Sprache:
Deutsch
Erscheinungsjahr:
1999
Titel der Quelle:
Jüdischer Almanach
Angaben zur Quelle:
2000 (1999) 52-65
Schlagwort(e):
Wilkomirski, Binjamin.
;
Ganzfried, Daniel,
;
Holocaust, Jewish (1939-1945), in literature
Kurzfassung:
Discusses the difficulty of representing the Holocaust experience as it really was and distinguishing it from fantasy. In Imre Kertész's "Sorstalanság", the narrator rejects the journalist's reference to "the hell of the camps" and insists that what he went through was a succession of days, minutes, seconds. Ganzfried, who first exposed the inauthenticity of Wilkomirski, himself wrote a novel, "Der Absender" (1997), in which he describes the efforts of a son to reconstruct the past of his father, a survivor; he struggles to find the reality behind the fiction and finally realizes that the empty spaces are part of the picture. Suggests that calling the camps "hell" is a means of evading reality; hell is an abstraction that can be filled with one's own worst fantasies. (Indeed the Nazis, in their sadistic inventiveness, did just that.) This seems to be what Wilkomirski did; behind the imagined horrors which he describes are common childhood traumas, and these are what initially drew readers and critics to his book.
URL:
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