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Stylised Configurations of Trauma: Faking Identity in Holocaust Memoirs

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Published/Copyright: November 8, 2014
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arcadia
From the journal arcadia Volume 49 Issue 2

Abstract

Exploring a series of fraudulent Holocaust memoirs – Herman Rosenblat’s Angel at the Fence, Misha Defonseca’s Misha: A Mémoire of the Holocaust, Binjamin Wilkomirski’s Fragments and Helen Demidenko’s The Hand That Signed the Paper – , this paper argues that fakes are not some ‘bogus Other’ (Ruthven 3) of ‘genuine’ literature but in fact parodic works that reflect on the tenuous nature of both the past and the notion of self. Indeed, the revelation of a fraudulent memoir exposes the investments of a public culture in notions of the real – firstly, in terms of an authentic identity and secondly, in relation to a genuine literary experience. The Holocaust frauds perpetuated by Rosenblat, Defonseca, Demidenko and Wilkomirski, in exploiting an historical phenomena regarded as sacrosanct, highlight and utilise the commodification of trauma in both public and literary arenas, manipulating discourses of victimhood and authenticity in order to interrogate the boundaries of the real and the unreal and, indeed, to reveal the faultlines in literary culture per se. Less interested in literary classifications, however, than in notions of history and identity, this paper contends that the scandals surrounding fakes are fundamental to understanding anxieties about the connection between word and world, and the strange expectation that literature is able to provide access to something ‘true’.

Keywords: Fakes; Holocaust; memoirs; testimony; history; identity; literary culture; performance

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Published Online: 2014-11-8
Published in Print: 2014-11-1

© 2014 Walter de Gruyter GmbH, Berlin/Boston

Articles in the same Issue

  1. Frontmatter
  2. Frontmatter
  3. Contributions
  4. Stylised Configurations of Trauma: Faking Identity in Holocaust Memoirs
  5. “A Wondrous Lesson in thy Silent Face”: Keats, Darwin, and the Geological Sublime
  6. Tracing the Other in the Theatre of the Precarious (Lola Arias, Elfriede Jelinek, Meg Stuart, Wajdi Mouawad, Christoph Marthaler)
  7. Said on Auerbach: Hospitality, or How the Western Canon transformed into Weltliteratur
  8. Stillschweigen in der Interzone
  9. Imago Mundi: The Ex-centric Worlds of Franz Gsellmann and Gerhard Roth
  10. Die getöteten Kinder und die Ästhetik des Bösen
  11. Enter the Japanese Imperial Marine: Postwar Comedy and Errol Brathwaite’s An Affair of Men
  12. Transmuting Performance: Esotericism and Metatheatre in Tennessee Williams’s The Two-Character Play
  13. Reviews
  14. Francesca Bravi: La Forma del Sogno. La rappresentazione del sogno in romanzi tedeschi e francesi degli anni ’70 tra filologia e fisiologia. Die Form des Traums. Die Traumdarstellung in deutschen und französischen Romanen der 70er Jahre zwischen Philologie und Physiologie. München: Martin Meidenbauer 2011. 172 Seiten. 31,90 €. ISBN: 978-3-89975-260-1.
  15. Heinrich Detering: Das offene Geheimnis. Zur literarischen Produktivität eines Tabus von Winckelmann bis zu Thomas Mann. Durchgesehene und mit einer Nachbemerkung versehene Studienausgabe. Göttingen: Wallstein Verlag 2013, Zweite Auflage, 432 Seiten.
  16. Theo d’Haen; David Damrosch; Djelal Kadir (Hgg.):The Routledge Companion to World Literature. New York: Routledge, 2012; Theo d’Haen:The Routledge Concise History of World Literature. New York: Routledge, 2012; Theo d’Haen; César Dominguez; Mads Rosendahl Thomson (Hgg.): World Literature. A Reader. New York: Routledge, 2013.
  17. Hg. von Monika Schmitz-Emans, Kai Lars Fischer und Christoph Benjamin Schulz,Alphabet, Lexikographik und Enzyklopädistik. Historische Konzepte und literarisch-künstlerische Verfahren. Hildesheim/Zürich/New York: Olms 2012.
  18. Marta Fernández Bueno, Miriam Llamas Ubieto & Paloma Sánchez Hernández (Hrsg./Eds.).Rückblicke und neue Perspektiven – Miradas Retrospectivas y Nuevas Orientaciones. Bern etc: Peter Lang 2013, 731 pp.
  19. Harst, Joachim:Heilstheater. Figur des barocken Trauerspiels zwischen Gryphius und Kleist. München: Wilhelm Fink 2012. 216 S.
  20. Emily Apter:Against World Literature. On the Politics of Untranslatability. London, New York: Verso 2013
  21. David Suchoff.Kafka’s Jewish Languages: The Hidden Openness of Tradition. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2012.
https://doi.org/10.1515/arcadia-2014-0022
Keywords for this article
Fakes; Holocaust; memoirs; testimony; history; identity; literary culture; performance

Articles in the same Issue

  1. Frontmatter
  2. Frontmatter
  3. Contributions
  4. Stylised Configurations of Trauma: Faking Identity in Holocaust Memoirs
  5. “A Wondrous Lesson in thy Silent Face”: Keats, Darwin, and the Geological Sublime
  6. Tracing the Other in the Theatre of the Precarious (Lola Arias, Elfriede Jelinek, Meg Stuart, Wajdi Mouawad, Christoph Marthaler)
  7. Said on Auerbach: Hospitality, or How the Western Canon transformed into Weltliteratur
  8. Stillschweigen in der Interzone
  9. Imago Mundi: The Ex-centric Worlds of Franz Gsellmann and Gerhard Roth
  10. Die getöteten Kinder und die Ästhetik des Bösen
  11. Enter the Japanese Imperial Marine: Postwar Comedy and Errol Brathwaite’s An Affair of Men
  12. Transmuting Performance: Esotericism and Metatheatre in Tennessee Williams’s The Two-Character Play
  13. Reviews
  14. Francesca Bravi: La Forma del Sogno. La rappresentazione del sogno in romanzi tedeschi e francesi degli anni ’70 tra filologia e fisiologia. Die Form des Traums. Die Traumdarstellung in deutschen und französischen Romanen der 70er Jahre zwischen Philologie und Physiologie. München: Martin Meidenbauer 2011. 172 Seiten. 31,90 €. ISBN: 978-3-89975-260-1.
  15. Heinrich Detering: Das offene Geheimnis. Zur literarischen Produktivität eines Tabus von Winckelmann bis zu Thomas Mann. Durchgesehene und mit einer Nachbemerkung versehene Studienausgabe. Göttingen: Wallstein Verlag 2013, Zweite Auflage, 432 Seiten.
  16. Theo d’Haen; David Damrosch; Djelal Kadir (Hgg.):The Routledge Companion to World Literature. New York: Routledge, 2012; Theo d’Haen:The Routledge Concise History of World Literature. New York: Routledge, 2012; Theo d’Haen; César Dominguez; Mads Rosendahl Thomson (Hgg.): World Literature. A Reader. New York: Routledge, 2013.
  17. Hg. von Monika Schmitz-Emans, Kai Lars Fischer und Christoph Benjamin Schulz,Alphabet, Lexikographik und Enzyklopädistik. Historische Konzepte und literarisch-künstlerische Verfahren. Hildesheim/Zürich/New York: Olms 2012.
  18. Marta Fernández Bueno, Miriam Llamas Ubieto & Paloma Sánchez Hernández (Hrsg./Eds.).Rückblicke und neue Perspektiven – Miradas Retrospectivas y Nuevas Orientaciones. Bern etc: Peter Lang 2013, 731 pp.
  19. Harst, Joachim:Heilstheater. Figur des barocken Trauerspiels zwischen Gryphius und Kleist. München: Wilhelm Fink 2012. 216 S.
  20. Emily Apter:Against World Literature. On the Politics of Untranslatability. London, New York: Verso 2013
  21. David Suchoff.Kafka’s Jewish Languages: The Hidden Openness of Tradition. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2012.
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