Binjamin Wilkomirski - Aftermath

Aftermath

The disclosure of Wilkomirski's fabrications altered the status of his book. The words are the same, but the work is not. Many critics argued that Fragments no longer had any literary value. “Once the professed interrelationship between the first-person narrator, the death-camp story he narrates, and historical reality are proved palpably false, what was a masterpiece becomes kitsch” (Maechler, 2000, p. 281). But for a few scholars, even as a pseudomemoir, the merits of the work still remain. “Those merits reside in a ferocious vision, a powerful narrative, an accumulation of indelible images, and the unforgettable way in which a small child's voice is deployed in an unfeeling adult world, during the war and thereafter” (Zeitlin, 2003, p. 177, see also Suleiman, 2006, p. 170).

The Wilkomirski case was heatedly debated in Germany and in Switzerland as a textbook example of the contemporary treatment of the Holocaust and of the perils of using it for one’s own causes. However, the affair transcends the specific context of the Holocaust (see e.g. Chambers, 2002; Gabriel, 2004; Langer, 2006; Maechler, 2001b; Oels, 2004; Suleiman, 2006; Wickman, 2007). Wilkomirski’s case raises questions about the literary genre of autobiography, the aesthetics of a literary work’s reception, oral history, witness testimony, memory research, trauma therapies, and the like.