FAKE JEWS

About the show

In 1995, Suhrkamp publishes a volume of memoirs by a Latvian Holocaust survivor. The publication received numerous awards and was highly praised as a moving historical document. Until, just three years later, a Swiss-Jewish journalist revealed that the author of these alleged memoirs was neither Jewish nor had he ever been affected by Nazi terror, but was writing from a fictional perspective, meaning that he had simply invented his Jewish biography. This appropriation of a Jewish victim's biography is by no means an isolated case, and what has since been described as the „Wilkomirski syndrome” based on the fictional biography of Binjamin Wilkomirski has been booming since World War II. Particularly in the country of the perpetrators where family histories have not been comprehensively addressed, there are numerous figures who hope to gain an advantage by claiming a biography of persecution, including a well-known blogger, a long-time chairman of a Jewish community near Hamburg, and an influential journalist. In a present in which one's own identity is becoming increasingly important for the visibility and relevance of a statement, certain biographies are becoming a privilege: Is the appropriation of Jewish identity therefore a career advantage? A selling point? Or is it rather the case that claims are not checked too closely when they are so historically sensitive? Noam Brusilovsky examines these questions in a monologue project and sheds light on the blind spots of German memory culture in an increasingly polarized present.