True Stories : Oprah, Elie Wiesel, and the Holocaust
The increasing sanctification of the Holocaust-survivor as witness to the "higher truth" of the Jewish experience was arguably helped by the Eichmann Trial with its emphasis on individual witnesses performing their true stories of unbelievable persecution on "the stage of the world" created by the modern mass media. The trial also helped the reception of Elie Wiesel's now paradigmatic Holocaust memoir-novel Night; and over the decades its author has made himself the most visible and influential proponent of this sanctification. He has declared as anti-Semitic all attempts to “desanctify” or “demystify” the Holocaust by "historicizing" the Nazi period. And this position led him to assert that “any survivor has more to say than all historians combined about what happened.” Peter Novick's study The Holocaust in American Life (201) quotes both this assertion and the complaint of the education director of Yad Vashem that “the survivor has become a priest; because of his story, he is holy"--a status that often has not been helpful to judging the historical relevance of these "sacred" stories.
The issue here is not the juxtaposition of fact or fiction (memoir or novel), not even the increasingly weak distinctions between them, but the desire of huge audiences for "true stories" in a world dominated by the fabricated stories of the mass media. The most desirable and therefore most protected "true stories" have survivor protagonists who by telling their individual true stories of victimization make it a part of a paradigmatic story of redemption. When Oprah callled Larry King to protest the protest against James Frey's fabrications in his promised true story, his "memoir," she invoked the "essential truth" of his story of redemption. Curiously, she did not at first understand the depth of his readers' angry disappointment which also meant a potential threat to her own "sacred" cultural status. They had expected and paid for the "truth" of every nitty-gritty detail of Frey's story because, in the court of morality, only this "whole truth" would validate the story of redemption that they craved. The publisher, expertly focused on "truth" as commodity, immediately returned their money. And Oprah, after casting away the sinner Frey before the eyes of the whole world --a serious moment of disturbingly comical hypocrisy--crowned her "new pick," Elie Wiesel's Night, on January 16, 2006. She did not forget to point out the significance of the date, the King Day holiday.
There were a few shadowy suggestions that Oprah's second choice might have been just a touch shaky in the matter of "whole truth." Night had begun its eventually stellar rise as a novel; though over the years it has also been called a memoir. Some press releases about Oprah's choice presented it as "a novel so personal that the author calls it a memoir." To be safe, Amazon, the Elie Wiesel Foundation for Humanity," and Wiesel's publisher, among others, officially "recategorized" the text as a memoir. The NYTimes(January 19, 2006) noted that the new translation of Night corrected several "errors" such as discrepancies regarding Wiesel's age as a teenage prisoner in the camps, but that old questions remained. More importantly, even if Night had been conceived as a memoir, and despite Wiesel's much repeated insistence on its "stenographic" truth," there still would be the important question of the instability of memory, particularly regarding extreme, traumatic experiences. But the "sacred" nature of survivors' stories has on the whole precluded such questions--a testimony to the remarkable cultural and political power of "the Holocaust" as meta-historical construct of memory-stories growing around and above the historical persecutions.
On that fateful King Day holiday, Oprah declared that, selecting Night, she had "a dream of my own, too, that the powerful message of this little book would be engraved on every human heart and will never be forgotten again. That you who read this book will feel as I do . . . that these 120 pages should be required reading for all humanity." But how could the book's message of "never forgetting" have been forgotten when there were (in Wiesel's words) "many, many million copies in print"? Speaking on a "higher" level, Oprah simply transmitted the book's message to all humanity as a super-community of Holocaust believers, carrying copies of Night and vowing never to forget not-forgetting . Elie Wiesel in his politically potent sanctified role as Holocaust survivor could not but confirm and bless this act. Remember how in late February 2003, he bestowed a “confirming moment" on the American president fixing to invade Iraq by telling him what he needed to hear, that ”Iraq was a terrorist state and that the moral imperative was for intervention. If the West had intervened in Europe in 1938, World War II and the Holocaust could have been prevented." (Robert Woodward, Plan of Attack, 320-21). Whatever has been good for the cause of the Holocaust has been good for Elie Wiesel; never mind the ever growing deadly mess in the Middle East. By definition, his sacred story as told in Night would never disappoint readers' desire for a "true story" because its pre-authorized claim to the universal relevance of Jewish suffering --in "every human heart," "never to be forgotten"-- has itself become a redemptive story, its author the redeemer. If Oprah's choice has made Elie Wiesel richer, it also has redeemed her from her wrong, potentially diminishing choice of Frey's A Million Little Pieces.
For those increasingly disturbed by the political uses of "the Holocaust" there are questions about the still growing redemptive power of the "sacred" stories of the Jewish Holocaust in the era of notoriously volatile globalization. A good case in point here is Binjamin Wilkomirski's memoir of his experiences as a child Holocaust survivor, an intriguing scandal in the late 1990s. Under the title Fragments. Memories of a Wartime Childhood, the middle-aged author recalled the extreme violence suffered by a three or four-year old boy in the archetypal death camps Majdanek and Auschwitz.. His descriptions of incredible experiences of physical and psychological cruelty and brutality were received with reverential admiration. Extraordinary claims were made for their cultural significance that immediately elevated him to the hallowed Holocaust-survivor status of an Elie Wiesel. There were many endorsements and prizes: the US National Jewish Book Award, the French Prix Mémoire de la Shoah, the British Jewish Quarterly Literary Prize and many more.
Critics in Germany and the US asserted that the slight volume had "the weight of this century." The "inexorability, density and power of its images" make it a literary masterpiece, "if one dares to apply literary criteria which shame forbids," gushed one reviewer. Another claimed that "the effect of the book is profoundly different from that of the usual Holocaust books. It is the perspective from deep down, the very earliest experiences, the child's perspective which profoundly stirs the emotions, appalls and shames.” Like everyone else, the New York Times had nothing but praise for the book and immediately put it on the list of notable books for 1997. As their reviewer saw it in early 1997 (January 12), this "extraordinary memoir" "recalls the Holocaust with the powerful immediacy of innocence, injecting well-documented events with fresh terror and poignancy."
But by the fall of 1998, discrepancies between Wilkomirski's authorial and legal identity had been mounting. They were reported in the NYTimes (November 3, 1998), as were questions relating to a then altered moral and literary status of the famous text and its author. He was born in 1941, the illegitimate son of a German-Swiss working-class woman, and later adopted by an upper-middle-class gentile Zuerich family. The local school file listed him as attending first grade in 1947, and there is photographic documentation that he lived with his adoptive parents in 1946. Religious adoration of Fragments changed quickly to embarrassed ambivalence or outright rejection, though some promoters drew back earlier than others. The award-winning author had served successfully as a poster child for unspeakable victimization on an extended fund-raising tour for the US Holocaust Memorial Museum. Exquisitely sensitive to the slightest indication of negative publicity, they immediately removed all copies of Fragments from their giftshop.
The German Suhrkamp Verlag, whose 1995 publication of Bruchstuecke--aus einer Kindheit 1938-1948 as a "memoir" had convinced many foreign publishers of the text's documentary authenticity, was more loyal. It issued a statement that they saw no reason to mistrust Wilkomirski's explanations concerning the troubling discrepancies. The publisher continued to believe its author's assertions that he was a Latvian Jew whose earliest memories were of the beating death of his father, and who came to Switzerland only in 1948 after the experiences of unspeakable violence in concentrations camps. According to Wilkomirski, the Swiss records had been tempered with by, among others, his adoptive father, a physician and alleged Nazi-sympathizer who had taken him in only because he had survived Mengele. A year later, however, Suhrkamp announced at the Frankfurt Book Fair the withdrawal of the book--an act that was international news in the NYTimes the next day (October 14, 1999). The publisher acted on new information gathered by a Swiss historian who, with the consent of Wilkomirski, had been hired by his Swiss agent to clear up the matter. It could no longer be disputed that at the period for which Binjamin Wilkomirski claimed the remembered experience of extreme, incredible victimization--torn apart limb by limb, crushed, smashed to pieces, deprived of all language, even his brother's Yiddish--, he had been living comfortably as Bruno Doessekker in the Zuerich home of his adoptive parents, a normal small child, talking in German.
Wilkomirski's case has raised intriguing questions of identity based on authentic or inauthentic memory in current Western culture where authority is easily granted to claims of identity on the basis of memories of persecution or extreme adversity--Frey's "demons" of drug addiction among them. On the seemingly most simple level one could ask, what if Wilkomirski's text had been presented as fiction rather than memoir? Would the reception have been different? Would there have been a more critical attitude regarding its literary quality? The in hindsight, but only then, deliciously silly reviews prostrated in adoration of the "authentic" memoirs, that instant "classic of Holocaust literature," obviously did not concern themselves with either the text's literary or its documentary quality. They were clearly motivated by the fact that it contributed so dramatically to the new "hot" child-survivor memoirs extending the memory of victimization for another generation. Wilkomirski's text added a new dimension of violence and innocence: a savage child lost, without sense of place, time and language, in the unspeakable, therefore unknowable dystopia of the camps, the most profound, unbelievable mysterious truth of the Holocaust.
The strongest motivation for the obviously disturbed adult to retrieve his memories was the extreme nature of victimization, the child's purest form of self-loss in that utter abandonment. Wilkomirski did not claim any authority other than that of the remembered small child's; and he benefited from the extraordinary authority of Holocaust literature only after the success of his book. This explains his seeming lack of concern when accused of false identity and inauthentic memories; his simply repeating that they were his memories and thereby his identity. Since they were of violently total, indeed "incredible" victimization, he was indeed the purest victim. And the reviewers' religiously fervent response to Fragments was to the drama of regaining identity in the memories of its total loss. To rob its author, by questioning them, of his memories would make him even more lost, an even purer victim. In the current culture and cult of remembrance built on the memory of Jewish persecution as the singular most defining event in Western modernity, Wilkomirski's existential lostness is in important ways indistinguishable from that experienced by the Jewish author of an authentic Holocaust memoir of a child-survivor. Could the controversy really have been avoided if the collection of memory fragments had been called "Fragments from a Therapy" as some critics suggested? But would not the then 'unattached' fragments, too, have been seen as a profoundly significant and authentic contribution to Holocaust memorial literature simply by virtue of association: their stereotypically violent images; their peculiarly literal relating of memory and identity? And could--or would--not the Suhrkamp Verlag in any case have responded to the "strong Holocaust market" with marketing strategies that emphasized these associations? What about Amazon's earnest "recategorization" of Wiesel's Night from novel to memoir--distinctions that are obviously readership-oriented, that is, commercial. Readers want "true stories," the more true, the more unbelievable, particularly if they are pre-authorized or authenticated as Holocaust memory stories.
The Wilkomirski affair shows above all a dismaying lack of critical judgment. Standards of documentary evidence are indeed a matter of increasing concern in our late modern high-tech culture that craves the immediacy of "true stories" but prefers the permissiveness of "docu-fiction" to the stricter plausibility protocols of the straight documentary. Yet Wilkomirski's muddled case does not seem to me a threat to the integrity of authentic Holocaust memoirs, as has been argued. The issue is, rather, that it shares in their problems, namely the fundamental instability of memories and the uses to which they can be put, among them notably the political uses of not-forgetting. The general tendency over the last half century to embrace all Holocaust-survivor memoirs, no matter what they actually say or how they say it, has had important, if perhaps unforeseeable, consequences. Among other things, this tendency has upheld an exclusive and limited cultural memory of the in many ways still obscure, incompletely understood political and generational catastrophe of WWII.
The extraordinary commercial and critical success of films like Schindler's List as documentary "Truth" about the Holocaust and Begnini's Life is Beautiful as making "Evil" more real, more true, more accessible, the stellar rise of Fragments because it made absolute Evil more evil, the terror more "fresh," raise important questions about current perceptions of historical memory and historical understanding. Why was the new translation of Night so important now? Why did Oprah "really" choose that book? Why should we care what Oprah and Wiesel are doing in Auschwitz? Or her high school essay contest on Night? Are we more comfortable with the familiar horrors that do not ask for our social and political intervention now, but only for the busy timeless rituals of never-forgetting?