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Abstract
This essay provides a rhetorical analysis of the Wilkomirski Affair and some of the recent public debates that have discussed the importance of childhood memoirs and the formation of authentic Holocaust identities. The author argues that rhetorical processes are involved in both the construction of what are deemed “authentic” memoirs and the formation of the standards of evaluation that are used in legitimating those authenticated memories. Moreover, the author contends that the perceptual nature of this authenticating process means that some Holocaust memories are co-produced by authors and their critics. By comparing some of the textual claims that appeared in Wilkomirski's Fragments with some of the audience interpretations of those claims, rhetorical scholars gain an appreciation of the polysemic nature of first and “second” generation child survivor memoirs. The essay concludes by evaluating the perceived effectiveness of Wilkomirski's performance as a Jewish victim of the Holocaust, and argues that the affective nature of some “prosthetic memories” may occasionally provide us with irresponsible and inauthentic Holocaust memories.
Notes
1. Benjamin Wilkomirski, Fragments: Memories of a Wartime Childhood, trans. Carol B. Janeway (New York: Schocken, 1996), 4.
2. Albert Friedlander, “Wilkomirski with Footnotes,” European Judaism 34 (2001): 144.
3. Bella Brodzki, “Trauma Inherited, Trauma Reclaimed: Chamberet: Recollections from Ordinary Childhood,” The Yale Journal of Criticism 14 (2001): 155–67.
4. See, for example, Thane Rosenbaum, “At Century's End,” New York Jewish Week, December 31, 1999, 22 paragraphs, http://www.proquest.com (accessed July 29, 2005).
5. Alison Landsberg, “America, the Holocaust, and the Mass Culture of Memory: Toward a Radical Politics of Empathy,” New German Critique 71 (Spring 1997): 66.
6. The Holocaust's “second generation” is made up of the children of Holocaust survivors, who have their own traumatic experiences. One of the most moving accounts of some of the societal problems of this second generation appears in Nadine Fresco, “Remembering the Unknown,” International Review of Psycho-Analysis 11 (1984): 417–27, 24 paragraphs, http:///www.anti-rev.org/textes/fresco84a/body.html (accessed July 31, 2005).
Some critics worry that that growing popularity of trauma studies or psychoanalytic approaches to memory may mean that publics will begin to shift their focus away from the life experiences of survivors and toward the study of those who simply come in contact with survivors’ testimony. Kalí Tal, Worlds of Hurt: Reading the Literature of Trauma (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 53–59; Esther Faye, “Missing the ‘Real’ Trace of Trauma: How the Second Generation Remember the Holocaust,” American Imago 58 (2001): 528.
7. Landsberg, “America,” 82.
8. André Aciman, quoted in Amy Hungerford, “Memorizing Memory,” The Yale Journal of Criticism 14 (2001): 67.
9. Pierre Nora, “Between Memory and History: Les Lieux de Mémoire,” Representations 26 (1989): 13.
10. Nora, “Between,” 14.
11. For some key commentaries on these internalization processes, see Stefan Maechler, The Wilkomirski Affair: A Study in Biographical Truth, trans. John E. Woods (New York: Schocken Books, 2001).
12. Barbie Zelizer, “Reading the Past Against the Grain: The Shape of Memory Studies,” Critical Studies in Mass Communication 12 (1995): 235.
13. For some illustrative examples of communicative studies of “public memory,” see Edward S. Casey, “Public Memory in Place and Time,” in Framing Public Memory, ed. Kendall R. Phillips (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2004), 17–44; Cheryl R. Jorgensen-Earp and Lori A. Lanzilotti, “Public Memory and Private Grief: The Construction of Shrines at the Sites of Public Tragedy,” The Quarterly Journal of Speech 84 (1998): 150–70; Roseann M. Mandziuk, “Commemorating Sojourner Truth: Negotiating the Politics of Race and Gender in the Spaces of Public Memory,” Western Journal of Communication 67 (2003): 271–91; Kendall R. Phillips, “Introduction,” in Framing Public Memory, ed. Kendall R. Phillips (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2004), 1–14.
14. Greg Dickinson, “Memories for Sale: Nostalgia and the Construction of the Identity in Old Pasadena,” The Quarterly Journal of Speech 83 (1997): 1.
15. Jolanta A. Drzewiecka, “Collective Memory, Media Representations, and Barriers to Intercultural Dialogue,” Intercultural and International Communication Annual 25 (2000): 189–220.
16. M. Lane Bruner, “Rhetorical Criticism as Limit Work,” Western Journal of Communication 66 (2002): 282.
17. Zelizer, “Reading,” 218.
18. Zelizer, “Reading,” 234.
19. Andreas Huyssen, “Present Pasts: Media, Politics, Amnesia,” Public Culture 12 (2000): 23, 38.
20. Efraim Sicher argues that the “children of survivors and members of their generation who feel they have been touched by the Holocaust trauma have entered a public competition of victimhood.” Efraim Sicher, “The Future of the Past: Countermemory and Postmemory in Contemporary American post-Holocaust Narratives,” History and Memory 12 (2000): 63.
21. For example of authenticated identities and “deep memory,” see Faye, “Missing,” 526–29.
22. Bradford Vivian, “Jefferson's Other,” The Quarterly Journal of Speech 88 (2002): 299.
23. Stephanie H. Grey, “Writing Redemption: Trauma and the Authentication of the Moral Order in Hibakusha Literature,” Text and Performance Quarterly 22 (2002): 1.
24. Amos Funkenstein, “History, Counterhistory, and Narrative,” in Probing the Limits of Representation, ed. S. Friedlander (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1992), 79.
25. Vivian, “Jefferson's,” 299.
26. Marouf Hasian Jr. and Robert E. Frank, “Rhetoric, History, and Collective Memory: Decoding the Goldhagen Debates,” Western Journal of Communication 63 (1999): 95–114.
27. On the political nature of public memories, see M. Lane Bruner, Strategies of Remembrance: The Rhetorical Dimensions of National Identity Construction (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2002); Peter Novick, Holocaust in American Life (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1999); Shawn J. Parry-Giles and Trevor Parry-Giles, “Collective Memory, Political Nostalgia, and the Rhetorical Presidency: Bill Clinton's Commemoration of the March on Washington, August 28, 1998,” The Quarterly Journal of Speech 86 (2000): 417–37.
28. Peter Ehrenhaus, “Why We Fought: Holocaust Memory in Spielberg's Saving Private Ryan,” Critical Studies in Media Communication 18 (2001): 321.
29. Nora, “Between,” 13–25.
30. Philip Gourevitch, “The Memory Thief,” The New Yorker, June 14, 1999, p. 49.
31. Harvey Grossinger, “Survivor of What?: Poignant Questions Raised about Ersatz Holocaust Victim,” The Houston Chronicle, July 21, 2002, Zest Section, paragraph 2, http://web.lexis-nexis.com/universe (accessed September 13, 2002).
32. Tamier Katriel and Thomas Farrell, “Scrapbooks as Cultural Texts: An American Art of Memory,” Text and Performance Quarterly 11 (1991): 2.
33. Barbie Zelizer, “Finding Aids to the Past: Bearing Personal Witness to Traumatic Public Events,” Media, Culture and Society 24 (2002): 698–99.
34. Jonathan Kozol, “Children of the Camps,” Nation, October 28, 1996, p. 24.
35. George Jones, “A Holocaust Hoax?” The Ottawa Citizen, October 2, 1998, 11 paragraphs, http://web.lexis-nexis.com (accessed May 8, 2002).
36. Rebecca Abrams, “Mistaken Identities,” New Statesman, June 28, 1999, p. 35.
37. . Harvey Peskin, “Holocaust Denial: A Sequel,” The Nation, April 19, 1999, p. 34. These are just some of the many national and international prizes that Wilkomirski won for publishing Fragments. He also won the Prix Mémoire de la Shoah in France. Doreen Carjaval, “Disputed Holocaust Memoir Withdrawn,” New York Times, October 14, 1999, paragraph 5, http://web.lexis-nexis.com (accessed September 13, 2002). The book would be translated into more than a dozen languages. Elena Lappin, “The Man With Two Heads,” The Granta 66 (1999): 7–65.
38. Maechler, Wilkomirski, viii.
39. Roy Schwartzman, “Review Essay: Recovering the Lost Canon: Public Memory and the Holocaust,” Rhetoric and Public Affairs 4 (2001): 547.
40. This situation gets even more complicated when one realizes that at various points in time, Wilkomirski has accepted some of the inheritance money that was left by both the Grosjean and the Dössekker estates. Yvonne Grosjean died in 1981, and the Dössekkers died five years later. Many observers consider Yvonne Grosjean to be Wilkomirski's biological mother, and the Dössekkers are believed to have been his adoptive parents. For more on Wilkomirski's background, see Daniel Ganzfried, Alias Wilkomirski: Die Holocaust-Travestie (Berlin: Judische Verlagsanstalt, 2002).
41. Robert Alter, “Arbeit Macht Fraud,” The New Republic, April 30, 2001, p. 36; Friedlander, “Wilkomirski,” 144.
42. Blake Eskin, A Life in Pieces: The Making and Unmaking of Benjamin Wilkomirski (New York: Norton, 2002); Stefan Maechler, “Individual Remembering as Social Interaction and Public Event,” History and Memory 13 (2001): 59–95.
43. Vivian, “Jefferson's,” 299.
44. K. E. Supriya, Remembering Empire: Power, Memory, and Place in Postcolonial India (New York: Peter Lang, 2004), 26.
45. Michael Bernard-Donals, “Beyond the Question of Authenticity: Witness and Testimony in the Fragments Controversy,” Publications of the Modern Language Association of America 116 (2001): 1303.
46. Kozol, “Children,” 27.
47. Lappin, “Man With Two,” 9.
48. Alter, “Arbeit,” 35.
49. In this particular investigation of the role that rhetoric plays in the authentication of key childhood survivor memories, I am also testing McGee's claims about the alleged structural relations that exist between “an apparently finished discourse and its sources, between an apparently finished discourse and culture, and between an apparently finished discourse and its influences.” Michael C. McGee, “Text, Context, and the Fragmentation of Contemporary Culture,” Western Journal of Communication 54 (1990): 280.
50. For some of the foundational work on the importance of traumatic memories, see Cathy Caruth, “Unclaimed Experience: Trauma and the Possibility of History,” Yale French Studies 79. (1991): 181–92; Cathy Caruth, Unclaimed Experience: Trauma, Narrative, and History (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996); Shoshana Felman, “Education and Crises; Or, the Vicissitudes of Teaching,” in Trauma: Explorations in Memory, ed. Cathy Caruth (Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press, 1995), 13–60; Dominick LaCapra, Holocaust Testimonies: Attending to the Victim's Voice, National Communication Association Website, 2002, http://www.natcom.org/convention/2002/keynote%20materials/holocaust.htm (accessed November 1, 2002).
51. Novick, Holocaust, 68; Ehrenhaus, “Why We,” 335.
52. Saul Friedlander, “The ‘Final Solution’: On the Unease in Historical Interpretation,” in Lessons and Legacies: The Meaning of the Holocaust in a Changing World, ed. Patrick Hayes (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2001), 23–35.
53. Bernard-Donals, “Beyond,” 1302–303.
54. Grey, “Writing Redemption,” 1.
55. Jennifer Silverstone, “Book Review: Fragments,” British Journal of Psychotherapy 17 (2000): 112–21.
56. Andrea Reiter, “The Holocaust as Seen Through the Eyes of Children,” in The Holocaust and the Text: Speaking the Unspeakable, ed. Andrew Leak and George Paizis (New York: St. Martin's Press, 2000), 83–96.
57. Daniel J. Goldhagen, Hitler's Willing Executioners: Ordinary Germans and the Holocaust (London: Abacus Books, 1996), 308.
58. Alon Confino and Peter Fritzsche, ed., The Work of Memory: New Directions in the Study of German Society and Culture (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2002), 3.
59. Reiter, “The Holocaust,” 85–86.
60. Zelizer, “Finding Aids,” 698.
61. Nechama Tec, Dry Tears: The Story of a Lost Childhood (New York: Oxford University Press, 1982).
62. Yehuda Nir, The Lost Childhood: A Memoir (New York: Berkley Books, 1996).
63. Fresco, “Remembering,” paragraph 4.
64. Brodzki, “Trauma,” 155.
65. Reiter, “The Holocaust,” 87–89.
66. Tamar Katriel, “Sites of Memory: Discourses of the Past in Israeli Pioneering Settlement Museums,” The Quarterly Journal of Speech 80 (1994): 5.
67. Rosensaft, quoted in Rosenbaum, “At Century's,” paragraph 11.
68. Brodzki, “Trauma,” 156.
69. Silverstone, “Book Review,” 115.
70. Gourevitch, “The Memory,” 50.
71. J. Robert Cox, Cultural Memory and Public Moral Argument (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University School of Speech, 1987), 14.
72. Nora, “Between,” 15.
73. Saul Friedländer, quoted in Faye, “Missing,” 525.
74. Wilkomirski, Fragments, 4.
75. Lawrence L. Langer, Holocaust Testimonies: The Ruins of Memory (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1991), 1–38.
76. Lappin, “Man With Two,” 15.
77. Landsberg, “America,” 67. Elsewhere in this essay, Landsberg admits that critics need to be juxtaposing these affective, prosthetic memories with more cognitive Holocaust records.
78. Stephen H. Browne, “Reading, Rhetoric and the Texture of Public Memory,” The Quarterly Journal of Speech 81 (1995): 243.
79. Wilkomirski, Fragments, 4; Gourevitch, “Memory,” 49.
80. Stefan Maechler, Wilkomirski, viii.
81. I agree with Susan Suleiman's assessment that the Fragments was “a highly stylized work: the decision to restrict the narrative perspective almost exclusively to the young boy allows for some powerful effects.” Susan R. Suleiman, “Problems of Memory and Factuality in Recent Holocaust Memoirs: Wilkomirski/Wiesel,” Poetics Today 21 (2000): 547.
82. Wilkomirski, Fragments, 3–5.
83. Jay Geller argues that there are two important factual problems with this section of Wilkomirski's narrative. First of all, the Latvian collaborators were actually known as the Bendeldikki, or “auxiliary police.” The use of the phrase “Latvian militia” was highly problematic. Second, by the mid-1990s, before the publication of his first book, he discovered that his biological father was probably still alive. Geller, “The Wilkomirski Case: Fragments or Figments?” American Imago 59 (2002): 361–62.
84. Wilkomirski, Fragments, 6–7, 11, 15.
85. Wilkomirski, Fragments, 17–19, 22–23.
86. Wilkomirski, Fragments, 38–39, 49.
87. Lappin, “Man with Two,” 31.
88. Wilkomirski, Fragments, 84, 87–89, 106, 113.
89. Wilkomirski, Fragments, 67, 115–16.
90. In fact, Wilkomirski's publishers asked him to provide proof of the authenticity of his claims before they would publish this work.
91. Zelizer, “Finding Aids,” 697.
92. Novick, Holocaust, 19–20.
93. Wilkomirski, Fragments, 119–23.
94. Vivian, “Jefferson's,” 299.
95. Wilkomirski, Fragments, 128–30.
96. Wilkomirski, Fragments, 146–52.
97. Wilkomirski, Fragments, 148.
98. Barbie Zelizer, Remembering to Forget: Holocaust Memory through the Camera's Eye (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998), 183.
99. Wilkomirski, Fragments, 149–51.
100. Vivian, “Jefferson's,” 299.
101. Wilkomirski, Fragments, 5.
102. Wilkomirski, Fragments, 4, 98, 148.
103. Betty Jean Lifton, “Wilkomirski the Adoptee,” Tikkun, September/October 2002, paragraph 14, http://web.4epnet.com (accessed September 2, 2002).
104. Wilkomirski, Fragments, 4–5.
105. Wilkomirski, Fragments, 51, 58, 65–66.
106. Philipp Blom, “In a Country Waking Up to a New Future,” The [UK] Independent, September 30, 1998, paragraph 1, http://lexis-nexis.com (accessed July 29, 2005).
107. Lappin, “Man with Two,” 42.
108. Daniel Ganzfried, quoted in Alter, “Arbeit,” 36. For a later and more detailed critique, see Daniel Ganzfried, Alias Wilkomirski: Die Holocaust-Travestie: Enthullung und Dokumentation eines literarischen Skandals (Berlin: Judische Verlagsanstalt, 2002).
109. Norman Geras, “The True Wilkomirski,” Res Publica 8 (2002): 116.
110. Maechler, Wilkomirski, vii.
111. Calev Ben-David, “A Holocaust Fraud,” The Jerusalem Post, July 27, 2001, paragraph 6, http://web.lexis-nexis.com (accessed May 8, 2002).
112. Lappin, “The Man with Two,” 63, 58, 63–65.
113. Lappin averred that this change in identities was so complete that when she met Wilkomirski, she was convinced that she was seeing “a writer who actually is his book” (emphasis in original). “Man with Two,” 11.
114. Zelizer, “Finding Aids,” 699.
115. Maechler, Wilkomirski, vii.
116. Maechler, Wilkomirski, 268.
117. Maechler, Wilkomirski, 268 (emphasis in the original).
118. Maechler, Wilkomirski, 269.
119. Alter, “Arbeit,” 36.
120. Alter, “Arbeit,” 36.
121. Blake Eskin, “Wilkomirski's New Identity Crisis: A Swiss Writer says ‘Fragments’ Memoirist is a Fraud,” Forward, September 18, 1998, paragraph 6, http://proquest.umi.com (accessed July 29, 2005). For a more detailed explanation of Eskin's position, see Blake Eskin, A Life in Pieces.
122. Daniel Ganzfried, “Die Geliehene Holocaust Biographie [The Borrowed Holocaust Biography],” De Weltwoche 35, paragraph 2, August 27, 1998, trans. Katherine Q. Johnson, http:///www.stopbadtherapy.com/experts/fragments/ganzfried.html (accessed January 29, 2002).
123. Eskin, “Wilkomirski's,” paragraphs 4–6.
124. Israel Gutman, quoted in Lappin, “Man with Two,” 61.
125. Judith Shulevitz, “Faking a Holocaust Tale,” The Ottawa Citizen, November 18, 1998, paragraph 2, http://web.lexi-nexis.com (accessed May 8, 2002).
126. Shulevitz, “Faking,” paragraphs 2, 9.
127. McGee, “Text, Context,” 274.
128. Maechler, Wilkomirski, viii–ix.
129. Gourevitch, “Memory,” 50.
130. James Booth, “Communities of Memory: On Identity, Memory, and Debt,” American Political Science Review 93 (1999): 249.
131. Lappin, “Man with Two,” 37–38.
132. Gourevitch, “Memory,” 53.
133. Maechler, “Wilkomirski the Victim,” 141–42.
134. Gourevitch, “Memory,” 50.
135. Maechler, Wilkomirski, 96.
136. Peskin, “Holocaust Denial,” 36.
137. Peskin, “Holocaust Denial,” 36–37. For an interesting analysis that links the reception of this work with Swiss debates about World War II asylum, dormant accounts, and slave labor, see Anne Whitehead, “Telling Tales: Trauma and Testimony in Binjamin Wilkomirski's Fragments,” Discourse 25 (2003): 119–37.
138. Daniel Goldhagen, quoted in Lappin, “Man with Two,” 12.
139. Maurice Sendak, quoted in Gourevitch, “Memory,” 50.
140. Gourevitch, “Memory,” 51.
141. Wilkomirski, Fragments, 153–55.
142. Gourevitch, “Memory,” 52.
143. Andreas Huyssen, “Monument and Memory in a Postmodern Age,” in The Art of Memory, ed. James E. Young (New York: Prestel-Verlag, 1994), 13.
144. Zelizer, “Finding Aids,” 700.
145. Alter, “Arbeit,” 38.
146. Bernard-Donals, “Beyond,” 1303.
147. Grey, “Writing Redemption,” 5.
148. Zelizer, “Reading the Past,” 214.
149. McGee, “Text, Context,” 288.
150. Grey, “Writing Redemption,” 5.
151. Bernard-Donals, “Beyond,” 1314.
152. Silverstone, “Book Review,” 120.
153. For example, Bernard-Donals avers that the Wilkomirski Affair shows us that there are times when a “testimony's authority” may appear to be “relatively autonomous from history” (“Beyond,” 1303). Compare this with Young's commentary on how some forms of abused memory—that can be critically qualified by others—may be better than no memory at all. Robert E. Young, Writing and Rewriting the Holocaust: Narratives and the Consequences of Interpretation (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1988), 133. See also the work of Suleiman, “Problems,” 554.
154. For some key theoretical commentaries on the significance of these “vicarious” victims, see Novick, Holocaust, 9.
155. Alter, “Arbeit,” 37.
156. Jeremy D. Popkin, “Book Review: The Wilkomirski Affair,” Biography 25 (2002): 370.
157. Rosenbaum, “At Century's,” paragraphs 7–9.
158. Note here the public scandal over the authenticity of Menchu's I, Rigoberta Menchu, a purportedly experiential analysis of some witnessing of the horrors that were wrought by genocide in Guatemala. David Stoll, Rigoberta Menchú and the Story of All Poor Guatemalans (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1999). During the same period, critics of Edward Said complained that this Palestinian propagandist had included in his genealogies commentaries about Zionist power on the West Bank, when he in fact may have been educated in Egypt, and not at St. George's Anglican preparatory school in Jerusalem. Charles Krauthammer, “The Case of the Suspect Bios,” Time, October 4, 1999, p. 122.
159. Brodzki, “Trauma,” 156.
160. Lappin, “Man with Two,” 29.