Binjamin Wilkomirski

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Binjamin Wilkomirski is a pseudonym of the Swiss Bruno Dossekker (* 12. February 1941 in Biel as Bruno Grosjean ), which, under this name as a Holocaust represented survivor.

Bruno Doekker is a trained clarinetist and self-taught instrument maker who lives in German-speaking Switzerland . He became known as Binjamin Wilkomirski from 1995 onwards, when he had published memoirs. After the life story was exposed as fiction , he is seen partly as a literary cheat, partly as a victim of false memories .

First-person narration

Release 1995

In 1995, Binjamin Wilkomirski published the book "Fragments" in the Jewish publishing house belonging to the Suhrkamp Group . From a childhood 1939–1948 ”. The publication, which was written in the style of an autobiography , described, in fragmentary form and mainly from the perspective of a child, experiences from the life of the first-person narrator from the time of National Socialism in Latvia and other countries.

As the earliest memory, the author described how, as a small Jewish child in Riga, he had to watch the murder of a man by “uniformed men”. This man may have been his father - the first-person narrator never mentions his date of birth, but apparently he was too short at the time to be able to remember it more precisely. After he and his brothers were able to hide on a farm in Poland, he was arrested and taken to two concentration camps . In the first camp he met his dying mother, of whom he had no memory before, one last time. After he was liberated from the extermination camp, he was first taken to an orphanage in Cracow and then to Switzerland. It was only through decades of research that he was able to reconstruct his past, which was only partially remembered (and taboo by his Swiss adoptive parents).

Spread the story

“Fragments” has been translated into twelve languages. Occasionally the author was compared to Elie Wiesel , Anne Frank or Primo Levi . Contrary to popular belief, however, his book was nowhere a bestseller.

The author himself appeared on many occasions in front of an impressed audience as a contemporary witness and expert, be it in front of school classes, in the media or at scientific events on the Shoah and its subsequent problems (such as the lack of identity of survivors who were still children during the Shoah were). He gave video interviews to prestigious archives and had himself portrayed in television documentaries. In addition, he received three important prizes for his work (Mächler, 2000, pp. 125–142). In his public appearances, he also specified much that was unsaid or in the vague in the published text. He verbally mentioned the names of the concentration camps in which he had stayed ( Majdanek and Auschwitz ), or mentioned that he himself had been the victim of bestial human attempts.

revelation

Actual origin

In the late summer of 1998, however, Wilkomirski's public reputation was suddenly shaken. In an article on August 27 in the weekly newspaper Weltwoche , the Swiss author Daniel Ganzfried , himself a son of a survivor of the Holocaust, alleged with good arguments that Wilkomirski was really Bruno Grosjean and the illegitimate son of the Swiss Yvonne Grosjean. After a stay in an orphanage in Adelboden , he was adopted from Zurich by the wealthy and childless couple Doessekker (Ganzfried always erroneously wrote the name with oe: Doessekker - which was subsequently adopted by many print media) . He only knows the concentration camps as a tourist.

The revelations made waves in particular in the German and English-speaking regions. Wilkomirski and his supporters firmly rejected Ganzfried's attacks. This, however, added new and convincing facts, while Wilkomirski could not substantiate his presentation.

Creation of the legend of life

At the beginning of April 1999, the Liepman literary agency , which had conveyed Wilkomirski's manuscript to the publishers, engaged the Zurich historian Stefan Mächler for a comprehensive investigation. His report was completed in autumn 1999 and published a year later under the title “The Wilkomirski Case”. In it the historian comes to the conclusion that the alleged autobiography contradicts the historical facts in essential points. In addition, the historian was able to explain how Wilkomirski and Bruno Grosjean had gradually developed his fictional life story over decades. The trigger for this could have been a therapy that was supposed to help Doesekker to regain repressed memories. Mächler describes that Wilkomirski's alleged experiences in Poland often corresponded with real events from his Swiss childhood. He was able to describe the farm on which he lived as a child down to the smallest detail. The only difference was that it was in Switzerland, not Poland. As witnesses confirmed, the abuse reported by Dolekker had really taken place, just not in the context he thought he remembered. In fact, it was his foster mother who abused him. The author had obviously transformed his own concrete experiences in a complex process of postponing and reworking into a Shoah children's biography - how consciously and planned he proceeded remains an open question. Mächler is skeptical of Ganzfried's assertion that Wilkomirski or Grosjean is a "cold-planning, systematic forger". He tends to believe that he himself believed in his fictional story, that is, he was a fake memory . Mächler criticizes the "Recovered Memory Therapy". It could not bring the historical truth to light, but rather provide an interpretation for previously incomprehensible, often speechless memory images: "The need to find words for a nameless horror opens a gate for confabulations ."

More reactions

In 2002 Ganzfried added a “documentary narrative” to his research experience under the title “The Holocaust Travesty”. In his endeavor to polemicize the cultural establishment (p. 22) which he believes is convulsive “secreting in little holocausts”, he did not always take the facts seriously. Only weeks later, Mächler also presented further results from his research and reflections on the significance of the case.

These publications were supplemented by media reports on the results of investigations by the district attorney's office of the Canton of Zurich, which indirectly confirmed that "fragments" had been invented: The authorities had arranged a DNA test on Wilkomirski and the living biological father Bruno Grosjeans, which had a positive result. The reason for this investigation was a private criminal complaint against "Dossekker and his associates " for fraud and unfair competition have been who stopped authorities in December 2002 due to lack of relevant criminal offenses.

Ruth Klüger reported in 2008 in the second part of her autobiography Lost on the Road. Memories that Siegfried Unseld continued to live the first part . A youth was rejected as “not literary enough” and the director of the Jewish publishing house at Suhrkamp later described Wilkomirski's fragments as the “truest, best, real adventure book of a child who survived the Holocaust”.

consequences

The unmasking of Wilkomirski sparked wide and emotional debates in the media from 1998 to 2000. The reactions were particularly fierce in Germany, where the case was used on all sides to address or criticize the way in which the stressful Nazi past was dealt with. There was also a lot of excited debate in Switzerland, whose banks and authorities were involved in massive international disputes about their previous attitude towards the Third Reich. The debates, which were often polemical and moralistic, only gradually gave way to a more level-headed attitude that made it possible to analyze the Wilkomirski phenomenon in all its facets.

The specialist discussions that have taken place since then (cf. Sorg / Angele, 1999, Eva Lezzi and Mächler in: Diekmann / Schoeps (eds.), 2002; Oels, 2004; Neukom, 2005; Bauer, 2006) make it clear that this is the case in many areas of knowledge gives an exemplary material for the discussion of fundamental issues, such as the literary genre of autobiography, the historians of the Shoah to their workup, as with the past , the past political status of the Holocaust as a universal sacrifice narrative for oral history , to memory theory , the trauma theory , the therapeutic with dealing Memories etc.

The American Orthopsychiatric Association presented Wilkomirski with the Hayman Award for Holocaust and Genocide Studies in April 1999 for promoting "the understanding of the Holocaust and genocide".

Works

  • Fragments. From a childhood 1939–1948 . Jüdischer Verlag, Frankfurt am Main 1995, ISBN 3-633-54100-4

literature

  • Irene Diekmann and Julius H. Schoeps Eds .: The Wilkomirski Syndrome. Imagined memories or the longing to be a victim . Pendo, Zurich 2002, ISBN 3-85842-472-2
    • therein: Stefan Mächler, excitement about Wilkomirski. Genesis of a scandal and its meaning . Pp. 86-131
  • Blake Eskin: A Life in Pieces: The Making and Unmaking of Binjamin Wilkomirski , New York and London: Norton, 2002, ISBN 0-393-04871-3
  • Hannes Fricke: Binjamin Wilkomirski's 'fragments': endless sequential trauma. In: ders .: That never stops. Literature, trauma and empathy. Wallstein-Verlag, Göttingen 2006, pp. 72-89, ISBN 3-89244-810-8
  • Daniel Ganzfried : The Holocaust Travesty. Narrative. In: Sebastian Hefti (Ed.): … Alias ​​Wilkomirski. The Holocaust Travesty . Jüdische Verlagsanstalt, Berlin 2002, pp. 17–154, ISBN 3-934658-29-6
  • Martin A. Hainz : "No scream comes from his throat, but a powerful black beam shoots out of his throat." To Binjamin Wilkomirski. In: Literature as a scandal. Cases, functions, consequences , Eds. Stefan Neuhaus & Johann Holzner. Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht , Göttingen 2007, pp. 613–623
  • Daniela Janser and Esther Kilchmann: The Wilkomirski case and the postmoderne condition . In: traverse. Journal of history . 2000, No. 3. pp. 108-122
  • Marita Keilson-Lauritz : Fictional trauma - an offense? BW and its readers. in intermediate world. Zs. For Culture of Exile and Resistance, Vol. 24, No. 3, Dec. 2007, pp. 13-17 ISSN  1606-4321
  • Lawrence L. Langer: Using and Abusing the Holocaust, Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2006, ISBN 0-253-34745-9
  • Elena Lappin : The man with two heads (original title: The Man With Two Heads , translated by Maria Buchwald and Monika Bucheli). Chronos, Zurich 2000, ISBN 3-905313-58-8
  • Stefan Mächler: The Wilkomirski case. About the truth of a biography . Pendo, Zurich 2000, ISBN 3-85842-383-1
  • Marius Neukom: The rhetoric of trauma in narratives. With the exemplary analysis of a literary opening situation . In: Psychotherapy & Social Science. Journal of Qualitative Research and Clinical Practice . Volume 7, 2005, Issue 1, ISSN  1436-4638 , pp. 75-109
  • David Oels: "A real-life Grimm's fairy tale". Corrections, additions, additions to the Wilkomirski case . In: Zeitschrift für Germanistik, NF Volume 14, 2004, Issue 2, pp. 373-390
  • Reto Sorg u. Michael Angele : Self-Invention and Autobiography. About truth and lies in a non-moral sense using the example of Binjamin Wilkomirski's fragments. From a childhood 1939–1948 . In: Henriette Herwig, Irmgard Wirz u. Stefan Bodo Würffel (ed.): Bookmarks. Semiotics and Hermeneutics in Space and Time. Festschrift for Peter Rusterholz on his 65th birthday . Basel u. Tübingen: Francke 1999, pp. 325-345.
  • Avraham S. Weinberg: Wilkomirski & Co. - In the land of the perpetrators, in the name of the people . Kronen, Berlin 2003, ISBN 3-934140-04-1

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Mächler, 2002; Pp. 87-90, 101-106; Oels, 2004, pp. 376-379
  2. ↑ Mächler, 2000, pp. 32-98
  3. ↑ cf. Mächler, 2000
  4. ↑ Mächler, 2000, pp. 287f.
  5. ^ "The hopeless therapy: Stefan Mächler's research on the" Wilkomirski case "" St. Galler Tagblatt, June 23, 2000
  6. ^ Stefan Mächler: The Wilkomirski case, Pendo Verlag Zürich 2000
  7. ^ See Neue Zürcher Zeitung , April 5, 2002; Mächler, 2002, pp. 99-101, 126f .; Süddeutsche Zeitung , May 5, 2002.
  8. ↑ in Diekmann / Schoeps, 2002, pp. 28-131
  9. ^ "Wilkomirski's" father clearly identified Neue Zürcher Zeitung , March 27, 2002
  10. ^ Literary fiction - no fraud Neue Zürcher Zeitung , December 13, 2002
  11. ↑ Oliver Pfohlmann: To remain unsolved , Der Tagesspiegel, January 4, 2009
  12. ↑ Ruth Klüger : lost on the way. Memories , Paul Zsolnay Verlag, Vienna 2008, pp. 162f.
  13. ↑ Christian Saehrendt , Steen T. Kittl : Everything Bluff !: How we become impostors without wanting to. Heyne 2011, p. 153 f.
personal data
SURNAME Wilkomirski, Binjamin
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Grosjean, Bruno; Dosekker, Bruno; Doessekker, Bruno
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Swiss author
DATE OF BIRTH February 12, 1941
PLACE OF BIRTH Biel