Helen Darville

Helen Darville (born January 7, 1971 ) is an Australian writer and journalist .

In 1993 she won with her novel The Hand did Signed the Paper to 20,000 $ doped Australian / Vogel Literary Award for young writers under 35 years. She had written the novel under the pen name Helen Demidenko while studying English literature at the University of Queensland in Brisbane .

In its history Darville described the experiences of Ukrainian brothers, the Stalinism , only survived because they first members of the Nazi - Einsatzgruppen death squads and finally Australian citizens were. Her decision to focus on the experiences of Ukrainian criminals against Jewish victims earned her allegations of anti-Semitism .

Darville pretended that her name was Demidenko and that she was not anti-Semitic, but was telling the truth based on her own experience as a person of Ukrainian descent. This got her into trouble when it was discovered that she was actually of British descent. Her novel was widely acclaimed and won various awards, including the gold medal of the Australian Literature Society and the prestigious Miles Franklin Award in 1995 .

After winning the Miles Franklin Award, there was an outcry in the media when the false Demidenko identity was uncovered. Darville was also accused of plagiarism ; she have u. a. Copied from the books The Black Deeds of the Kremlin: a White Book , The Power and the Glory, and The Demon Lover .

Critics called the novel a fake and the judges who awarded the awards were ridiculed in the press. The subject has sparked a lively debate about identity politics and the long history of identity forgery by writers and artists in Australia.

In 1995, the Australian cultural journal Meanjin published the short story Pieces of the Puzzle , also under the name Demidenko, although the magazine mentioned that Demidenko had reverted to her previous name Darville. She now claimed that she met Ukrainian witnesses and based the story on them. This concession eventually resulted in a correspondence with the Simon Wiesenthal Center asking them to name the possible war criminals .

Darville was fired as a columnist for the Brisbane daily Courier-Mail in 1997 because she copied jokes from the Evil Overlord List in a column . She continued to freelance features for this newspaper and other News Corporation magazines .

In 2000, after an interview in Australian Style magazine with Holocaust denier David Irving during his unsuccessful trial of defamation in London, she was again charged with anti-Semitism.

Negative attitudes towards Darville's Jewish community were partially defused when it wrote an article in the Sydney Morning Herald after September 11th that was rated as pro- American and pro- Israeli . The article is in the archives of the Israel Forum and other Israeli news websites.

After working as a secondary school teacher for several years , Helen Darville quit writing and is now studying law at the University of Queensland.

literature

• Robert Manne : The culture of forgetting. Helen Demidenko and the Holocaust Melbourne: Text Publ. Co., 1996 ISBN 1-875847-26-X
• Therese-Marie Meyer: Where fiction ends. Four scandals of literary identity construction Würzburg: Königshausen & Neumann, 2006 (Series: ZAA monograph series Vol. 3) At the same time: Tübingen, Univ., Diss. ISBN 3826031644

Web links

• Jews, UKRAINIANS, NAZI WAR CRIMES, AND LITERARY HOAXES DOWN UNDER - A REVIEW OF THE HAND THAT SIGNED THE PAPER ALLEN & UNWIN. SYDNEY. 1994 Extensive review of the book