Introduction:The Mediation of Failed Mediation

Abstract

In 1995 Binjamin Wilkomirski published a book that was to become a source of fierce controversy. Fragments: Memories of a Wartime Childhood recounts Wilkomirski’s experiences of surviving alone two concentration camps as a small Jewish child from Poland. Having lived most of his life as Bruno Dössekker, the adopted son of a Swiss couple, Wilkomirski claimed to have discovered his true identity through a long psychoanalytic process, which led to writing his story. The book quickly received popular and critical acclaim and won a number of literary prizes, including the National Jewish Book Award. What happened next is fairly well known: a 1998 newspaper article cast doubt as to the authenticity of Wilkomirski’s account, revealing instead the story of a Bruno Grosjean, the illegitimate son of an unmarried woman who had given him away for adoption in Switzerland. The book’s publisher then commissioned a historian to look into the allegations, which were consequently found to be correct. The book previously described as “achingly beautiful” and “morally important” was now declared as fake and its author a fraud. The Wilkomirski case has since figured in debates on Holocaust memory as a cautionary tale about the facility with which one can pass as a survivor— and convince a worldwide audience. The book was discontinued as memoir only later to be released in tandem with the historical study finding it false. While Wilkomirski’s memories may have been fabricated, the way they were depicted in the book is a fairly accurate description of traumatic memory. Even if the content of these memories is made- up their structure very much conforms to a psychology textbook entry on post- trauma. Evidently Wilkomirski was aware of this fact, as in the afterword to the book, he urges others in a similar situation to “cry out their own traumatic childhood memories.”