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...inaccuracies distortions memory. Thomas Keneally, author of Schindler's List, argued that his novel, based on interviews with survivors and extensive archival research, comprised a hybrid form, suspended between fact and fiction, which he termed "non-fiction fiction." Art Spiegelman's Maus comic books, based on historical research and interviews with his father, took thirteen years to complete. Spiegelman protested when the New York Times classified Mausunder "Fiction" in its bestseller list; in response to his letter, the Times changed the classification of Maus from "Fiction" to "Fact." Of Holocaust testimony, Primo Levi, in The Drowned and the Saved, insisted that "[h]uman memory is a marvelous but fallacious instrument," liable to deterioration and decay, especially in the wake of such a catastrophic experience as the Holocaust (11). Elie Wiesel, in his memoir All Rivers Run to the Sea, revised and commented on a passage in Night, in which he described the horrific train journey to Auschwitz. Wiesel revealed that his description in Night mingled fact and fantasy, and distorted the truth of the event, and he observed of the process of testimony: "No witness is capable of recounting everything from start to finish anyway. God alone knows the whole story" (Rivers 17). If testimonies inevitably contain errors and omissions, scholars nevertheless agree that they remain fundamentally accurate. Levi defended the consonance of his memories with the historical record, arguing that his own published writings are "unaffected by the drifting I have described" (21). Lawrence Langer observed that the essence and substance of Holocaust testimonies takes priority over inconsistencies or contradictions in their detail (xv).
The recent controversy surrounding Binjamin Wilkomirski's 1996 Fragments: Memories of a Childhood, 1939-1948 represented a crisis point in this discussion. Fragments narrated the story of its author's childhood experiences, which included escaping from the persecution of the Jews in Riga, surviving imprisonment in concentration camps in Poland, and being smuggled from a Polish orphanage to Switzerland immediately after the war. On publication, the text was widely hailed as a literary masterpiece, and received numerous prestigious awards, including the American National Jewish Book Award for autobiography and memoirs, the Jewish Quarterly prize for nonfiction, and the Prix Memoire de la Shoah from the Fondation Judaisme Francais. However extensive research by Elena Lappin, Philip Grourevitch and Stefan Maechler has convincingly demonstrated that Wilkomirski invented the history in Fragments. Wilkomirski was born in Switzerland in 1941, under the name of Bruno Grosjean. He was brought up by his mother until he was two years old, when she was forced by the Swiss authorities to give him up for adoption, because he was illegitimate. He was officially adopted by the Doessekers in 1945, when he was four years old. In the wake of the revelations concerning Wilkomirski, the publishers temporarily withdrew Fragments from print in autumn 1999. Many critics turned against the work, arguing that it no longer had any literary value. However, influential scholars stood against the tide of opinion and defended the text. Susan Suleiman described Fragments as "a work of literary art, powerful in its effect" (553), Lawrence Langer regarded the book to be "a very compelling work of literature" (qtd. in Eskin, 107), and Deborah Lipstadt agreed, arguing: "If [Wilkomirski] had told the same story in terrible prose, it wouldn't have been mesmerizing" (qtd. in Eskin, 108).
Fragments collapsed the boundary between fact and fiction in an unprecedented manner, and critics were at a loss as to how to categorize the text. Although it was published as a memoir, this description was clearly no longer appropriate, because memoir, by definition, describes experiences that the author has lived through. Wilkomirski self-consciously presents Fragments as a memoir, observing in the "Afterword" that he was persuaded to forget the past by those around him, and that it took many years before he was able to write about his memories. He claims that he is one of the "children without identity," who survived the Holocaust because they were provided with false documentation, but who consequently lacked any clear information about their own origins (154). In deliberately framing his text as a memoir, Wilkomirski breaks what Lejeune has termed the "autobiographical pact," whereby a text can be classed as autobiography if the author and the narrator-protagonist coincide. Sue Vice has suggested that Fragments can be straightforwardly recategorized as fiction, arguing that "the work of textual analysis can begin on what remains a striking and unusual novel" (165). However, as Suleiman points out, Wilkomirski's text obscures the difference between fact and fiction, by insisting on its own accuracy and truthfulness. The unique character of Fragments emerges from the fact that this obfuscation does not seem to be deliberate; to all appearances, Wilkomirski genuinely believes himself to have experienced the past that he describes. Based on Wilkomirski's own insistence and apparent belief that his text is factual, Suleiman observes that "we must call Fragments not a novel but a false--or better a deluded--memoir" (552).
This paper explores, in the first instance, the literary context which enabled Fragments to be read as an authentic and convincing Holocaust memoir. In recent years, Holocaust testimony has emerged as a distinct genre, which is governed by its own rules and conventions. By writing within these conventions, Wilkomirski was able to produce a powerful and moving narrative of trauma, which seemed to collapse under the burden of its own unbearable recollections. Wilkomirski was also influenced, in writing Fragments, by Jerzy Kosinski's The Painted Bird (1965), and in particular by Kosinski's view of memory, which does not accord to fact but reflects an inner or subjective truth. I will discuss the relation between Fragments and The Painted Bird, and argue that Wilkomirski's adoption of the child's perspective owes much to Kosinski and marks a striking departure in the text from the testimonial genre. One of the key questions for critics, in relation to Fragments, is whether the text deserves to fall into oblivion, and, if not, how it can be constructively read or interpreted. The paper concludes by seeking to re-orient current discussions of Fragments away from the notion of individual memory, and towards ideas of cultural or collective memory. I will argue that one way of rehabilitating Wilkomirski's text is to regard it as reflecting, and helping to shape, a singular moment of crisis in Swiss cultural memory of the Holocaust. Fragments emerged in the highly-charged cultural atmosphere of a society split along generational, racial and political fault lines. In the mid-1990s, the Swiss were bitterly divided between those who defended the traditional image of Switzerland as a neutral and independent power, and those who regarded Switzerland to have been complicit with National Socialism. I will discuss the publication of Fragments as a key watershed in the Swiss cultural debate about the Holocaust, and as...
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