which the SS command voices had until then crackled and crackled now broadcast the BBC evening news. My beginner's English was enough for me to understand what was spreading around the world: that American allied troops had just liberated the concentration camp of Buchenwald, located next to Weimar. Lying in my straw-filled sack, I felt a special dizziness (...) Suddenly I saw my life with another color. From the moderately indignant voice of the announcer I deduced, despite the state of total malnutrition of my brain, that an injustice had been committed against me. My murder, or rather my choice to be killed, was not, at least according to London radio, the result of implacable logic, a consequence of historical necessity and universal reason, as I had believed until then in the countryside and also before." [5]
To interpret here and now, which, if I may say so, I would call "postmodern" victimism, I shall initially use what Kertész says in this paragraph. Kertész tells us that, after time, he realized that when he was released he began, without being aware of it, to be part of a myth. He who, surely, considered himself simply a prisoner, happened to be one of the victims of the most brutal tragedy lived by the human being in modern times. From here he could have been a "character." But he wasn't. After World War II some of the Holocaust survivors such a Primo Levi, Jean Améry, Eli Wiesel, Imre Kertés and others wrote and published their stories but the general public did not pay too much attention to what they needed to tell. It had to pass yeras until they began to be read. These survivors did not wish to present themselves as victims, but as witnesses.
[1] Wilkomirski, B.-1996 Fragments: Memories of a Wartime Childhood. New York: Schocken Books
[2] I was surprised to find that Spanish is not one of them.
[3] Wilkomirski, B.-1996 Pp. 165
[4] One thing is the meaning of Auschwitz or the Holocaust and another is its use as a tool for thinking, something often carried out by philosophers, who have dominated the theoretical production of Auschwitz-Holocaust.