1 - Rethinking Testimony: Authenticity, “Travelling Memories,” and Post-Holocaust Jewish Identities in Benjamin Stein’s Die Leinwand

Summary

Introduction: Remediating the Wilkomirski Affair

HOLOCAUST REMEMBRANCE in the new millennium oscillates between the acknowledgment of hypermediation, on the one hand, and a continuing desire for authenticity, on the other. This tension is reflected in contemporary German- and Austrian-Jewish Holocaust fiction, which has seen a rise of metafictional, metahistoriographical, and semiautobiographical genres that, by definition, focus on the interplay between (historical) reality and its representation. Benjamin Stein's 2010 novel Die Leinwand is a case in point: the entanglement of authenticity, (re) mediation, and the appropriation of memories is at the heart of both the novel's content and its formal arrangement. By offering a fictional reconsideration of the Wilkomirski affair, Stein's Die Leinwand is bound to touch on central questions concerning the issues of authenticity, memorial transmission, and testimony that have also shaped contemporary scholarly and artistic Holocaust discourse: How is the issue of authenticity renegotiated after the disappearance of the eyewitness generation? How do concepts of authenticity change in the age of remediation? Who does the Holocaust “belong to” after the dying out of the survivor generation? What new pathways of transmission will emerge after the survivor generation has passed away? What happens to the genres of memoir and testimony when memories become increasingly mobile and appropriable? And how do all of these developments affect contemporary notions of Jewish identity?

I will tackle these questions by concentrating on three interconnected issues in Stein's novel: remediation, memorial transmission, and post- Holocaust Jewish identity. I will start with a consideration of the relationship between Stein's novel and its most important intertext, Binjamin Wilkomirski's Bruchstücke (1997; translated as Fragments: Memories of a Wartime Childhood, 1995). Reading both works as well as their intertextual relationship through Bolter and Grusin's framework of “remediation,” I will demonstrate how Wilkomirski's Bruchstücke was in itself already a product of complicated circuits of mediatization and remediation. This reading shifts the focus away from Wilkomirski's breach of the autobiographical pact, highlighting instead his (over)compliance with a certain set of literary conventions. My close reading of Stein's novel, which was published fifteen years after the Wilkomirski scandal, will investigate how the generational distance expressed in the text enables a radically changed perspective on the key issues of authenticity, “memorial propriety,” and witnessing in Holocaust discourse.