The Wilkomirski Affair: A Study in Biographical Truth (review)

This is a translation of Der Fall Wilkomirski: Über der Wahrheit einer Biographie, Swiss historian Stefan Maechler’s official investigation of what came to be known as the Wilkomirski controversy. In 1995, the Jüdischer Verlag published Bruchstücke (Fragments), a Holocaust memoir by Bruno Dössekker, writing under the name Binjamin Wilkomirski. The adopted son of Swiss physician Kurt Dössekker, Bruno was purportedly born to Yvonne Grosjean on February 12, 1941. His natural father, a young mechanic known only as “Rudolf Z.,” was not listed on the birth certificate. According to Swiss records, the Dössekkers became Bruno’s foster parents in 1945 and officially adopted him in 1957. Having rejected his parents’ wish that he study medicine, Dössekker pursued a musical career instead. Strikingly handsome as a boy, he married, fathered three children, and became a successful clarinetist as well as a noted instrument builder. But as his marriage began to fall apart and his health started to break down, Dössekker became obsessed with the memories of a tragic childhood.

Longstanding recollections of his infancy took on an ominous significance. The alienation felt by an adopted child became proof of a foreign heritage. In 1979, Dössekker met Israeli-born psychologist Elitsur Bernstein. Under Bernstein’s guidance, he began to weave his scattered memories into a coherent story of life in a death camp. Several trips to Poland, as well as numerous interchanges with Holocaust survivors, eventually led Dössekker to claim that he was a Latvian Jew named Binjamin Wilkomirski. Incarcerated in Majdanek, and then in a series of Kraków orphanages, he was eventually taken to Switzerland. Dössekker came to believe—or at least claimed to believe—that “he was exchanged with another boy [the real Bruno Grosjean!]” by his stepparents, who hid his true identity (p. 25). By the 80s he had begun to refer to himself as Wilkomirski.

Although Dössekker-Wilkomirski maintained that the Fragments had begun as a mere exercise in memory retrieval, critics hailed it as a literary masterpiece. The thin volume won international acclaim and was translated into nine languages. The Jewish Quarterly of London awarded Dössekker-Wilkomirski’s book its prestigious Non- Fiction Prize in 1997. The American edition sold over 30,000 copies, with rave reviews in publication like the New York Times. Writing in The Nation, the greatly respected Jonathan Kozol hailed Fragments as “austerely written” as well as “profoundly moving.” Dössekker-Wilkomirski went on an extensive book tour, “making countless public appearances” (p. 119). Fragments seemed destined to be the capstone of the Shoah’s Temple of Memory.

Then the roof caved in. On August 27, 1998, Swiss journalist Daniel Ganzfried published an article in Die Weltwoche dismissing Fragments as fiction and its author as a fraud. Roger Boyes reported the scandal in the London Times on September 8, 1998. Mark Pendergast, a prominent critic of memory retrieval, disseminated a paper on the Internet characterizing Fragments as the work of a deluded victim of trash psychotherapy. In June 1999, Elena Lappin published a long article in the British journal Granta depicting Dössekker-Wilkomirski as a confused “man with two heads.” Around the same time, Philip Gourevitch used the pages of the New Yorker to denounce him as a “memory thief.” Norman Finkelstein, a rabid critic of Israel, dismissed Fragments as a mere recycling of “Holocaust kitsch.” Antisemitic organizations were ecstatic. In November 1999, a Zurich lawyer filed charges against Dössekker for fraud. Police searched his apartment a few months later. Dössekker’s own literary agents commissioned Maechler’s investigation. At the same time, the German publisher of Fragments withdrew the book from sale, pending an examination of the final report.

In undertaking his investigation, Maechler was confronted with three possibilities. Dössekker was either truthful, deceitful, or merely confused. To find out which, our investigator interviewed dozens of witnesses, collected photographs, viewed films, and dug into archives in four different countries. Maechler...