Abstract
In the introduction to this book, I asked whether Binjamin Wilkomirski’s fictional Fragments was as singular as it seemed on its publication in 1995, as the testimonial — but also literary — account of a child’s perspective on the Holocaust. It is clear that Wilkomirski’s text was not as unusual as it appeared. Even the anachrony of its form, in which three historical periods are narrated out of order, is simply an extreme version of the disordered memorial chronology to be found in many of the fictional and non-fiction texts I have mentioned throughout this study.
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Notes
W.G. Sebald, Austerlitz, trans. Anthea Bell, London: Hamish Hamilton 2001; all page references are in the text.
Jean Améry, At the Mind’s Limits: Contemplations by a Survivor on Auschwitz and its Realities, trans. Sidney and Stella P. Rosenfeld, Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press 1980;
Dan Jacobson, Heshel’s Kingdom, London: Hamish Hamilton 1998.
See Geoffrey Hartman, Scars of the Spirit: The Struggle Against Inauthenticity, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan 2002, p. 79.
W.G. Sebald, The Emigrants, trans. Michael Hulse, London: Harvill 1996 [1993].
See Michiko Kakutani’s complaint about the ‘gratuitous device of the narrator’ in Austerlitz (‘Life in a No Man’s Land of Memory and Loss’, New York Times, 27 October 2001: E 40).
Maya Jaggi, interview with W.G. Sebald, ‘The last word’, the Guardian, 21 December 2001, p. 5.
Jaggi, ‘The last word’, p. 4; see Jeremy Josephs with Susi Bechhofer, Rosa’s Child: The True Story of One Woman’s Quest for a Lost Mother and a Vanished Past, London: I.B. Tauris 1996; Whatever Happened to Susi, BBC 2.
Saul Friedländer, When Memory Comes, trans. Helen R. Lane, New York: Farrar Straus Giroux 1979, p. 52.
Georges Perec, W or the Memory of Childhood, trans. David Bellos, London: Harvill 1996 [1975], p. 54.
David Bellos, Georges Perec: A Life in Words, London: Harvill 1995, pp. 58, 547.
On this point in relation to The Emigrants, see Katharina Hall, ‘Jewish Memory in Exile: The Relation of W.G. Sebald’s Die Ausgwanden:en to the Tradition of the Yizkhor Books’, in Pôl O’Dochartaigh, ed., Jews in German Literature Since 1945: German-Jewish Literature, Amsterdam and Atlanta: Rodopi 2000.
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© 2004 Sue Vice
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Vice, S. (2004). Conclusion. In: Children Writing the Holocaust. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230505896_10
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