Criticism
British author Guy Walters has characterized Wiesenthal as "a liar" and wrote that Wiesenthal would "concoct outrageous stories about his war years and make false claims about his academic career. There are so many inconsistencies between his three main memoirs and between those memoirs and contemporaneous documents that it is impossible to establish a reliable narrative from them. Wiesenthal’s scant regard for the truth makes it possible to doubt everything he ever wrote or said."
Walters went on to say, "His figure is a complex and important one. If there was a motive for his duplicity, it may well have been rooted in good intentions." and "It is partly thanks to Wiesenthal that the Holocaust has been remembered and properly recorded and this is perhaps his greatest legacy."
Daniel Finkelstein has described Walters' research as "impeccable" and reported that the Wiener Library supports his re-evaluation of Wiesenthal. The Library's director Ben Barkow stated that "accepting that Wiesenthal was a showman and a braggart and, yes, even a liar, can live alongside acknowledging the contribution he made".
Although Wiesenthal later claimed to have been in 13 concentration camps, including five death camps, he had in fact been in no more than six camps.
Read more about this topic: Simon Wiesenthal
Famous quotes containing the word criticism:
“I consider criticism merely a preliminary excitement, a statement of things a writer has to clear up in his own head sometime or other, probably antecedent to writing; of no value unless it come to fruit in the created work later.”
—Ezra Pound (1885–1972)
“To be just, that is to say, to justify its existence, criticism should be partial, passionate and political, that is to say, written from an exclusive point of view, but a point of view that opens up the widest horizons.”
—Charles Baudelaire (1821–1867)
“The aim of all commentary on art now should be to make works of art—and, by analogy, our own experience—more, rather than less, real to us. The function of criticism should be to show how it is what it is, even that it is what it is, rather than to show what it means.”
—Susan Sontag (b. 1933)