The impostor A true story

Review by New York Times Review

WHO SHOULD BE considered the more malign liar, a Holocaust denier or a Holocaust impostor? The denier in effect falsely accuses millions of a horrible fraud and wounds the very souls of those who suffered and died - and their descendants. A Holocaust impostor doesn't deny the Holocaust, he affirms it and claims falsely to be one of the survivors. When he or she is exposed, it does however cast doubt on those whose suffering was genuine, and most lamentably, feeds the beast of denialism. It's one of the difficult questions raised by a reading of "The Impostor," Javier Cercas's book about the Spanish Holocaust impostor Enric Marco. This Catalonian mechanic was exposed as a liar and con man back in 2005, but his defiant defense of his imposture as a matter of minor "errors" and "mistakes" continues to this day - even as Marco approaches 100 - and prompts counterintuitive thinking about the role of what Cercas disparages as a "beneficial lie." Is there such a thing, especially on this inflammatory subject? Cercas is a respected Spanish novelist; his book on Marco was published first in 2014. It appears in English at a time when the debate about separating fake from fact is at the forefront of contemporary historical and political debate here. He decided he wanted to know not so much whether Marco lied (though he turns the question into a fascinating and suspenseful historical whodunit) but why. Spaniards believed Marco for a long time and hailed him as a celebrity, a hero of suffering, "a rock star of historical memory," as Cercas contemptuously calls him. He addressed the Spanish parliament, had a medal bestowed upon him by the Catalonian assembly. He gave numerous talks to schoolchildren, to colleges and union halls. Why, what need did his imposture serve? Can we take his claims of good intentions seriously that he wanted to educate a populace unaware of the magnitude of Hitler's horror? Cercas got in deeper than he thought he would, deeper than those who merely called Marco "a monster." The book is both a tribute to Cercas's investigative zeal and a series of dramatic confrontations between the writer and the impostor. Years after his exposure as a fraud, Marco would not give up his posture of defiance. In his attempt to understand why Marco would lie, Cercas rounds up some of the usual explanatory tropes - including looking at narcissism as a clinical condition - but they fail to fully account for a historical crime, a rebuke to truth. As one suspects Cercas knows, trying to uncover the psychological motives for Marco's deception might not be the appropriate response. As the Italian Holocaust survivor and thinker Primo Levi argued, explanation can lead to a false sense of exculpation, can lead one to the dilemma posed by the French proverb "To understand all is to forgive all." Cercas struggles with the question of whether Marco's crime can ever be forgiven for any reason. By the time Cercas makes the forensic discovery that resolves his persistent doubt about what to think of Marco's story, the con man has driven the novelist to wonder if - as a novelist, a writer of fiction - he is some kind of impostor himself, although his obsession with this idea can sometimes seem a tired postmodern touch. The Marco saga begins with the democratic Spanish Republic's defeat at the hands of Franco's fascists in the civil war that lasted from 1936 to 1939. Marco would later claim that he had fought bravely for liberty on the republican side; Cercas is unconvinced but unable to refute these stories, especially since few veterans of that conflict are still alive. At the end of the civil war, Spain remained officially neutral as the Nazis occupied most of Europe, but expressed its tacit support of Hitler by shipping those identified as supporters of the vanquished Spanish Republic to Germany in work battalions to help maintain Hitler's home front. Some of these men were incarcerated in concentration camps. Marco's claim was that he was one of these deportados (as they were called in Spain), who was involuntarily rounded up for work in Germany. Cercas finds evidence that instead Marco actually volunteered to help Hitler, perhaps not out of ideological commitment but a desire to be on what he thought would be the winning side. His proclaimed affinity for the republic may be one reason he was later treated with sympathy when he began to tell his story of being incarcerated in a concentration camp in Flossenbiirg. It was one of the smaller German camps but no less brutal. Cercas estimates that tens of thousands died there. Marco didn't begin to spread his Flossenbiirg stories until the late 70s, after Franco's death and the fall of the fascist regime - when it was suddenly more safe to do so. But the celebrity worship he always seemed to crave did not come to him then. Cercas believes this is because the entire Spanish nation was resolving its shameful complicity in fascist rule and Hitler friendship and forging its own imposture of resistance. So Marco's stories about his brave deeds in defense of his dignity in the camp - including a dramatic showdown chess match with the SS camp commandant, which Marco claims to have won - were not subject to much public examination or dispute then. it was not until two decades later, in the late '90s, that he became the celebrity hero of "historical memory" and enjoyed some seven years or so riding the wave of Holocaust remembrance before it all fell apart when a dogged historian revealed Marco's lies. What a tempting character for a novelist to write about, especially the aftermath of the exposure when he was revealed to have been a fabulist. One of the highlights of Cercas's portrait of his impostor quarry is a tour de force imposture of his own, in which he captures Marco's grandiose comic rhetoric - an imposture of an impostor. This impostor impostor tells us how people were awe-struck with admiration for his courage and eloquence, that after his impostor survivor lecture they'd say, "You've got a way with words, you've got so much energy, and you're so intelligent and you know how to charm and move and persuade people." In addition, "it was not so easy to be humble ... people seemed determined to see him as a hero... he did not like the idea of being put on a pedestal." But what can he do? Cercas's Marco laments "the only thing that he has done throughout his life is struggle tirelessly, with all his might, oblivious to danger and to his own self-interest, for peace, for solidarity, for freedom, for social justice, for human rights, for the dissemination of culture and memory." One begins to understand Cercas's attraction to Marco as a character. He's a great Falstaffian incarnation of the braggart soldier type that dates back to Plautus. In fact the book almost takes on the shadow of a novel in which Marco the hardened con man seems to play the long game in an attempt to convince Cercas that, despite his "mistakes" and "errors," he is somehow more than a memory thief. He finally concedes, when Cercas finds documentary evidence, that he was never in Flossenbiirg. Rather he was jailed in the north German town of Kiel in a prison for common criminals. But was it so wrong to shift his sentence to a concentration camp, he asks, if he could become a spokesman for the dead and dying who were there? Toward the close of the book Cercas reprints the transcript of his final interview with Marco. And when Marco says to Cercas, "You understand me at last," the reader will probably (mentally) be shouting out, "No don't, don't believe him, this is part of his con." But though Cercas seems on the verge of being taken in, it turns out that he has been conning the con man; at the end, the evidence of Marco's continued lying and imposture makes it impossible for him to defend himself any further. It's satisfying to think that this monster has finally been painted into a corner. My only dissatisfaction is Cercas's recurrent attempt to draw a parallel between Marco's imposture and that other Spanish fabulist Don Quixote, who also lied to become the hero of his fantasies. This has the effect of normalizing Marco - almost everybody wants to be a hero, everybody loves Don Q. Does it not matter what lies one tells to attain the love and adoration of others? Does it excuse the delegitimization of history and the very notion of truth? Cervantes at least gives Quixote the undeceived Sancho Panza. And Quixote was a dreamy romantic, who loved books too much and hurt no one but himself. Marco, on the other hand, was a repellent liar whose blurring of tragic history, his fake news, his stealing of souls, should never be forgiven. RON rosenbaum is the author of "Explaining Hitler: The Search for the Origins of His Evil."

Copyright (c) The New York Times Company [August 23, 2019]

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Review by Booklist Review

*Starred Review* Leading Spanish novelist Cercas (Outlaws, 2014) probes the lies of a notorious fraudster and reveals uncomfortable truths about postwar Spain, the persistence of narcissism, and his own struggles to reconcile reality and fiction. Enric Marco, a metalworker from Barcelona, captured the public eye and brought at least one government official to tears with dramatic, and entirely false, accounts of his time in Nazi concentration camps. His fraud exposed, Marco continued to grasp after public affection, insisting that his deception was a noble lie that served the public interest. Cercas declares Marco a conman, a shameless charlatan, a peerless trickster and worries deeply about the morality of giving him the attention he desires. But Cercas cannot resist peeling back the onion skins from a man whose invention of history is almost literary in its audacity. Might Marco be Don Quixote, tripped up by his own longing for heroism? Or is his story more like Capote's In Cold Blood (1966), another novel without fiction in which the novelist's own ethics are implicated? Likewise compelling is what Marco's story reveals about postwar Spain's attempts to reinvent itself amid questions of complicity and constructed memory. Cercas' sophisticated and emotionally intelligent portrait of humanity at low ebb speaks with uncommon directness to our own historical moment.--Brendan Driscoll Copyright 2018 Booklist

From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.

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Review by Publisher's Weekly Review

"The liar has no history," novelist Cercas (Outlaws) declares at the start of this mesmerizing biography of a fraud, only to disprove that contention in his quest to understand Enric Marco, a Spanish man who for decades famously represented himself as a survivor of Nazi concentration camps. In 2005, at the age of 84, Marco was revealed to be a fraud who had, in fact, volunteered for a work detail in Germany during WWII to avoid his mandatory military service in Spain. Cercas, who interviewed Marco, depicts him as a charismatic narcissist who misrepresented his anarchist proclivities during the Spanish Civil War, changed his name repeatedly to escape his past, and lied his way into high-profile positions after the end of the Franco dictatorship, serving as a spokesperson for former Holocaust survivors and members of the resistance in Spain. As Cercas investigates Marco's psyche, he describes his own moral qualms about exposing his subject's subterfuge. He likens Marcos's "novelistic imagination" to that of a fiction writer (such as himself) and also presents it as a personification of Spain in the post-Franco years, which invented "a noble and heroic past, in which most had been resistance fighters or anti-Franco dissidents." This rigorous work shines a light not only on the methods of the deceiver but the willingness of the deceived to accept such falsehoods. (Sept.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.

(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved

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Review by Kirkus Book Review

Acclaimed Spanish novelist Cercas (The Blind Spot: An Essay on the Novel, 2018, etc.) looks deeply at the curious case of a man who wasn't there.Enric Marco (b. 1921), a Catalonian metalworker, became a cause clbre first for having supposedly survived a Nazi concentration camp, for which he received medals and honors, and then for having been exposed for bending the facts to the point of breaking, apparently precisely in order to cash in on the fame. As Cercas digs into the story of this "swarthy, balding, thickset, burly, mustachioed gnome," Marco moves from object of "moral disgust" to something at once more understandable and more mysterious. Yes, Marco, an anarchist who was on the losing side of the Spanish Civil War ("his memories of this farce, however, are scant and unclear"), did go to Germany during World War IIbut apparently voluntarily, having joined a labor detachment for a decent wage. Yes, he did run afoul of the Nazis, but apparently for an ordinary crime. Yes, he was jailed briefly, but he did not do time in the concentration camps, as he attested. Other claims of having been a hero of the Resistance melt away, leaving Cercas with what novelist Mario Vargas Llosa, his friend, had divined at the beginning: "Don't you get it? Marco is one of your characters!" Cercas ponders the case from every angle: Is it possible, he wonders, that even with the evasions and lies, Marco might tell us something truthful about the experience of fascism? Even though he "needed to be admired, to be a star," might he not have something to say after all? Who doesn't enjoy a little self-aggrandizing confabulation? The answers come slowly, deliberately, and certainly not definitively even as Marco transforms himself from man on the street to Holocaust survivor "just as, at a certain point, Alonso Quixano became Don Quixote."Though long and occasionally repetitive, this is a charged examination of a surpassingly strange matter and of the masks and fictions we construct. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

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Part I: The Onion Skin 1 I did not want to write this book. I didn't know exactly why I did not want to write it, or rather I did, but did not want to acknowledge it, or did not dare acknowledge it; or not entirely. The fact is that for more than seven years I resisted writing this book. During that time, I wrote two others, but I never forgot this one; on the contrary: after my fashion, while I was writing those two books, I was also writing this one. Or perhaps, after its fashion, this book was writing me. The first paragraphs of a book are always the last to be written. This book is finished. This paragraph is the last I am writing. And, since it is the last, I now know why I didn't want to write this book. I didn't want to write it because I was afraid. This is what I have known since the beginning but did not want to acknowledge, or did not dare acknowledge; or not entirely. What I did not know until now is that my fear was completely warranted. *** I met Enric Marco in June 2009, four years after he became the great impostor and the great pariah. Many people still remember his story. Marco was an octogenarian from Barcelona who, for almost three decades, had passed himself off  as a deportado - a deportee - to Hitler's Germany and a survivor of the Nazi camps, for three years he had been president of the Amical de Mauthausen, the principal Spanish association for survivors of Mauthausen, he had given hundreds of lectures and dozens of interviews, he had received a number of significant official distinctions, and had addressed the Spanish parliament on behalf of his supposed companions in misfortune, until it was discovered in early May 2005 that he had not been deported and had never been a prisoner in a Nazi camp. The discovery was made by an obscure historian named Benito Bermejo, shortly before the commemoration ceremony at the former Mauthausen camp to mark the sixtieth anniversary of the liberation of Nazi concentration camps, a ceremony at which, for the first time, a Spanish prime minister was to be in attendance and at which Marco was to play an important role, one he was forced to relinquish at the last minute after his imposture was exposed. When I met Marco, I had just published my tenth book, The Anatomy of a Moment , but I was going through a difficult time. Even I did not understand why. My family seemed happy, the book was a success; it is true that my father had died, but he had died almost a year earlier, more than enough time to have coped with his death. The fact is that, I don't know how, but I came to the conclusion that the blame for my depression was my recently published book: not (or not entirely) because it had left me physically and mentally exhausted; but also (or more importantly) because it was a curious book, a strange novel-without-fiction, a rigorously true story, devoid of the slightest trace of invention or imagination. I thought that this was what had killed me. Day and night I repeated a mantra to myself: "Reality kills, fiction saves." In the meantime I was struggling to deal with anxiety and the panic attacks, I would go to sleep crying, wake up crying and spend the day hiding from people so that I could cry some more. I decided that the solution was to write another book. Though I had no shortage of ideas, the problem was that most of them were for non-fiction narratives. But I also had ideas for fictions; three in particular: the first was a novel about a professor of metaphysics at the University of Pontificia de Comillas who falls in love like a rutting boar with a porn star and ends up travelling to Budapest to meet her personally, declare his love and ask her to marry him; the second was called Tanga and was the first of a series of crime novels featuring a detective called Juan Luis Manguerazo; the third dealt with my father and began with a scene in which I brought him back to life and we devoured fried eggs with chorizo and frogs' legs at El Figón, a restaurant in the Cáceres of his youth where we had often eaten together. I attempted to write these three fictions; with all three I failed. One day, my wife gave me an ultimatum: either I made an appointment with a psychoanalyst, or she made one with a divorce lawyer. I did not have time to visit the psychoanalyst that she recommended. He was a bald man, cold and twisted, with an unplaceable accent (sometimes he sounded Chilean or Mexican, sometimes Catalan, or maybe Russian), who, in our early sessions, was constantly berating me for showing up at his surgery in articulo mortis . I have spent my life making fun of psychoanalysts and their pseudoscientific mumbo-jumbo; but I would be lying if I said that our sessions were not useful: at least they gave me a place where I could sob uncontrollably; but I would also be lying if I did not confess that, more than once, I felt like getting up from the couch and punching the psychoanalyst. He, for his part, attempted to guide me towards two conclusions. The first was that the blame for all my unhappiness was not my novel-without-fiction or true story, but my mother, which explained why I often left his consulting room with the urge to strangle her the next time I set eyes on her; the second conclusion was that my life was a charade and I was a charlatan, that I had chosen literature so that I could have a life that was free, happy and authentic whereas actually my life was false, servile and unhappy, that I was a guy who pretended to be a novelist, and succeeded by deceiving and cheating people; in reality I was nothing more than an impostor. The latter conclusion eventually came to seem more plausible (and less hackneyed) than the former. And it was this that prompted me to remember Marco; Marco and a long-forgotten conversation about Marco in which I had been called an impostor. Here I need to go back a few years, to the moment when the Marco scandal first broke. It triggered an outrage that resonated around the world, but in Catalonia, where Marco had been born and had lived almost all of his life, and where he had been a very popular man, the revelation of his imposture made a greater impression than it did anywhere else. So, even if there were no other reason, it was logical that I, too, was interested in his case. But there was another reason; furthermore, the verb "to be interested" is inadequate: rather than simply being interested in Marco's case, I immediately came up with the idea of writing about him, as though I sensed in Marco some profound connection. This worried me; it also produced a feeling of vertigo, an inchoate dread. The truth is that all the while the scandal played out in the media I devoured everything that was written about Marco and, when I discovered that a number of people close to me knew or had known Marco or had been aware of the man, I invited them to a dinner at my house to talk about him. The dinner took place in mid-May 2005, shortly after the story broke. At the time, I was teaching in the University of Gerona and living in the suburbs in a little semi-detached house with a garden. To the best of my recollection, in addition to my son, my wife and my sister Blanca, those present that evening included two of my colleagues in the Faculty of Arts: Anna María García and Xavier Pla. My sister Blanca was the only one of us who knew Marco well, because years earlier she and he had been on the board of FaPaC - the Federation of Associations of Parents of Schoolchildren in Catalonia - in which both had long served as vice-chair: she in the Gerona district, Marco in Barcelona. To everyone's surprise, over dinner, Blanca painted a picture of a charming, hyperactive, flirtatious and witty old man who was desperate to appear in photographs and, without troubling to hide the affection she had felt at the time for the great impostor and the great pariah, she recounted the projects, the meetings, the anecdotes and the trips she had shared with him. Anna María and Xavier did not know Marco personally (or knew him only superficially), but both had studied the Holocaust and the Deportation and seemed as fascinated by the case as I was: Xavier, a young professor of Catalan literature, loaned me various texts concerning Marco, including the two most comprehensive biographical accounts of his life; for her part, Anna María, a veteran historian who had never abandoned the noble concept of civic responsibility instilled in the intellectuals of her generation, had friends and acquaintances in the Amical de Mauthausen, the association for camp survivors of which Marco had been president, and had been in Mauthausen a couple of days before the scandal exploded attending the commemoration ceremonies of the sixtieth anniversary of the liberation of the Nazi concentration camps, where she was among the first to hear of the discovery of Marco's imposture; she had even dined there with Benito Bermejo, the historian who had just unmasked him. As I remember it, when we talked about Marco in the garden of my house that afternoon, Xavier and I were more baffled than anything; Blanca somewhere between being baffled and amused (though on the whole she tried to hide her amusement, perhaps for fear of shocking us); Anna María, simply outraged: over and over she said that Marco was a scoundrel, a compulsive, barefaced liar who had mocked the whole world, but in particular the victims of the most terrible crime in history. At some point, as though she had suddenly become aware of a blindingly obvious fact, Anna María said, her eyes boring into me: "So, tell me, why did you organise this dinner? Why are you interested in Marco? You're not thinking of writing about him?" The three point-blank questions caught me unawares and I did not know how to answer; it was Anna María herself who broke the silence. "Listen, Javier," she said, very seriously, "the best thing to do about Marco is forget him. It is the worst punishment for that monstrous egotist." Then she smiled and added: "Let's stop talking about him." I don't remember whether we changed the subject (I think so, though only briefly: later Marco made his presence felt again), but I remember that I did not dare to publicly admit that Anna María's intuition was correct, that I was considering writing about Marco; I did not even dare tell the historian that, if I eventually wrote about Marco, it would not be to talk about him but to try to understand him, to try to understand why he had done what he had done. Some days later (or perhaps it was the same day) I read something in El País that reminded me of the advice or the warning Anna María had given me. It was a letter to the editor from a woman named Teresa Sala, the daughter of one of those deported to Mauthausen and herself a member of the Amical de Mauthausen. It was not the letter of an outraged woman, but rather one who felt devastated and humiliated; it said : "I do not think we need to understand the reasons for Señor Marco's deception"; it also said: "To spend time attempting to justify his behaviour is to disparage and to fail to understand the legacy of those who were deported"; and also: "From now on, Señor Marco will have to live with his disgrace." It was precisely the opposite of what I thought. I thought that our primary duty was to understand. Obviously, to understand does not mean to excuse or, as Teresa Sala said, to justify; to be more exact: it means the reverse. Thought and art, I believed, attempt to explore what we are, revealing our endless, ambiguous and contradictory variety, and in doing so, mapping out our nature: Shakespeare or Dostoyevsky, I thought, illuminated every nook and cranny of the moral maze, demonstrate that love can lead to murder or suicide, and succeed in making us feel compassion for psychopaths and bastards; it is its duty, I thought, because the duty of art (or of thought) consists in showing us the complexity of existence in order to make us more complex, in examining the mechanics of evil, so that we may avoid it, and even the mechanics of good, perhaps so we may understand them. I believed all these things, but Teresa Sala's letter betrayed a desolation that I found moving; I also remembered that, in If This Is a Man , Primo Levi had written with reference to Auschwitz, or to his experience of Auschwitz, "Perhaps one cannot, what is more one must not, understand what happened, because to understand is almost to justify." To understand is to justify? was the question I had asked myself years ago when I read this sentence by Levi, one I asked myself again when I read Teresa Sala's letter? On the contrary, is it not our duty? Is it not crucial to try to understand the bewildering diversity of the real, from the most noble to the most abject? Or does this universal imperative not apply to the Holocaust? Perhaps I was wrong and there is no need to try to understand terrible evil, still less someone who, like Marco, uses terrible evil to deceive. Excerpted from The Impostor: A True Story by Javier Cercas All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.

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