In Our Time - Truth, Lies and Fiction

Episode Date: July 15, 1999

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss truth, lies and fiction. In 1995 a book appeared which brought its author great acclaim from serious critics, won prizes, stunned its readers and was thought to add significantly and profoundly to the literature of the Holocaust. The book was called Fragments, its author, Binjamin Wilkomirski. But recently the veracity of the account told in Fragments has been questioned by Elena Lappin, the author of an investigative essay published in the literary magazine Granta. When it was exposed as a fiction - or should it be called a lie? - it triggered many arguments, one of which is that of the value of authenticity and the supremacy of originality in the culture of the late twentieth century. Does it really matter if literature isn’t entirely truthful? And is the idea of authenticity in writing a recent invention?With Elena Lappin, novelist and author of an investigative essay published in Granta called ‘Truth and Lies’, where she questions the veracity of the account of the Holocaust in the book Fragments by Binjamin Wilkomirski; Dr Nick Groom, lecturer in English, University of Exeter.

This BBC podcast is supported by ads outside the UK. Thanks for downloading the In Our Time podcast. For more details about In Our Time and for our terms of use, please go to BBC.co.com.uk forward slash radio 4. I hope you enjoy the program. Hello, I'm joined today by Eleanor Lapin and Nick Groom to examine truth, lies and fiction. Does it really matter if literature, including memoirs,

aren't entirely truthful? And is the idea of authenticity in writing a recent invention? In 1995, a book called Fragments was launched onto the world to great critical acclaim, written by Biniamen Vilkormiski, with the subtitle Memoirs of Childhood, 1939 to 1948, the book described the events of a Jewish childhood spent in the concentration camps. The book was hailed as a classic of Holocaust literature. But recently, the veracity of his account, told in fragments,

has been questioned by my guest, Alan Elapin, the author of an investigative essay published in the most recent edition of Granta. Born in Moscow, Ellen and Lappin grew up in Prague and Hamburg, and she's lived in Israel, Canada and the United States. She moved to London in 1993, where she edited the Jewish Quarterly until 1997. She's the author of a collection of short stories, foreign bodies,

and she's currently working on a novel entitled The Nose. Dr. Nick Groom is a lecture in English at the University of Exeter. He's the author of a number of academic books and reviews, including The Making of Persis Reliquis and Thomas Betterton and Romantic Culture. He's currently writing a book on the origins of authenticity in literature, provisionally entitled The Forger's Shadow. Eleanor Laping, this book came out Wilkarmierke's story fragments,

and he graphically and powerfully described this boy's experiences in places very, very often not named, with people not named, but there was a powerful idea of the place being concentration camps, orphanages, moving around. Why do you think initially, it had such an effect so much acclaim, prizes, good reviews from very fine people. What was its power?

I think there is a great deal of very powerful writing in the book. Some places are in fact named. The concentration camp, Maidanik, is named. The orphanage where he was in Krakow after the war is named. So it's not entirely abstract and it's not entirely... But the Auschwitz thing, which is the most... Ashwitz was not named. I'm just saying there's a lot of vagueness about it as well as occasional.

Yes. Well, I personally believe that the appeal of the book was based on two things. One was this very immediate child's account of what went on during the Holocaust, which is something that we now think is a very rare eyewitness account. On the other hand, I think the appeal of the book was also based on the highly narcissistic nature of this text. It's a very self-involved book. It's a book about a man who presents himself as a child who is very much in the center of his own attention

and therefore wants to be in the center of everyone's attention. It's a very attention-grabbing kind of narrative. And I think this appeals, this narcissism of this text, appeals very much to the 90s readership with our love of, you know, psychobabble and pseudo-therapeutic approach to what's inside of us. And his way of presenting himself as an innocent child who had suffered the ultimate victim experience

for the rest of his adult life and was never allowed to express it until now as a grown man in his 50s, I think this is what appealed to readers and critics alike. And of course there are very, very few histories of the Holocaust from the point of view of a child. So it's a new... Well, I have to say, as a matter of fact, when I started working on this,

I discovered there are quite a few accounts written from the point of view of children, even from the vantage point of being adults and later remembering. But they're all very, very different from this one. They don't have this kind of immediacy and the interest in very brutal scenes which he depicts. So when did, briefly, when did, I know I'm rushing this a bit because there's a great deal to talk about, so that's why I'm rushing it.

When did it occur to you and others that this might be an invention, that this might not be a document of this man's life, but it might be a complete invention? Well, I myself read the book and never guessed that it was an invention. I didn't even pay attention to the afterward, which actually did suggest that there were some question marks attached, not openly so, but with hints.

It wasn't until 1998 when a Swiss Jewish journalist named Daniel Gansfried published an article in a Swiss newspaper, Valtweche, where he actually exposed Wilkimoski's story based on his Swiss biography, which has absolutely nothing to do with the Holocaust. And he described how this man was born in Switzerland, adopted by a very well-to-do Swiss family, lived a pretty normal bourgeois life until at one point he decided to present himself as a Holocaust victim.

And your essay in Granta, which is very powerful and compelling as far as I was concerned, takes the evidence sifted, you talk to the man, you talk to other people, you revisit places, and there's no doubt at the end that you think that this is an entire fabrication. No doubt at all. Although in the course of working on this,

I mean, I spent almost six months working on this investigation. In the course of the investigation, I kept going back and forth and not being sure. He was very convincing in the interview with me personally. You know, he was very much full of pain and sort of physical demonstrations of the pain that he experienced and described in the book. But looking at the evidence and looking at the historical evidence and talking to other people, even people he names as his own witnesses or co-witnesses in his book, I came to a different conclusion. Before I come to Nick Grum, because he's got quite a lot to say about this. I'd like to ask you one final question in the opening phase.

The man you describe is, the man you meet in this book, Wilkomyski, is a serious man, a man full of pay. It doesn't seem as if he's doing it for a quick book or a sort of flash of reputation. So why do you think he did it? I think he did it in order to give himself an identity because, well, for two reasons. I think his own background, which I explained in my article, is something he never really addressed at all. He comes from a very, very troubled background,

something called for Dinkinder in Switzerland. His mother had to give him up for adoption, and he never really knew where he came from, but if he had looked at those roots, instead of taking what I call the Holocaust shortcut, he would have come up with a different sort of story about himself. A Pindicada, a tradition in Switzerland is actually sort of equivalent to a sort of slavery. Yeah, these are like slave children's speciality,

although not only in Switzerland. Until quite late, actually. Until the 1950s. Yes. This is Sonny Switzerland, yes. Nick Grum, what does it mean to you that this book, powerful to receive by intelligent, committed, given prizes by various Jewish magazines who test and take, as you would expect, the greatest

care in these matters. What does it mean to you that this is discovered to be inauthentic? What happens to the piece as far as you're concerned? I think one of the most extraordinary things happens, which is that reviewers who previously had been praising the book suddenly decide to expel it, to dismiss it, to say that either, in fact, Eleanor's account, which I think is extremely eloquent and very convincing on its terms. It's a superb investigation. You actually called for it to either be reclassified or withdrawn. Now, what interests me, which I think is a starting point,

is how all the stuff surrounding the book, all of these sorts of frames, the critical plaudits, the reviews, the prizes, and the way that it tries to hook into reality, how that can be so radically changed that the experience of the book, the experience of reading, is then profoundly, different. It stops being the same book.

It's a different book. It gets the heart of a lot of what you're taught. I've only allowed to read, perhaps it's the only part you finished. The introduction to your new book about where you're talking about forgery, counterfeit, copying, plagiarism, and mimisisis and all that sort of thing. But it gets the heart

of it. You're looking at, I remember a friend of mine, I'm not named, I used to go and look at a painting about twice so he can think it was the most wonderful experience of his life. And then was told it was a fake. And so what did he do about that? then, do you think that this book is now completely different, is now kind of not as important, not as significant

because of what Ellen has done and found out? Well, I think that it's a different book, and I think that one of the things that it demonstrates is that how the book does change, bearing a mind what people say about it. Now, what I mean by that is that there's a reluctance to actually engage in the thing as literature and a real desire to try to.

to approach it as some sort of absolutely authentic, accurate witness document, which then tells a version of history. Now, the fact that it is, we could say, forged, and by forged, I mean that it's a creative copy. It's not a counterfeit. There's no original here that it's actually copying. It's not plagiarized. It's not somebody else's work. It's actually a piece of creative writing, which is creative in more than just what goes on on the page. I mean, clearly Vilkimerski is a performer. Whether he's internalised this, whether he actually is aware himself, whether it's intentional,

I don't think it really matters. Part of the book has clearly been, the talks that he's been giving, the interviews that he's been giving, even the tears that he's been crying. They're all frames that actually surround this particular work. But it clearly does matter for a lot of people, doesn't it? Because especially, well, not especially,

but actually, yes, especially in Holocaust literature, it is very, very, very important indeed to find out what is true in the sense of what is documentary true and what is might or might not be emotional true. Yes, of course, and I think it's highly frivolous to say that the authors, the writer's intention, is irrelevant here.

It's extremely relevant. And you also have to look at what happens outside of the book itself, outside of the written text as it stands. You have to look at how this writer presents the book and himself to the world. Because not only did he write the book, he also went around the world lecturing

about what it means to be a Holocaust survivor, teaching other Holocaust survivors how to remember, in fact, collaborating with a psychologist on an approach to memory and a new approach to self-identity. And all of this is based on what he believes is his true past, which he knows.

full well, it isn't. I actually don't think that he believes it himself. I do think that he has manipulated the facts to such a degree that he must be aware of what he's doing. And his story kept shifting throughout, even after the publication of the book. You're talking about on the one hand he believes it to be true, on the other hand, that he knows that it's untrue. And you do talk about his anguish being genuine. He has the need to believe. Now let's distinguish between two things. His anguish

His pain is genuine because his anguish and his pain go back to something he has really experienced himself. But this pain is not caused by having been in a concentration camp. It is caused by a private, very painful

history of his own. It is not a Holocaust story and the two are not the same. And you cannot make an equivocation between history and literature. History is history literature. If he had written this, if he had had written this as a novel and presented it as a novel, it would have been read completely

differently. It would have had shortcomings of its own or pluses of its own, but it would have been a different sort of text. But he presented it as a witness account, as a historical account, a personal memoir based on what actually happened. I take this distinction between history and fiction. You seem to rather grumble at that, Nick. Well, there are two things I grumble about, but the first is the whole issue of intention, because I don't think that books are necessarily solved by critics going and finding out more about the author. I think that it shows a bad faith in why we actually read literature. I also think that one of the things that this book does, if it does anything, is actually to remind us that in fact history is written, history is a form of literature, history is style.

In fact, in the 18th century, certainly the relationship between history and fiction was extremely. extremely blurred. For example, the novel Tom Jones is called the history of Tom Jones, and it's not quite clear where history is coming from and what its relationship to empirical events is. Now, I certainly wouldn't deny that there are things, and clearly there, you know, we have an historical record, but there are facts, and there are also people writing, and the two don't necessarily coherence. But do you think that had this been presented as fiction, it would have been accepted as powerfully and as majestic as it were, as it was. Well, it's an unanswerable question, although in fact, Wilkimer said that it was always

a free choice of the reader to read my book as literature or to take it as a personal document. Now, that might be simply disingenuous on his part. But I think that it shows this reluctance to actually be able to read literature in a relationship with history,

rather than repeating history, rather than as a witness. But surely history has principles which guide it, don't apply to fiction. I mean, you have to have to have to have to, when anyone writes fiction, they write fiction. It doesn't matter, really, as long as everything works and is good, that's the deal. But in history, you have to check your sources, and well, there are two people there to check your sources? Is there a document?

So there is a, but you're suggesting that because in the 18th century fielding called the history of Tom Jones, the history of Tom Jones, that there was a, you say, blurring then, but the implication was that it carries on now, and so you're sort of saying, what's the fuss? I'm not exactly saying what's the fuss. I think that the fuss itself is the interesting thing because it actually demonstrates that we haven't solved this problem, that we're not actually able to tell history without it being a literary practice of some sort.

Can I just bring you back to the actual topic at hand, which is something entirely different? I'm not talking here about how we read literature. I'm talking about how this particular book, which describes a very central and monumental event in 20th century history has actually caused a lot of damage by being a lie. What sort of damage has it caused? It has caused damage to actual Holocaust survivors

who are not happy with the fact that this particular one has been exposed as a fraud because it then means that every single Holocaust memoir will be examined very closely and with suspicion, which is a very negative side effect of what will be. Kumerski has done. It is also interesting, I mean, coming from your area of expertise, James McPherson, who wrote himself the Oceanic poems and presented them as originals, caused a huge controversy in his own time, which actually led to a split, as far as I know. I mean, I'm sure you know more about this

than I do. But it was a split along political lines as well. And it was a split which affected various ideas about Scottish nationalism and people were quite upset about a forgery being sold as a real thing. And it had political implications. David Hume was one of the people who was very angry at that. And I think what was a fraud then is a fraud now. You may want to claim that the Romantics introduced the idea of authenticity. But as opposed to that, I will put to you that already much, much earlier than that, long before the Romantics, in Dante's hell, for example, forgerers go straight into the 10th Gulf of hell, forgeries and alchemists. So forgery was taken extremely seriously. It was certainly taken extremely seriously. And so should truth be

taken seriously? And if you don't, you are opening the way to propaganda and relativism of this sort. I think that there's quite a lot to take on that, Nick, and I'm just, why don't we take on the notion of forgery? Because you, as it were, make claims for forgery, as it were, you try to restore the forgery to what you see, his or her, rightful place. Yes. So that part of, we've touched on the historical, we've touched on the authenticity in the sense of his historical document. It's been pointed out that this has had a bad effect on other. Let's take all that. Let's talk about forgery. What about this idea of forgery? Well, I think that we have to remember

that forgery means two things. It means both making something, forging in a smithy, and it also means this form of bad making to somehow pass something off as being real or original when it actually isn't. In fact, it shares that pun with a word like fabricate, which

means both to make something and to make up something. Now, I think that this idea of making and its relationship to originality can perhaps be exemplified in a story in the lives of the artists that Bizarre tells about Michelangelo, in which the young Michelangelo, as yet without a patron, carved a statue of a beautiful sleeping cupid, and one of the

Medici princes says that this is absolutely wonderful. If you were to bury this in your garden and dig it up, people would think that it was a work of the ancients. It has all of the contours. It has all of the spirit of ancient art. Now, it's not actually. actually clear what then happens. In one version of this story, Michelangelo does finish the marble in a rather distressed state to make it look antique, but that's simply to show his artistry at completing his work. In another version, it is bought by a Roman, who then buries it in his garden, digs it up and sells it on as an antique, and in fact, the owners of this tend to effloresce, and the statue has now been lost.

The irony is that one of the owners, through whose hands it passes, is a person who then becomes a patron. So what are we drawing from this? What are we drawing from this? Is Michelangelo is an artist, as an original artist. Michelangelo as an imitator of ancient art, and Michelangelo as a forger. And the relationship between those three, I think, is actually inextricable.

So what do you draw from this with regard to... So are you saying, therefore, that... Well, he wasn't a forgery. He'd done this, hadn't he? I mean, he hadn't forged something. He'd done this... Well, it's a piece of creative work, which is then read in different contexts, in different ways. Yes, I understand that. But I can't see where the forgery really plays a part there.

I mean, imitation maybe when he did the statue in the first place. Well, I think that happens... That was a tradition at the time, it still is. It certainly was a tradition, although it's a tradition which, in fact, has fallen away, rather. It's a tradition which goes back to Plato, but certainly in the 18th century, it becomes less convinced. That's one of the reasons why I think that the romantic authenticity is becoming important.

So we're getting back to the idea that context is everything. There are no forgeries, there are just things made, which are judged in different contexts. Well, I don't think that... If somebody painted something that looked like the Van Gogh sunflowers, it would still be a painting that we could appreciate, but we would dismiss it in our culture because it was like it was a forgery. Well, it certainly wouldn't carry the same price tag, and it certainly wouldn't be accommodated within the body of works, which is in Van Gogh.

and what I think that forgery reminds us I mean the way that I think that it can actually be of some sort of help is because it's an extreme of making it's an extreme of fiction or of crafting an object I mean poets were certainly called liars and if you like the poets that lie with the most effrontery then become forges because they forge more than simply the text that's reading how do you take that argument on

Poets or liars? In the case of Wilkimerski, I mean in the case of writers, I mean, I'm a fiction writer myself, and I obviously choose to write or say whatever I want, but there has to be certain truth, internal truth, to any story we tell. In case of Wilkomirsky, this is entirely different because he has written something that he wanted to be accepted as proof of his own identity based on historical fact and based on, um, a historical story, which he claimed to remember not too clearly, but up to a point. However, by applying the Holocaust concept to his own story, which has nothing to do with the Holocaust, he has actually deprived himself and possibly his readers, of reading his true story, which he could have written, which he could have researched. And I think it's that truth which gets lost when we choose to tell lies, which have nothing to do with the actual fact. Nick Grum, what would you say to one commentator, a Jewish scholar actually,

who said, oh, this is more valuable because it's not a document, because he felt that, although he was never in a concentration camp, or did not have that childhood described in that book at all. This makes it more valuable because it shows how the whole idea of the Holocaust spread out and has engaged and caught up and consumes the imagination people. What do you say to that? Well, I think that, I mean, I'd certainly want to preface any remarks by saying, I mean, I think the Holocaust is extremely difficult to discuss

and also extremely difficult to write about. But it needs to be written about. I think to accept some sort of ineffability is actually to mystify it and to avoid the conversation, the historical conversation that we ought to be having about it. Now, I think that... Israel Goodman was the historian who's about here. I think that...

forgery in this case, in the Vilkimerski case, can actually mark a boundary. It can actually mark that point at which so many witnesses say that the Holocaust was unbelievable. Now, the Vilkimer case, I mean, as I think Eleanor has comprehensively demonstrated, it is unbelievable. But it does two things. One of the things is it actually makes a Holocaust serious again, and it stops it perhaps being used as so much fictional fodder.

On the other hand, it actually reminds me of what William Golding said about the end of the Second World War is that the sheer ghastliness of finding that having won the war, the opening of the concentration camps, meant that the Allies realized that the war had already been lost, and in fact had been lost for three or four years, that this triumph was actually undercut with some sort of terrible and abysmal failure. Now, that to me, and I don't want to be flippant, but in a sense, that's the experience I think that readers have had, as a reading Volkimeroski, that having found some sort of empathy,

then there's a terrible crash in which the whole edifice falls apart and becomes dust. I see the exact opposite happening. I see it in a totally different light. I see that far from bringing Holocaust to the serious attention of readers, he has actually managed to sentimentalize it, to cheapen it, to turn it into kitsch and into... you know, an odd mixture of everything that goes on in his own head. And he has to really take responsibility for that.

It reminds me, actually, in preparation for this program, I looked at the kind of material that you're interested in. Thomas Chatterton claimed to have discovered a poem which he had in fact written himself. Now, he was much admired for having written in himself, but he didn't want to admit that he was in fact the author and not the archaeologist, as it were, who had discovered it.

This is 18th century stuff. Now, Wilkimerzky, whose real name is actually Bruno Dusaker, as a parallel to that, in fact, invented a character called Biniamin Wilkimersky, wrote a fictional memoir in his name, and then appropriated that man's identity as his own, mixing it with some real elements from his own life. And now that people are saying, well, actually you are not Benjamin Wilkimerick, the character,

but you are, Bruno Dusaker, the very talented writer. He doesn't like that. I see an interesting parallel then. Are you surprised, Nick, coming to the end now, that so many people, and I emphasize it without any irony at all, people I respect as critics, several whom work I read, were so taken in by this. I mean that, they were so taken over by this work. I think taken over is better than saying taking in. I think literature always takes people in.

You have to believe the story as you're reading it. And I think it is at point. It's a powerful book, and it can remain a powerful book. We're speaking in fairly lofty terms here, but I'd like to mention something that an actual Holocaust survivor has brought to my attention. There is this, after reading my article and after reading Wilkimerzky's book

and a number of other pieces on the subject, this man phoned me up. He lives in Switzerland as well. And he said, actually he himself has been in a camp as a child and one of the central themes in Wilkimerski's book is concerns advice which saved his life another boy in the camp gave him the advice of

actually standing in excrement to keep himself warm because it was warm it would keep him warm and this saved him so this man phoned me from Switzerland and said this is complete nonsense because in those barracks when it was ice cold that shit was cold it would not save them even for a second. And Holocaust survivors are actually pointing out facts like these to me

rather than lofty concepts like truth versus fiction. And they're upset by the fact that he didn't even get those facts right, not even the direct scientific facts, which he seems to present as something he actually remembers, a physical memory. Thank you very much. Not even that is right. Thanks, Alan Lapid.

Nick Groom, we'll be back next week. Thank you for listening. We hope you've enjoyed this Radio 4 podcast. You can find hundreds of other programmes about history, science and philosophy at BBC.com. com.com.com.