Holocaust Discourse, Regulator of Reality: Creating a Referential Illusion by appealing to the Holocaust Discourse

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Holocaust Discourse, Regulator of Reality:

Creating a Referential Illusion by appealing to the

Normative Constraints of the Holocaust Discourse

Bram Faber MA - 6124100

rMA-thesis

Literary Studies

dhr. dr. B. Noordenbos

dhr. D.A. Duindam MA

Graduate School for Humanities

Universiteit van Amsterdam, 15/6/2015

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“Reality is endurable as long as it is not perceived as a whole. It draws near through fragmented events and tattered reports, in echoing shots, in the distant smoke drifts, in the fires which, history cryptically says, “turn into ashes”. This reality, at once distant and played out against the wall, is not real – that is, until the mind struggles to gather it up, arrest, and understand it.” Zofia Nałkowska, Medallions

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Preface

In 1995 Fragments: Memories of a Childhood, 1939-1948, a collection of allegedly autobiographical notes written by Binjamin Wilkomirski was published. In the book, he provides the reader with a narration of how he fled Riga from the Nazis as a young child, his internment in two concentration camps, and how he after a short stay in orphanages finally moves to Switzerland. The memoir was very well received and hailed as one of the most forthright, riveting and austere Holocaust testimonies that had been written up to date. It was rapidly translated into nine different languages and published worldwide. Fragments was put alongside the work of iconic Holocaust writers and received major prices. However, three years after the book’s initial release, it gradually transpired that Wilkomirski’s entire account was, in fact, a fabrication: he had never been anywhere near Nazi camps or otherwise suffered as greatly as he contended. It came to be known as one of the most striking excrescences in recent times in the context of Holocaust remembrance.

Stefan Mächler was commissioned by Suhrkamp to put an end to all doubts surrounding

Wilkomirski’s autobiographical assertions, leading to the publishing of Der Fall Wilkomirski in 2001. The primary concern of the study that ensued from Mächler’s meticulous work was to thoroughly verify his Fragments, in the form of a journalistic venture. As the subtitle to the book’s English translation, A study in biographical truth, already suggests, his primary aim was to validate autobiographical clues Wilkomirski gives in his memoir (to assess the statement that “[t]he first-person narrator has personally experienced everything he describes”, viii), but in passing he makes reference of numerous more philosophical issues the Wilkomirski affair ushers, such as: in how far did the reader audience play a role in the consecration and canonisation of Fragments? And what place does the book have in an overarching Holocaust discourse?

Mächler does not dwell on these vital inquiries and maintains his focus on the main objective of establishing autobiographical truth; therewith he sides his study with most of the scholarly work that has been done on the affair, which is predominantly situated in the field of intentionality and

Wilkomirski’s rationales. Moreover, with few positive exceptions (Bernard-Donals 2001; Whitehead 2004; Rothe 20111_{), most writers on the subject seem to prefer a strictly hermeneutical approach by}

focusing on the text itself and do not deal with possible interplay between text and reader, nor between text and context. The curious case of Wilkomirski has fascinated ever since I first encountered it during my period as an undergraduate. I have written several papers on the subject, among others trying to associate it with historiography in relation to narrativity in the context of Gérard Genette, Hayden White and Paul Ricoeur. For my thesis I wish to use the angle of discourse analysis as a point of departure, there where Mächler and others seem to have ceased.

1_{For Bernard-Donals, Whitehead, and Rothe applies that they are conjointly concerned with Wilkomirski’s own}

persona, but passingly make observations that will prove to be of great importance in the construction of my own argument.

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The main question I will explore in my thesis is how it has been possible that the public took Fragments as a truthful Holocaust testimony in the first place. In order to allow a deeper insight to this question, I use a tripartite method. After a short recap of the Wilkomirski affair in chapter 1, in chapter 2 I look at the text and the interplay with the reader it poses. As the memoir is a text which could impossibly be dissociated from the context, in chapter 3 I make an analysis of the overarching

Holocaust discourse in which the text participates. Finally I want to use chapter 4 to look if it could be argued that the working of a falsified Holocaust testimony is a recurrent mechanism: if the way in which Fragments appealed to its public is something that could also be encountered with similar controversial memoirs written by alleged Holocaust survivors. In this case I will look at a Holocaust memoir proved to be fictitious by the Belgian Misha Defonseca.

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1. The Rise and Fall of Wilkomirski at a glance

Admiration and consecration

In 1995 Fragments: Memories of a Childhood, 1939-1948, a collection of allegedly autobiographical notes written by Binjamin Wilkomirski, was published by the renowned German publishing house Suhrkamp. In the book, he provides the reader with a narration of how he fled Riga from the Nazis as a young child, his internment in two concentration camps (Majdanek and subsequently Birkenau), and how he after a short stay in orphanages in Kraków finally moves to Switzerland. The narrative is presented in a shattered and – indeed – fragmentary way. The book’s chronology is exceedingly scattered and non-linear: the narrative oscillates between scenes from the camps, from earlier childhood and from the post-war years with his foster parents. Added to this, the book contains tremendous amounts of brutal violence, for example through plastic depictions of him at young age seeing his father being

dismembered against the wall by a military jeep (9-11), and babies in the child’s camp eating their own fingers, driven by an unhinged sense of hunger (73-75). Moreover, his troubled journey includes many transitional gaps which are not explicated. In addition, a significant share of his memoir is devoted to the post-war years of his childhood in Switzerland, in which he is continually faced with denial and ignorance in his surroundings: his behaviour is at times dubious and primitive, as he has only learned to survive according to the insidious and degrading laws of the Nazi camps, to the dismay of his foster parents. In turn, they do not wish to hear anything about the possible existence of a tormented Holocaust past or anything even remotely Holocaust-related, neither do his peers and teachers in school. “Het was alleen maar een angstige droom”, his mother consistently repeats: “Je moet alles vergeten. Ik, ik ben nu jouw moeder!” (Wilkomirski 1996:126).2

The memoir, upon its first publication, was very well received and hailed by its public. In one of the earliest book reviews for the Neue Zürcher Zeitung, the reviewer writes that “without laying claim to being literature, with its density, irrevocability, and the power of its images, it nevertheless meets all the criteria of real literature…” (qtd. in Mächler 114). A critic for the American magazine The Nation wrote: “This stunning and austerely written work is so profoundly moving, so morally important, and so free from literary artifice of any kind at all that I wonder if I even have the right to try to offer praise” (Ibid.). Finally, a book review that appeared in the respected Dutch newspaper NRC Handelsblad praised the “honest, powerful, pure” prose of Wilkomirski (1996:4, translation mine). Fragments was put

alongside the work of iconic Holocaust writers such as Primo Levi and Elie Wiesel, and was greatly appreciated not only by the ordinary public, but also by other Holocaust survivors who recognised their own experiences in Wilkomirski’s appalling writing. Fragments received prominent major prizes such as the American National Jewish Book Award for autobiography and memoirs, the Jewish Quarterly prize for non-fiction, and the Prix Mémoire de la Shoah from the Fondation Judaisme Français.

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Debunking and downfall

There already were doubts regarding the veracity of the story before it was published. Put under pressure, Wilkomirski decided to include an epilogue in which he discloses his intentions and sources:

Years of research, many journeys back to the places where I remember things happened, and countless conversations with specialists and historians have helped me to clarify many previously inexplicable shreds of memory, to identify places and people, to find them again and to make a possible, more or less logical chronology of it. (Wilkomirski 1995:496)

Three years after the book was first published, however, articles began to appear that questioned its authenticity and the author’s claim that he was a Holocaust survivor; Wilkomirski would in fact be the pseudonym of Bruno Dössekker, born Bruno Grosjean, a Swiss-born citizen who had never even been anywhere near Nazi camps during the war.3_{Elena Lappin (1999) argued that his remembrances,}

because of the plastic depictions of violence, might even be largely derived from the increasing variety of “violence porn” visual culture has to offer: “I cannot believe that Fragments is anything other than fiction. And yet, [...] anguish like [his] seemed impossible to fabricate” (61). The inquiring happened mostly under the guidance of the Swiss journalist Daniel Ganzfried, who however was unable to verify his claims and definitely dismiss Wilkomirski’s truth claims.

Finally Stefan Mächler (2001), commissioned by Suhrkamp, did profound research on Wilkomirski’s origins. Jerzy Kosiński could be considered the predecessor of Wilkomirski. The latter’s controversial 1965 novel The Painted Bird was thought to deal with his factual tours through Eastern Europe during the Second World War as a child, but similarly turned out to be fully fictional. He argued in his defence that “experiences are fit into moulds of the imagination”, which in turn “simplify, shape and give them an acceptable emotional clarity”; this results in the fact that “remembered events become a fiction, a structure made to accommodate certain feelings” (qtd. in Anne Rothe 2011:148). Along the same lines, Mächler’s findings turned out to legitimise all doubts surrounding Wilkomirski’s autobiographical assertions, as Mächler came to the conclusion that

Wilkomirski fell back on collective memory in order to articulate his own memories, and chose images that had no direct connection with what had happened to him but that seemed to express the quality of his experience. (278)

It came to be known as one of the most striking excrescences in recent times in the context of

Holocaust remembrance. The debunking of the memoir’s authenticity triggered a surge of resentment in Wilkomirski’s readership. The initial respect and reverence for the sufferings he described was tersely transformed into disdain. This is adequately summarised by the following reaction a reader expressed upon discovering the fictitious component of the memoir: “I am sorry that that this author felt that he

3_{In order to facilitate an ease of reading, for the remainder of my thesis I maintain Dössekker’s own chosen}

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needed to lie, it seems he had given a great opportunity for the Holocaust deniers to seize the

opportunity to discredit the real survivors” (Amalie 2011). The indignation is interesting to point out for a number of reasons. First and foremost, Wilkomirski’s audience understandably felt betrayed upon realising they had in fact been reading a sincere personal history in a Shoah context. Secondly, the fact that his memoir is set against the backdrop of the Holocaust massacres made it even more

objectionable. It made the public thoroughly aware of the moral dimension present in the Holocaust remembrance culture. As the story could be taken as a metonymy of holocaust horrors, one did not want to be on record as a denier of the account’s truthfulness. In an emotional response to the first charges of his identity, Wilkomirski stated that “the SURVIVAL OF EVERY SURVIVOR is linked to many very “unlikely” happenings, ways, tricks and coincidences… [b]ecause it was not the rule to survive. ARGUING LIKE THAT WOULD MEAN TO DENY EVERY SURVIVOR’S

EXPERIENCES!” (qtd. in Mächler 149).

By the same token the debunking of his memoir in some sense undermined the legitimacy of similar Holocaust testimonies such as the ones it was originally compared with and therewith perhaps even the sacrosanctity of the atrocities of the Shoah. The demystification of his prose provided proof to a growing group of critical observers of Holocaust remembrance; Norman G. Finkelstein for example, in his notoriously polemic book The Holocaust Industry (2000), uses the Wilkomirski affair to illustrate the way in which the idea of the Holocaust has become central to modern American culture, eventually considering the phenomenon to be a “fraudulent misappropriation of history for ideological purposes” (61) – what is meant is the emergence of Israel as a global power and the continual prudence of the Western world regarding the Jewish identity, subsequent to the earlier fright of being accused of Holocaust denial.

What I consider to be an important omission in the reception of Fragments is the role of the working of the text itself, and the role of audience and culture. Too often the Wilkomirski case is considered a trivial literary forgery which his readership trod in. In the same context, the persona of Wilkomirski is made the central scapegoat for our resentment. In the following chapters I wish to look beyond this individual accountability and want to explore the question how it could have been possible that the public took Fragments as a truthful Holocaust testimony in the first place. As Mächler puts it: without a public, the persona of Wilkomirski would have been inconceivable (qtd. in Withuis 2001:34).

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2. Decomposing the groundwork of the Holocaust discourse: A closer look at the

role of text and reader

In this chapter I will analyze the primary text of Wilkomirski’s Fragments. By means of theoretical work of several literary theoreticians I will read the primary text and evaluate its workings. This operation will allow me to lay the foundations of what I consider to be the construction of a Holocaust discourse.

Referentiality and indexicality: Roland Barthes and

The Reality Effect

As a logical point of departure I want to survey Roland Barthes’ The Reality Effect (1989 [1968]). In his famous essay Barthes argued that realist conventions in fin-de-siècle literature often accumulate in “the reality effect”: a writing mode originally created in an endeavour to surpass the constraints of Romantic literary convention into a truthful depiction of the world, only leading up, however, to the founding of new dogmatic codes for the formation of illusionary authenticity. A reader of realism is thus merely presented with a rhetorical effect. Barthes’ assertions can be placed in the context of the 1960s, when much his work and that of his contemporaries was part of the greater plan of liberating the sign. It also reveals Marxist influences: featured most prominently in his early work, Barthes criticised what he regarded as a delusion of bourgeois culture, the alleged capitalist annexation of signs to create the impression of static, natural and enduring meaning.

Furthermore Barthes argues that trying to represent reality in literature implies a resistance to meaning and sense-making, as a part of “the great mythic opposition of the true-to-life … and the intelligible”. The “real”, according to Barthes, is supposed to be self-sufficient, and can exist separate from “function”; “the having-been-there of things is a sufficient principle of speech” (146-7). Barthes shows that the reality effect describes the result of specific representational and rhetorical schemes that intend to suggest instants of referentiality, or a “referential illusion” (148). What this comes down to is the fact that realist writers such as Flaubert and Michelet incorporate a lot of details in their text that are irrelevant for the story’s plotline: minor details of individuals, places, and acts that contribute nothing to the narrative, but nonetheless seem to provide the story with a realist atmosphere. These schemes aim to produce the impression of authenticity, in fact never losing out of sight the author’s construction and perception of reality.

The reality effect as elaborated by Barthes is palpable throughout Wilkomirski’s Fragments. A significant portion of the memoir’s veneer is encapsulated in the indexical character of its writing. The following passage serves as a good illustration of this:

A big block warden watched over the [latrine] bucket. Her uniform was like the uniform that had brought me here from the farm and the one that had brought me to my mother, only much dirtier and without any shiny buttons. She too always had a peaked cap on her head, and we knew that when she pulled the cap forward was when she was most dangerous (W 65)

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In this scene, the reader a quick glance in the world of the Blockowa4_{who guards the latrine, making}

sure that everyone who has to go has permission. The reader is supplied with a great array of completely irrelevant details of how she looks: the Blockowa wears a dirty uniform (which to some sense could be justified as an illustration of the omnipresence of filth in the camp), and moreover she becomes hazardous when her cap is moved forward. Nowhere else the reader gets to know what it was like when she had moved her cap forward, let alone what the difference would have been with the cap in a regular position.

Another example of such a seemingly meaningless elaboration is the following:

A farmstead, a cluster of small buildings arrayed in a rectangle to make a courtyard in the middle. A house facing an empty stable, a barn for the horsecart minus horse, standing open on the side facing the courtyard, and another barn for grain, now as empty as the stable

The only grown-up is the farmer’s wife, severe, rough, full of punishments. She supervised us, fed us, some kind of porridge out of a big pot. (W 395)

The only entities that are meaningful for the succession of the story are the fact that young Binjamin and his brothers were living with a peasant woman. All the other details – the cognitive tour around the farm, “some kind of porridge out of a big pot” – solely serve as atmospheric images. Nowhere else their depiction serves a goal that transcends this.

What is also relevant to mention is that Wilkomirski discloses his employment of the reality effect in the opening chapter, when he writes:

I’m not a poet or a writer. I can only try to use words to draw as exactly as possible what happened, what I saw; exactly the way my child’s memory has held on to it; with no benefit of perspective or vanishing point. (W 378)

What Wilkomirski does here is point out that his primary objective is to represent reality, wie es eigentlich gewesen, and nothing more than that. He discloses that he holds no literary pretentions to be an author; all he can do is tell what he has been through, thus more or less exonerating him from any possible vindications. He uses his having-been-there as a cognitive cockade, exempting him from further clarification – after all, following Barthes, the having-been-there is a sufficient principle of speech. The atmospheric images he stages in his narrative thus become part of his intentions: he wishes to redraw that what he has seen as exactly as possible in words, without adding any a priori values or intentions to the totality of its components. However, it is clear that his memoir goes further than just a shallow plot that is put in orbit around the reality effect. A good illustration of the fact that Wilkomirski is obviously aiming for more than just represent reality, wie es eigentlich gewesen, is the following citation:

4_{The Dutch translation, contrary to the English translation, invokes the historical name of “Blockowa” to}

designate a female block warden, without any further explanation. This in turn convokes interesting questions regarding disparities in different linguistic regions: would a Dutch public be more familiar with Nazi

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It must have been Riga, in winter. The city moat was frozen over. I’m sitting all bundled up with someone on a sled, and we’re running smoothly over the ice as if we’re on a street. Other sleds overtake us, and people on skates. Everyone’s laughing, looking happy. On both sides tree branches are bright and heavy with snow. They bend over the ice; we travel through and under them like through a silver tunnel. I think I’m floating. I’m happy. (W 398)

The scene sounds plausible enough: a child on a sledge in wintry Riga, as do the seemingly irrelevant details that nonetheless enrich the reader’s experience. When assessed more critically however, it can be discerned how in Wilkomirski’s description everything is in service of the depiction of one of the scarce happy memories he has: the sun shines, everyone smiles and tree branches provide a celestial glisten over the entire scene.

Narrative leaps, narrative gaps: Discerning implied readership and its horizon of

expectations

In his memoir, Wilkomirski implicitly grants a significant role his reader in reconstructing his survivor narrative. I already quoted Mächler in the previous chapter that without Wilkomirski’s readership, his persona would have been unimaginable. Wolfgang Iser (1974) was one of the first literary scholars who valued the role of the reader in making sense of a text: he argued that the chief task of the literary scholar is to explain the text not as an object but rather the effect a text sorts unto the reader. The reader of fiction has his/her expectations and suppositions, which across time have always been confronted and defied by a great range of works of art. Conversely, it is no prerequisite for texts to be based on the expectations formed by precedent literature; the texts themselves can arouse false

expectations, which in turn have been formed by the literature of the past. This is what makes the reader experience the writer wants to bring across feasible: whenever the reader’s expectations are not lived up to, “the reader’s mental faculties are at once directed toward an attempt to comprehend the new situation with which he is confronted” (58-9).

Regardless of the means and circumstances the reader may interlink different phases of a text, Iser argues that by any means it is a continual process of anticipation and hindsight, which incites formation of the virtual dimension; this is what transforms the text into an experience for the reader (281).

In addition, the author of the text may amply influence the reader’s imagination, but Iser maintains that “no author worth his salt will ever attempt to set the whole picture before his reader’s eyes” (282). It is only through activation of the reader’s imagination that the author can involve the reader and thus realize textual intents. Whenever the flow of a narrative is interrupted, the reader is provided with the opportunity to utilize our own faculty for establishing connections, “for filling in the gaps [Leerstelle] left by the text itself” (280). By filing the written parts of a text together, the reader enables them to

interrelate. The reader moreover renders consistency onto the interrelation, a prerequisite in order to dovetail the narrative conglomerate. Finally, Iser points out that a text provokes the reader’s

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expectations in such a way that s/he reduce the “polysemantic possibilities” to a single interpretation compliant with the expectations aroused, eventually “extracting an individual, configurative meaning” (285).

In the wake of Iser’s reader-response theory, Wilkomirski’s text similarly invites for an active role of the reader: s/he has to generate meaning from textual cues such as a scattered chronology and lacunae in the narrative. Visions of post-war Switzerland are frequently and unexpectedly intertwined with horrific scenes from Majdanek and Birkenau. Likewise, chapters often disintegrate in sentences such as “... hier dooft mijn herinnering uit in een langdurige grijze mist” (99), “Alles leek uiteen te vallen, alles was wazig, onduidelijk” (101), “Hier vervaagt alles in een onbestemde schemering” (119).

A very specific type of knowledge is assumed to be known upon reading Wilkomirski, so as to be capable of filling in the many Leerstelle his autobiography has to offer. Iser quotes Northrop Frye’s Anatomy of Criticism, in which the latter argues that upon reading anything,

… we find our attention moving in two directions at once. One direction is outward or centrifugal, in which we keep going outside our reading, from the individual words to the things they mean, or, in practice, to our memory of the conventional association between them. The other direction is inward or centripetal, in which we try to develop from the words a sense of the larger verbal pattern they make. (qtd. in Iser 199)

This indicates that the process making sense of narrative gaps is a bidirectional activity: on the one hand the reader makes sense by looking for clues in the text itself, on the other s/he has to relate by means of his/her own cultural context and knowledge. Michel Foucault in his Archaeology of Knowledge (1972) similarly argued that the frontiers of a book are never clear-cut: “beyond its internal

configuration and its autonomous form it is caught up in a system of references to other books, other texts, other sentences: it is a node within a network” (23). This is where I take up the path with Robert Jauss. Where Iser takes the text as point of departure, Jauss is primarily focused on context and thus already anticipating the next chapter on context. Along the same lines as Iser, Jauss (1982) writes that a literary work affects its public to “a very specific kind of reception by announcements, overt and covert signals, familiar characteristics, or implicit allusions” (23). What he has to add to the former is the term horizon of expectations (“Erwartungshorizont”), the conglomerate of earlier read texts and general beliefs and culture which define the familiarity and criteria readers use to evaluate literary texts. These criteria assist the reader for instance in determining what is to be considered literary set against non-literary usages of language. The efforts of a reader to understand a work rely on the inquiries which his/her own milieu enables him/her to ask.

Wilkomirski’s text appeals to a very specific Erwartungshorizont, namely that of a public which is already acquainted with Holocaust remembrance culture. In an article on the rhetorical notion of ethos, Ruth Amossy (2001) indirectly addresses the notion of a horizon of expectations in a manner that is very relevant for my argument here. In her review of Henri Barbusse’s Under Fire, a fictitious story of a

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combatant in the Great War, she discerns a dialogic dimension in the text which separates the I-narrator (i.e. the combatant) from an addressee or “narratee” – a term which could also be seen as Iser’s implied reader. This narratee, or implied reader, is covertly characterized by encyclopaedic knowledge and the norms and values which in the text appear to be taken for granted, “for it is obvious that they define his own views and build the common ground on which the two partners can meet” (15). In terms of argumentation, Amossy continues, “the discourse on the Great War has to conform to the supposed beliefs and views of its audience in order to influence it” (Ibid.). Michael Bernard-Donals (2001) similarly argued that any Holocaust testimony has to comply with or at best substantiate a good deal of existing testimony to tell a certain truth (1305). Likewise, at many instances Wilkomirski appeals to the very specific horizon of expectations of public acquainted with the Holocaust, for example when he writes:

[N]obody was allowed to be sad in the camps. Whoever was sad, even for a minute, was weak. Whoever was weak, died. (W 389, emphasis mine)

The labelling of the Nazi camps of Majdanek and Birkenau is not made explicit anywhere in Fragments and emanates – apart from interviews and other utterances by Wilkomirski outside the text – solely from the audience’s ability to relate the events in the text. The astute reader immediately know what camps are meant when he says “the camp”, any further explanation is unnecessary. The text of Fragments hence makes an appeal to our imaginative powers, our encyclopaedic knowledge of the Holocaust, and the norms and values which seem to be taken for granted.

Ethical components: On child perspective and the autobiographical self

The primary concern of Barthes, Iser and Jauss in the discussed theoretical work was literature, i.e. fictional texts, whereas Wilkomirski at least takes the shape of testimony – this moreover forms a large part of the reason why his memoir could have been read as a factual account in the first place. In order to fill this fictionality gap of the previous theoreticians, I am provided with a good reason to continue my analysis of the memoir from the viewpoint of autobiography, by means of Liesbeth Korthals Altes.

The reader of a text is by definition presented with a value system. As Iser and Jauss showed, a text to some degree is open for the reader’s own comprehensions, but in order to make sense of the text, s/he has to agree on its most primary situation of norms. Korthals Altes (2014) argues that “framing a work as literary by intention exposes it to particular expectations and interpretive and evaluative procedures” (116). Classification of a text as fiction triggers the reader to look for relevance, whereas non-fiction triggers the reader to look for referentiality and truth. One book Korthals Altes focuses on as a case study is James Frey’s ex post fictitious memoir A Million Little Pieces (2003), which conveys the story of a 23-year-old alcoholic and drug abuser who has to cope with rehabilitation in a treatment centre; initially promoted as a memoir, it transpired that many of the events described Frey’s book in

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fact never happened – in fact, quite comparable to Wilkomirski, albeit in a different context. Korthals Altes argues that if Frey is taken to have intended his work as nonfiction, this generic framing elicits “a mode of processing and evaluating in which personal, authenticated experience becomes salient” (110). Thus, the cognitive frames that are triggered with the reader are those of real-life experience.

Korthals Altes continues by suggesting that the framing intention of documentary-autobiographic writing in Frey is suggested not only on the level of the narrative’s scenography – being a former addict and criminal telling his own life story – but also through the work’s “paratextual generic framing” – being a memoir (110). As obvious as it may seem, it should in any case be noted the genre designation is bound to express the author’s intentions. Along the same line, Fragments also already sets expectations for its readership just with the paratextual genre designation of “memoir”, more specifically “Holocaust memoir”: readers can relate the description with similar Holocaust memoirs such as Elie Wiesel’s Night, Anne Frank’s Diaries or Primo Levi’s Survival in Auschwitz.

The great success of many Holocaust memoirs and diaries validates the public’s desire to safeguard a grasp on history through testimony and autobiography. Mächler (2001) writes that it corresponds to “a deep human need to make the past present in the colourful and emotional yet concrete reality of an individual”. In addition, Wilkomirski’s autobiography discloses many of the mechanisms by which eyewitness literature produces its effects; his text even exhibits several of the hallmarks that are applicable to other witness reports (306-7). One of the primary hallmarks is that of the possibility for identification with the victims, comparable with present-day human interest stories; the ability to provide a face to abstract facts associated with the Holocaust that make no appeal to the imagination at all, such as the ungraspable amount of six million Jews that is considered to have been killed in the Second World War.

Korthals Altes writes that autobiography, as a genre that is to some extent bound to referential truth, is inextricably linked with the risk of factual inaccuracy for instance due to failing or distortive memory. This generates a large role for the presence of topoi of sincerity, “which promise attempts at truthfulness without guaranteeing factual reliability” (193). Likewise the risk of inauthenticity is always lurking, in the form of too stylised or contrived prose. Consequently, Korthals Altes argues,

thematizations of the impossibility of being true, sincere, and authentic have unsurprisingly become themselves a powerful topos of sincerity” (Ibid.). In Wilkomirski the presence of constant doubt about his curriculum is similarly emblematised, for example when he writes: “Did I have four brothers or five, which seemed righter? I can’t say for sure anymore” (W 30). Even on the blurb text of the Dutch edition, this particular aspect of the text is highlighted and presented as a sincerity-inducing feature:

Binjamin Wilkomirski's youth is an area scattered with debris full of individual images, which the author describes calmly, almost by touch. Wilkomirski knows he will never be able to get the whole picture, and therefore outlines the cleavages, the boundaries of his memory all the more accurately. (translation mine)

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The NRC Handelsblad book review mentioned earlier on claimed that “the childlike ignorance, combined with [Wilkomirski’s] unbroken curiosity, were what made the narration so compelling and lifelike”, (1996:4, translation mine). The child perspective plays a vital role in the credibility of Wilkomirski’s memoir. In the first chapter he writes:

If I’m going to write about [my past], I have to give up on the ordering logic of grown-ups; it would only distort what happened. (W 378)

The child perspective is illustrated as a perspective that opens up his past, rather than narrowing it. Historical imprecisions or contradictions are thus trivialised and belittled: their absence does not weaken the narrative’s credibility but rather “underscore[s] the authenticity of a childlike perception” (Mächler 279). The sheer absence of place names and factual details, which is to be filled in by the sufficient Erwartungshorizont of Wilkomirski’s readership, thus also becomes justified and valid: a child would be completely incapable of contextualising his/her experiences in a similar fashion as his readers are able to. Following Rothe, the strategy of narrating the past from the naïve perspective of the child justifies the lack of historical specifics regarding time and place beyond the vague setting of Poland during the Holocaust (148). Wilkomirski uses the child perspective to put up a smokescreen for the reader, as if it were a perpetual suspension of disbelief, making the gaps and fragmentary narrative intelligible. Thus the reality effect, paradoxically enough, is achieved through the absence of an objective representation.

Final remarks

Wilkomirski’s referentiality and indexicality initially provided him with shelter to become accepted as a camp survivor and – albeit unsolicited – a celebrated Holocaust author. But the referential truth to which the autobiographical author is generally bound was substituted with referential illusion, to great acclaim. Upon the discovery of his forgery, very little has remained of this status. Once the avowed liaisons between narrator, Holocaust survival narrative, and historical reality were invalidated, what was first taken as a stroke of genius became kitsch: a muffled appropriation of clichéd cultural or literary conventions. Gaps that were previously filled in by readers with the sufficient horizon of expectations are suddenly left empty and the text is pitilessly “reduced to its sheer material value” (Mächler 281). The initial consecration of Wilkomirski’s falsified Holocaust memoir is a mechanism that cannot be explained by relying exclusively on a textual analysis. Jauss gave a prelude to the matter of context with his Erwartungshorizont, which is not restricted to place names but goes much further. In the next chapter I will argue that Fragments participate in an overarching Holocaust discourse, a culture that permeated popular culture in the course of the twentieth century and which to a large degree formed the horizon of expectation of an entire generation of readers.

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3. Perceiving the pillars of the Holocaust discourse: An examination of the frame

of reference in Wilkomirski’s

Fragments

In this chapter I plan out to allocate the place of Binjamin Wilkomirski’s memoir in the larger context of what I consider to be Holocaust discourse. I will look at what kind of material does he use, with what sort of fertile grounds was he provided to make his autobiography bloom. Where I built the foundations for the Holocaust discourse in the previous chapter in looking at the text itself, the process of contextualising in this chapter will form the pillars, the framework and the contents of what I call the Holocaust discourse.

After a brief introduction of the existence of the Holocaust discourse, I will formulate three tropes that can be distilled from the particularized discourse and are similarly retraceable in Wilkomirski’s Fragments.

Discourse analysis: Premises and method

The way in which I employ methods of discourse analysis for my argument lies in the extension of the reader-response theories of Iser and Jauss as elaborated on in the previous chapter. An important distinction that should be made between Iser’s “implied reader” and discourse analysis is primarily focused on semiotic interaction, whereas discourse has more to do with contextual, cultural and political dynamics. Discourse is moreover contained in the culture and supervises the reader. Jauss’ Erwartungshorizont, the conglomerate of earlier read texts and general beliefs and culture which define the familiarity and criteria readers use to evaluate literary texts, is a logical point of departure here. I am interested in exposing the contextual milieu of Wilkomirski’s readership: in what sort of frame of reference the vocabulary of his memoir could be embedded. Following Amossy in the previous chapter, the discursive surroundings of his memoir has to conform to the supposed beliefs and views of his audience.

The primary goal of discourse analysis is to expose these implied norms and rules for the production of language. In this context, it is relevant to mention Michel Foucault’s Archaeology of Knowledge (1972). His primary contention herein is that

… a statement always belongs to a series or a whole, always plays a role among other statements, deriving support from them and distinguishing itself from them: it is always part of a network of statements, in which it has a role, however minimal it may be, to play. (Foucault 99)

Foucault’s interest goes beyond analysing contemporary circulating discourses: he wishes to highlight their arbitrariness, their “strangeness … in spite of their familiarity” and he wants to show that discourses are continuously subject to change (Mills 1997:26). Instead of focusing on the author, Foucault emphasises the author-function: the “principle of organisation which operates to group together disparate texts which often have very few common features” (74). Shakespeare’s works, for example, are grouped together and discussed by means of their mutual stylistic attributes, despite their stylistic

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variety, discontinuity and even doubts regarding authoritative singularity.

Wilkomirski’s Fragments similarly hitches on a discourse of Holocaust remembrance. This particular discourse consists of a prodigious spectrum of ingredients. For the present paragraph I highlight a few characteristics particularly. Firstly, the discourse is to a great extent coloured by the Holocaust

testimonies of “celebrated” camp survivors such as Primo Levi and Elie Wiesel: many aspects, such as the inherent urge to convey their experiences and the depiction of deplorable conditions marked by hunger and bad hygiene. These testimonies are moreover constantly reverberated through different media, such as film adaptations and other more (semi-)fictitious narratives such as Roman Polański’s The Pianist and Steven Spielberg’s Schindler’s List; the viewer is aware that s/he is provided with a fictional account, but nonetheless the images s/he experiences supplements the bigger picture the reader has. Another constituent the Holocaust discourse relies heavily on is trauma and, by extension, the academic and common sense ideas of its workings: how past horrors leak into present minds and cultures. These ingredients, among others, together establish an overarching Holocaust discourse, which is ubiquitous in contemporary western culture and has shaped readers’ expectations of possible scenarios, of the type of cruelties, the narrative frames and the ideological messages of the stories of Shoah survivors.

Foucault ultimately questioned the notion of an oeuvre, as this is in effect an order which a particular group of readers imposes on the text on the basis of their biographical knowledge. Literary texts are innately intertextual, not only through stylistic figures at the surface, such as allusion, but all the more in terms of their formal construction (narrative voice, plot, character). Nevertheless, they are most

evidently pigeonholed as primarily authored texts, in which the singular author’s ingenuity and

idiosyncrasy is believed to be a determining factor. Foucault was one of the first to argue that literary texts, more than any other texts, are formed in reaction to and within the tacitly normative constraints as set up by other literary texts.5 This is a premise that I consider to be highly applicable in the context of the Wilkomirski affair: he employs a great array of tropes his audience is familiar with, for which he is laurelled in return, while in fact all he does is appeal to the constraints that are set up by this

discourse: he gets honoured simply by living up to the image the public has of The Holocaust. Wilkomirski was known to keep a large archive of Second World War literature, consisting of testimony and films, and claims that his research into the subject of the Second World War in general and the Holocaust in particular helped to place the flashes of memory into context. In the words of Philip Gourevitch (1999), Wilkomirski’s reading into the subject offered “the calming ‘possibility’ of finding ‘the historical center’ of [my] own past” (56-57). In his study of the affair, Stefan Mächler (2001) adequately summarizes the core problem of Fragments as follows:

5_{As with the previous chapter in the context of Barthes, Iser and Jauss, I presume Foucault’s philosophy, in spite}

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[It] is the attempt of the adult Bruno Grosjean [i.e. Binjamin Wilkomirski] to assemble elements taken from humanity’s remembrance of the Shoah in order to find a means of expressing

experiences that were not verbally retrievable either when they occurred or later, and which for that very reason cried out for a narrative that would give them meaning. (269)

I will now formulate three tropes that can be distilled from the Holocaust discourse that recur throughout Fragments.

Trope 1: The imperative to tell

The first trope I would like to foreground in Wilkomirski’s memoir is that of the imperative to tell: the inherently felt urge that many Holocaust survivors have expressed in their testimony to bring across their story. Moreover, not only did Holocaust survivors need to survive in order to tell their story, but vice versa they needed to tell their story so as to survive. According to Shoshana Felman (1992) in every Holocaust survivor lives “an imperative need to tell and thus come to know one’s story, unimpeded by ghosts from the past against which one has to protect oneself” (78). Primo Levi, commonly known as an outspoken eyewitness of the first hour, was one of the first first-hand writers who cultivated this aspect of Holocaust testimony. He contends in his canonical Survival in Auschwitz (1961) that

“[t]o tell the story to bear witness was an end for which to save oneself. Not to live and to tell, but to live in order to tell. I was already aware at Auschwitz that I was living the fundamental experience of my live.” (13)

Levi makes it appear as if his sole purpose in surviving was to convey what he has seen, so it is not forgotten. The camp even becomes the essential event of his life: the sole goal of life after Auschwitz, for him, takes root in his survival of its atrocities. He moreover argued that he felt a responsible to witness for the ones that did not survive and thus no longer could make their voices heard. By claiming to speak for those who did not survive, he expands the significance of his writing: those who died in the Holocaust have no more voice to share and continue to haunt Levi, and with him perhaps his audience. It could provide him – and the reader in turn – with some sense of reconciliation, knowing that he conveys their stories the best he can, under the rubric of “lest we forget”.

The Holocaust history of Primo Levi of course differs from that of the alleged history of

Wilkomirski in the fact that the Levi was already an adult upon entering Auschwitz (he had reached the age of 25), whereas Wilkomirski according to his memoir was between one and six years old during the Second World War – the aspect of childhood is a feature that proves a vital core of his narrative. A part of his imperative to tell emanates from more personal convictions: that of rectifying his identity which he presumes to be false (as mentioned before, he was given the name Bruno Dössekker by his Swiss foster parents). However, at a few instances he does seem to call attention to the urgency of his text in

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a similar fashion as what Felman ascribes to Shoah survivors. In the epilogue to his memoir, which was included under the pressure of Suhrkamp, he discloses his intentions:

I wrote [these fragments of memory] with the hope that perhaps other people in the same situation would find the necessary support and strength to cry out their own traumatic childhood memories, so that they too could learn that there really are people today who will take them seriously, and who want to listen and to understand. (W 496)

Here Wilkomirski’s rationales for writing his memoir are assembled: he appeals to his peers, to Holocaust child survivors who haven’t spoken out yet and thus are still haunted by their past, just as Levi and Felman describe. Just before this passage he elaborates on the foundation of the Children of Holocaust Society in Warsaw, which seeks to make short shrift of the presumed false identities Jewish children were given during the war in order to survive. With hindsight Wilkomirski’s assertions here of course become all the more ironic, given the fact that he has never been in a camp as a child.

Felman argued that the necessity of testimony that is affirmed in Claude Lanzmann’s canonical documentary film Shoah (1985), consisting of nine hours of testimonies by witnesses, survivors and perpetrators of the Holocaust, derives from the impossibility of testimony around which the film is

simultaneously centred: “At the edge of the universe of testimony … at the frontiers of the necessity of speech, Shoah is a film about silence: the paradoxical articulation of a loss of voice – and of a loss of mind. The testimony stumbles on, and at the same time tells about, the impossibility of telling” (224). This paradox between the imperative to tell and the impossibility of representation that Felman denounces on the basis of Shoah forms the prelude to the second trope I will discuss.

Trope 2: The loss of voice, the (im-)possibility of representation

“A writer who can say so much with few words should be cherished”, The NRC Handelsblad book review of Fragments reads, just after its publication in the Netherlands (de Jong 4). This is an utterance I wish to take as a starting point in developing the second trope I distinguish in the Holocaust discourse: that of the loss of voice, complemented by the impossibility of representation. An essential argument about representation and the Holocaust is centred on the impossibility to represent it and its

magnitude. Those dismissing the comprehensive representation of the Holocaust argue that to put a face on the atrocities of the Shoah would equate to bringing it to closure. Shelley Hornstein (2014) said that if one is capable of actually representing the real, then s/he would have also captured the real, in the end leaving “no room to imagine the worst and the scale of la chose” (16). Similarly, Haydn White argued against the cognizance of the Shoah when he wrote that “the Holocaust was and should remain unfinished business in the sense of being an event in “our” history” (2007:240).’

Peter Novick (2000) looks at how the Holocaust has been recognised, demarcated, and spread as an event which requires public remembrance. According to Novick, the prevailing view for a long period of time had been the contention that the Holocaust was an event inherently inaccessible for outsiders

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and “a holy event that resisted profane representation” with “special rules for its representation” (211-2). Extending on this, Felman contends that it was the condition of being inside the event that made the idea of an actual Holocaust witness inconceivable: only “someone who could step outside of the coercively totalitarian and dehumanizing frame of reference in which the event was taking place” (1992:81) could provide an independent standpoint.

The current Holocaust discourse however seems to have caught up with Felman’s utterances: the present-day timeframe is permeated by a rich and pervasive visual and narrative framework that allows insiders as well as outsiders to appropriate and get inside of the atrocities of the Shoah. Novick

attributes the provenance of the rich and pervasive Holocaust framework most notably to an American interference of popular culture. During the debate over whether the American-made Holocaust

miniseries, which aired firstly in 1978, should be broadcasted in Germany, the opponents fell back on familiar complaints. Der Spiegel deprecated the “destruction of the Jews as soap opera” and called it “a commercial horror show”, and German television editors who were against airing called it “a cultural commodity, not in keeping with the memory of the victims” (qtd. in Novick 213). In spite of the objections that were made beforehand, the Holocaust miniseries became a tremendous success in Germany. Heinz Höhne in Der Spiegel cherished the ability of the American production to subvert the entrenched European Holocaust discourse and break with the “paralyzing dogma … that mass murder must not be represented in art” (Ibid.).6

What makes this confusing is that simultaneously with the subversion of the dogma that the Holocaust was found unsuitable for representation, the impossibility of representation nonetheless remained part of the very same Holocaust framework. The chief reason for this is that it continued to be a predominant characteristic of many Holocaust testimonies. It has been argued that the coexistence of seemingly irreconcilable components in the same narrative framework is one of the basic

characteristics of people who have suffered from a large trauma.

A famous case that explains this mechanism has been elaborated on by pioneering French

psychotherapist Pierre Janet: his patient Irène suffered from a trauma upon finding her mother dead in her apartment. In sessions with her, Irène disclosed that she did not have any memory of the death of her mother. Oddly enough, she did show another assembly of symptoms: upon entering the bedroom in which her mother had died, she instinctively and lively started to take care of an imaginary victim that was lying on the ground – presumably mimicking the events of the night on which her mother had passed by. On the on hand, on the level of speech and communication, she seemed amnestic for her mother’s death (she could not convey what had happened), but on the hand “she seemed to remember too much” (qtd. in van der Kolk & van der Hart 1995:162).

6_{This is an aspect which makes relevant my citing of Novick: even though his primary focus is the American}

Holocaust discourse, this shows that America in fact exercised a huge influence on European – and thus global – Holocaust discourse as well.

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This serves as a good illustration of what seems to lie at the core of trauma in general, and

Holocaust testimony in particular. Following Michael Bernard-Donals (2001) testimonial narratives in general do not disclose history; they rather disclose “the effect of events on witnesses” (1308). In the wake of the expansion of negotiability of the Holocaust, a process that came on stream during the second half of the twentieth century, the traumatic nature of the stories of camp survivors and the accompanying impossibility to retell was a guiding principle. Consecutively, the impossibility of representation calls attention to another interesting paradoxical relationship with the first trope: how can the impossibility of representation coexist with the imperative to tell?

Wilkomirski’s memoir makes ample use of the rhetorical form of paradox. Rothe argues that the figure of paradox was first and foremost familiarized in the Holocaust discourse by Elie Wiesel, through such claims as that the Holocaust is of universal significance, in spite of it being a unique historical event. For example Wilkomirski paradoxically underlines the many lacunae in his childhood memories but inconsistently proclaims the cast-iron certainty that his testimony is based on “exact snapshots” of his “photographic memory” (Rothe 147). Additionally, according to Rothe,

Wilkomirski’s allusions to lacunae in his memoir resound the notion that trauma is fundamentally inscrutable and impossible to convey; thus it is “encoded … not in the language an author employs to communicate the experience, but rather in the text’s silences and absences” (Ibid.). This arranges for an interesting reconnection with Iser’s Leerstelle from the previous chapter, which proves the versatility and stratification of Fragments: the gaps in Wilkomirski’s text simultaneously illustrate an interaction between text and reader, as well as the failure to convey the author’s tribes and tribulations to the reader.

It is clear by now that testimonies of Holocaust survivors generally provide a blueprint for trauma. A wide array of traumatic tropes can be read into them, such as the dislocation of the traumatic event by testimonial language, as well as occasionally contradictory camp stories (Bernard-Donals 1307). In Wilkomirski, the contradictions tumble over each other, for example in the following passage:

Nothing has stayed with me about the journey to Kraków [sic]. On the other hand, I retraced the route from the station to the Miodowa synagogue like a sleepwalker twenty years later, the first time I ever went back to the city (W 464)

No explanation or elaboration at all is given to the reader for the apparent discrepancy between his knowledge of the road to the Miodowa synagogue and the adjacent nescience of his trip to Krakow. But the reader is inclined to accept this discrepancy: the juxtaposition of exact details and vague recollections fits the general image that can be extracted from the discourse of Holocaust testimony.

Van der Kolk (1997) claims that a traumatic event is first perceived as a set of shards of the event’s sensory constituents and, as such, is stored on a non-verbal level; these constituents do not receive admittance into the personal narrative. Accordingly, preliminary memories of the trauma materialize as a flashback of physical sensation (245). He argues that a traumatic event as experience would be

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engraved in the brain as an image that is inherently incomprehensible and illegible; it is thus read belatedly (nachträglich) due to its literal disconnection from the brain’s language centre (qtd. in LaCapra 2001:107n20). Trauma is thus fundamentally different from memory, as it becomes dissociated from conscious awareness and voluntary control.

This disintegration of memory, which could be regarded as one of the causes for the loss of voice in the first place, is an aspect Wilkomirski cultivates in his writing, for example when he writes in the beginning of his memoir:

My earliest memories are a rubble field of isolated images and events. Shards of memory with hard knife-sharp edges, which still cut flesh if touched today. Mostly a chaotic jumble, with very little chronological fit; shards that keep surfacing against the orderly grain of grown-up life and escaping the laws of logic. If I’m going to write about it, I have to give up on the ordering logic of grown-ups; it would only distort what happened. (W 377-8)

This elaboration honours the name of Wilkomirski’s memoir. He explicates the incoherence of the traumatic events of his youth, and the loss of voice is even made a keynote for the narrative that follows: the fragmentary representation of his story is the only possibility to illustrate what he has been through, any other representation or structuring would only falsify the events. Cathy Caruth, whose work on trauma and testimony is widely considered to be very influential in the field of trauma studies, would argue by mouth of Bernard-Donals that the narrative gaps “mark a separation between the witnessing of the traumatic event before it is processed as experience and its return as a departure in the narrative of the testimony” (1307).

In his narrative, Wilkomirski employs several gradations of representation. At times his depictions seem almost filmic in their suggestiveness, such as in the following citation:

Silence again. We waited, motionless. Then there was a crack of bones, then hard footsteps and the sound of something being dragged toward the block in the rear.

I saw nothing; I couldn’t make out a thing against the sun. my inflamed eyes kept weeping. (W 426)

The reader only gets the suggestion that a human catastrophe has just taken place, for at least bones have been broken.7_{With descriptions such as these Wilkomirski in a way shows the reader the most}

horrible atrocities of the camp by not showing them at all, just by their suggestion. It is up to the reader to fill in the blanks in the outlines he supplies.

Another, even more striking instance of the mechanism of showing by not showing is this passage:

7_{Ellipsis is a style figure that is not only ubiquitous in trauma, but also permeates visual culture. According to}

Linda Williams (2006), ellipses “happen all the time in movies, frequently within the same scene, usually accomplished by single cuts from shot to shot” (305). It could thus be argued that not only through trauma, but also through the nascent audiovisual culture the symbol of ellipsis has found its way into the Holocaust discourse.

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I look over the edge into the bottom of the trench, then out over it. I can’t understand what I’m seeing through the pillows of smoke, and at the same time I do understand, but it doesn’t connect up with anything I know, either in pictures or in words. I just feel that this is a place where

everything ends, not just the embankment and the rails. This is where this world stops being a world at all. (W 449, emphasis mine)

The place that is being described in this scene is Auschwitz – Wilkomirski made no secret of this in several interviews. In spite of this he emphatically is not naming the place in his narrative, yet he does make an appeal to the image the public has of the death camps: this is where humanity stops and where the civilized world ends. Alan Mintz (2001) has argued that over time, the murder of European Jewry turned out to be “the referent for collective suffering” (26): in spite of its continual inherent connection with (and to some extent even causative agent of) Jewish identity, the Holocaust turned into what Dan Diner has called “the ultimate core event of “our” time” (qtd. in Postone & Santner 2003:67). In turn, Auschwitz has become the centrepiece of Holocaust remembrance and the absolute embodiment of the persecution of Jews during the Second World War. By not naming the place, Wilkomirski in fact asserts the unabated status of Auschwitz as a space that is inherently connected with a traumatic event, a place-that-shall-not-be-named.

An example from the text that convokes clear similarities with the situation of Pierre Janet’s patient suffering from the physical reliving of a traumatic event is the following:

What i saw on the ground, up against the wall, was the two bundles, still lying there, or rather, what was left of them. The pieces of cloth were undone, lay around all torn, and in amongst them the babies on their backs, arms and legs outspread, stomachs all swollen and blue. And where once their little faces must have been, a red mess mixed with snow and mud.

Nothing else to see – except the skulls were smashed open.

A mass of yellow, sticky-shiny stuf had flowed out and was splashed against the wall, on the ground, and right across the path I had to follow. My stomach heaved with horror and disgust. (W 456-457)

At a few instances, Wilkomirski describes scenes that, in fact, surpass imagination in their depiction of extreme horror and brutality. The scenes moreover seem diametrically opposed to the impossibility of representation. Thus, they provide a clear example of the shards of memory that have remained intact, uncorrupted by the present context, as he had already disclosed in the novel’s opening as discussed in context of the prior trope. They offer the reader the central paradox of trauma: that of not

remembering anything, yet at the same time remembering too much – just as was the case with Irène. However, the paradox is supplied with an extra layer here: where Irène’s reaction of remembrance of her trauma was purely physical – she undertook a physical action upon entering the bedroom in which she had found her mother dead –, Wilkomirski’s doubt and uncertainty in the text go hand in hand with the most frightful – but razor sharp – depictions of his alleged trauma. Fragments, as Mächler put it, is very much true “in the emotionality it evokes, in the density of its horrors” (278). This could be one of the primary reasons why it was believed at first, and that even genuine Holocaust survivors

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recognised their experiences in the memoir: with the harsh pictures, it could be argued, he forced his readers into witnessing the barbarities of the Holocaust at their worst – again functioning as a kind of reality effect.

During the 1980s, testimonial accounts of Shoah survivors started to develop as a literary genre in itself, and its procedures were demarcated by significant pioneering trauma theorists such as Felman, but also Lawrence Langer and Dori Laub (Whitehead 33). As such, the emergence and delineation of testimony as a separate type of literature more or less paved the way for Wilkomirski, on which he could construct his Holocaust survivor narrative. His readership was already familiar with the general procedures that have their validity in the framework of such a narrative: the coexistence and

juxtaposition of vague impressions and razor sharp and horrific details, . In short, the reader was already familiar with the standardized strategies of representation considering Holocaust testimony. As a result, the text of Fragments creates another reality effect: it mimics the inherently traumatic workings of the calibrated genus of Shoah eyewitness accounts, thus generating a new referential illusion.

Trope 3: Facing denial and ignorance after World War II

The third and final trope I will discuss in this chapter is that of facing denial and ignorance for the fate of Holocaust survivors after the Second World War. Peter Novick observes that recurring themes in Holocaust discourse in favour of Israel were particularly those of “the world’s silence,” “the world’s indifference,” and “the abandonment of the Jews.” These had been debated occasionally since 1945, but did not play a large role in remarks directed to a larger audience (158). It wasn’t until the 1970s that charges of wartime ignorance and indifference were firstly foregrounded.

The idea of the plight of a victim that is being disbelieved and discharged had become widespread in Holocaust discourse ever since Primo Levi wrote his canonical memoir Survival in Auschwitz (orig. Se questo è un uomo, 1947). Here Levi delineates the nightmare of a camp survivor whose story was not believed, after returning home. Rothe remarks that in Wilkomirski’s author’s note, the reader is similarly reproached that questioning the narrative’s historical authenticity and hence the author’s identity and status as a child survivor would be synonymous with re-victimization (146).

Denial of the Holocaust for a long time has been considered a major crime, especially in the framework of the Holocaust discourse. This is the reason that also made people very cautious to deny the truthfulness of Wilkomirski – one did not want to be known as someone who negates the stories of a sincere Holocaust survivor. As already shown in the previous chapter in the context of ethos, the framing of a work as literary by intention opens the work up to specific anticipations and explanatory processes. Korthals Altes argued that the generic framing of a work as non-fiction triggers the cognitive frames of real-life experience with the reader. The genuine presentation of the initial publication of

Fragments bears witness of a good knowledge of the presentation of a Holocaust memoir, not only through the genre designation but also through visual display: on the book cover of the English edition,

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we see an actual photograph of a young boy with a Jew’s Star of David crossed around it (Figure 1) – due to his readership’s familiarity with the culture of images of the Holocaust, consisting of many a million collected passport photographs of (Jewish) people that did not survive the Nazi camps, it seems impossible to miss that the reader is in fact dealing with a candid Holocaust memoir. Thus an extra layer that is added in the context of the Holocaust discourse: next to respects to genre designations, it does not testify of good form to call into question the genuinely presented story of a Shoah survivor, especially not if taken into consideration the already named emergence of the Holocaust as “the ultimate core event of our time”.

Figure 1: Book cover of the English edition of Binjamin Wilkomirski’s Fragments

The trope of denial and ignorance might be one of the most prominent tropes featured in Fragments: the textual examples that can be adduced and relegated to this trope are legion. In the following passage, he is being laughed at when he wraps rags around his feet, instead of regular shoes:

I stood there petrified, not understanding. Something here was wrong. But now, as if on command, there was a roar of mocking laughter, poisonous and ugly. The children were pointing at me. They yelled and catcalled and clutched their stomachs. I stood there speechless, still not understanding. (W 418)

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In the foregoing, Wilkomirski described how he wrapped rags around his feet in the camps to keep warm feet, in the absence of decent shoes. This was for him a means for survival in the camps. He is thus “abandoned” by his peers: his survival instinct which dragged him through the years in the camps is ridiculed and misunderstood in post-war Switzerland.

Another occasion of this occurs when he interprets a print of Wilhelm Tell as a camp guard taking a shot at an innocent child:

The class has gone wild, they’re all yelling. The girls are laughing right out loud now, high mocking laughter, and tapping their foreheads, while the boys point at me and make fists and yell:

“He’s raving, there’s no such thing. Liar! He’s crazy, mad, he’s an idiot.” (W 479)

Novick quotes Elie Wiesel, who writes that for the first time in his adult life he had been “afraid that the nightmare may start all over again.” For Jews “the world has remained unchanged … indifferent to our fate.” (qtd. in Novick 158-9) The fear for re-occurrence of the Holocaust is sensed by the young Wilkomirski as well, when he writes:

The people who live in whole houses and don’t wear striped shirts and have everything to eat, as much as they want, they’re the ones who kill the others. They’re the ones I have to fear, the ones with fat faces and strong arms and legs and terrible big hands. (W 466)

I look over to the warden-teacher, standing there shaking with anger, standing there in front of the big blackboard, her hands still on her hips. My eyes begin to smart, and the big blackboard turns watery, gets bigger and bigger until it surrounds the whole classroom and turns into a black sky in her red pullover, and thered pullover is dripping red blood down in a stream over all the benches. “Red warden – bloody warden”, I hear in my head. (W 477-8)

These citations indicate the sheer indifference of post-war Switzerland Wilkomirski resides in. He is constantly derided and told that he is completely wrong, that it was all a bad dream and moreover completely impossible. On top of that, the perpetrators were still freely roaming the country, as he is certain that his teacher is a former camp guard, solely divested of her Nazi uniform. This all leads up to the same conclusion as Wiesel had arrived at: indifference and ignorance simply meant that it would only take a small effort to let it all happen again.

Novick remarks that the most noteworthy shared memories derive their strength from their “claim to express some permanent, enduring truth”; they are believed to define collective identities and they tell essential particulars that constitute “who we are now” (170). Within the context of denial and ignorance of the Jews’ past in post-war Europe, the lack of understanding formed a significant

component what rounded up Jewish Holocaust survivors in the first place. Wilkomirski also makes an appeal to the existence of the hidden kinship with those who know what happened, for instance in the following citation:

Holocaust Discourse, Regulator of Reality: Creating a Referential Illusion by appealing to the Holocaust Discourse