The Politics of Selfhood: Binjamin Wilkomirski's Fragments as an Adoption Narrative of Disaffiliation

This article reads Binjamin Wilkomirski's false memoir Fragments: Memories of a Wartime Childhood (1995) from the perspective of adoption studies and offers a new facet to the explanation of how and why his narrative came to be. Scholarship on Fragments recognizes but rarely considers his adoption and its historical circumstances contextually central to the "Wilkomirski affair." I argue that, within the regime of secrecy and shame imposed by the Swiss society on experiences of Verdingkinder and their descendants, Wilkomirski wrote an adoption narrative of disaffiliation renouncing his ties to both the adoptive and birth families. Instead, he cleaved his life trajectory to the Holocaust survivors' as a form of catachrestic remembrance: he substitutes an account of silenced and shameful traumatic experience for a publicly recognized form of trauma narrative that more reliably solicits the audience's compassion. Such reading reveals the influence of socially sanctioned ways of remembering on personal narrative construction. It also brings to light the hidden history of the Swiss social welfare victims and invites us to consider consequences of social narratives that value some forms of kinship over others.