Waltzer, as conscious as any Jew or historian of the damage done to real war stories by fake ones, approached Rosenblat’s agent, Andrea Hurst, with what he knew. He was able not only to quote a very reliable witness, Ben Helfgott, the leader of the Schlieben survivors who had journeyed with Rosenblat to England after the war (and had himself gone on to find fame as an Olympic athlete), but to show maps of the camp’s layout which proved that the apple-tossing story could not possibly be true; because aside from the fact that wandering alone along the perimeter of the camps grounds was an infraction punishable by instant death, the only place in Schlieben where anyone outside the compound could possibly approach the fence was in the spot right next to where the SS guards had their look-out point.
At first, according to Waltzer, neither agent nor publisher was interested in his claims. The promise of recouping millions from what was now planned to be a memoir, a children’s version called Angel Girl and a film too was hard to let go. And besides, Rosenblat was a sweet and kindly old man, clearly in love with his wife of half a century and determined to spread a little happiness in the world before his time was up. But by 28 December 2008, Berkley Books had announced that they were pulling the plug on the whole project. There would be no books and if the film company who had bought the rights to the story still thought they could get investment after the greatest love-story ever told turned out to be a fabrication, well, good luck to them.
Penguin was embarrassed. Oprah Winfrey – hot on the heels of the James Frey debacle – was incensed. And Rosenblat’s son Ken, who had known about the deception for years, was keen to distance himself entirely from the affair, telling the magazine the New Republic: ‘My father is a man who I don’t know. I can’t understand it. It’s not my way of thinking . . . I didn’t agree with it. I didn’t want anything to do with it. I tried to just stay away from it. It was always hurtful. I just never dealt with it.’
All that remained was for Rosenblat to account for himself, and, choosing his words carefully to avoid any accusations of greed, he used the New York Times to address the dozens of publishers and millions of Oprah viewers he had duped:
To all who supported and believed in me and this story. I am sorry for all I have caused to you and every one else in the world. Why did I do that and write the story with the girl and the apple, because I wanted to bring happiness to people, to remind them not to hate, but to love and tolerate all people. I brought good feelings to a lot of people and I brought hope to many. My motivation was to make good in this world.
No one is suggesting that Rosenblat’s motivation was to do evil, but the prospect of a retirement supported by the astronomical fee a good popular memoir can net its author in the twenty-first century would seem delightful to any ageing couple, let alone one who has lived through the horror of the Holocaust and then pulled themselves up by their bootstraps to join America’s middle class. And indeed, despite the debunking of his hoax, he might still make some money out of the story, because as of January 2009 his book is slated for release by the New York publishing firm York House Press. They will, of course, be branding the book fiction and releasing it under the new name of The Apple, and its new selling point is that it is ‘one of the most controversial love stories of all time’. Their website confirms that a film version is indeed still in production and also carries an essay encouraging readers to think about the complex nature of authenticity and authorship in autobiographical writing and to ask themselves whether Rosenblat – a damaged war survivor – wasn’t just working through his trauma by writing the book.
All of which is indeed worth thinking about. But the real tragedy of the Apple debacle is that a far more moving story – the true story – may never be told. That is the story of the two older brothers who took a solemn vow never to abandon their little sibling, never to let him starve, and to lie about his age to save him from punishment even as they were risking their lives daily to do it. And of the woman – Roma’s mother – who in deciding to disguise her children as Polish Catholics and live openly under the gaze of the Nazi occupiers (near Breslau, not Schlieben) had to take the appalling decision to leave her one very dark-complexioned child, who would never be able to pass as an ethnic Pole, behind to die. It is no wonder that the families of Mr and Mrs Rosenblat find it hard to forgive the man who wasted his voice on fantasy when the reality spoke so much more poignantly of the power of love.
9
RELIGION
HOAXES INSPIRED BY theological debates might, to an atheist, sound slightly boring. But from the reclusive German priest who wrote the dark, reality-fairy tale The Amber Witch to the academic genius who could not rein in his love of practical jokes when he found himself alone in a monastic library in Morocco, these are some of the boldest and best pranks in literature. Not to mention the most influential in terms of the books people believe in now. For without the crazy schemes of a provincial Frenchman in the 1950s there would be no one who believes you can find the secret of Jesus’ bloodline in the Louvre. And without the violent acts of a disenfranchised Mormon in the 1980s, one of America’s most influential church groups would be resting far more comfortably on its Utah laurels than it is today.
JOHANNES WILHELM MEINHOLD
THE EARLY LIFE of Johannes Wilhelm Meinhold was one not even the most fanciful of German romantic novelists could have made up. Born on the lonely Baltic island of Usedom to an impecunious Lutheran pastor and his wife, his formative years were spent in the company of books, pious adults and nature – he never even saw another child of his age until he left the island to continue his education at the University of Greifswald in 1813. It was always assumed that Johannes would follow his father into the clergy, and indeed that was what the young man seemed to want for himself, but not before spreading his wings for a while in his provincial college town, where he made a name for himself as one of his year’s most enthusiastic drinkers. He also began to write poetry, and when a volume of his work was given a small print run it was, to his delight, well reviewed by Goethe himself.
However, Meinhold was an inherently religious young man and after he had got his rebellion out of the way he continued with his theological education, taking his doctorate at the age of twenty and then being posted to a series of dull institutions to further his professional practice. His first job, in 1821, was as rector of the school of Usedom, and soon after he was promoted to the role of pastor at Koserow church on the same island. He moved around the district working at different churches, but it was with Koserow that he would come to be infamously associated in years to come, because it was there that he set his most famous literary creation. In fact, he stayed there little more than a year, moving on to the isolated diocese of Krummin, where he would spend the next sixteen years performing the unchanging cycle of duties of the country pastor.
It was during this quiet time that his literary career began to preoccupy him more and more. As well as poems, he now turned his hand to prose, hoping, no doubt, that his mature talents would be recognized, as his youthful poetry had been. These were the years that the new German Romantics – Hegel, Schlegel and Heinrich Heine – were taking over from classical writers like Goethe and Schiller, and Germany was by far the most happening place on the European literary scene. It was also the time of the Napoleonic wars and most of Europe was in the grip of a revolutionary fever which resulted not only in the creation of fine poetry, prose and music but of philosophical and theological developments which were, to a conservative like Meinhold, utterly shocking.
One of the most famous revolutionary religious thinkers of the day was David Strauss and it was for him and his followers that Meinhold reserved his strongest disdain. Strauss believed that Jesus ought to be seen as a historical figure, not a divine one, and set about deconstructing the Bible to support his thesis, which he published under the title Leben Jesu (Life of Jesus). In this unprecedented book he rereads Jesus’ miracles in strictly mythical terms, ignoring both the rational explanations and the div
ine ones that had split Enlightenment thinkers into two groups. Strauss was a genuinely radical thinker and by the time Mary Ann Evans (aka George Eliot) translated his work into English in 1846, he was officially the leading subversive writer on Christianity in Europe and had a wide following. He was also very young (twenty-seven when he published the Leben) and fiendishly handsome, which may well have inflamed Meinhold’s ire even more.
To a man like Meinhold, saying that the virgin birth was merely a silly story invented to please Messiah-hungry Jews in the aftermath of Jesus’ death (one of Strauss’ most famous theories) was the worst kind of sacrilege. He felt that people who believed this sort of thing would believe anything and were incapable of discerning what was a real historical document and what was not. And in 1839 he began to focus all his literary skills and ideological indignation on proving that this was the case.
One of the most popular subjects in Germany at that time was the supernatural, and literature across Europe was in thrall to the vogue for gothic fiction. Meinhold decided that a ‘discovered’ book about a medieval witch trial which would also give him the opportunity to pontificate on the history of the Thirty Years’ War and the behaviour of the Catholic church in relation to magic and paganism, was just the thing. So the story of The Amber Witch was born. The given author was to be Reverend Abraham Schweidler, a pastor at the church of Koserow in the seventeenth century who had nearly lost his only child, Mary, to a witch trial; and in the preface, the ‘editor’, Wilhelm Meinhold, would describe how the manuscript had come into his possession:
At Koserow, in the Island of Usedom, my former cure, the same which was held by our worthy author some two hundred years ago, there existed under a seat in the choir of the church a sort of niche, nearly on a level with the floor. I had, indeed, often seen a heap of various writings in this recess; but owing to my short sight, and the darkness of the place, I had taken them for antiquated hymn-books, which were lying about in great numbers. But one day, while I was teaching in the church, I looked for a paper mark in the Catechism of one of the boys, which I could not immediately find; and my old sexton, who was past eighty . . . stooped down to the said niche, and took from it a folio volume which I had never before observed, out of which he, without the slightest hesitation, tore a strip of paper suited to my purpose, and reached it to me. I immediately seized upon the book, and, after a few minutes’ perusal, I know not which was greater, my astonishment or my vexation at this costly prize. The manuscript, which was bound in vellum, was not only defective both at the beginning and at the end, but several leaves had even been torn out here and there in the middle. I scolded the old man as I had never done during the whole course of my life; but he excused himself, saying that one of my predecessors had given him the manuscript for waste paper, as it had lain about there ever since the memory of man, and he had often been in want of paper to twist round the altar candles, etc. The aged and half-blind pastor had mistaken the folio for old parochial accounts which could be of no more use to any one.
No sooner had I reached home than I fell to work upon my new acquisition, and after reading a bit here and there with considerable trouble, my interest was powerfully excited by the contents . . .
This story is so similar to others of the found object school of literary hoaxing that it is hard not to echo the Shakespeare scholar Malone’s response to the William Henry Ireland affair in saying that ‘after the demolition of the chest with six keys [Chatterton’s], I did not expect to have heard again, for some time at least, of such a repository for ancient manuscripts’.
Meinhold, however, goes on in his preface to play a far more complex game with his learned readers than the boys Chatterton and Ireland, admitting that he has filled in a few of the missing pages in the text himself in a manner he hopes is consistent with the tone and content of the ‘original’ author’s work:
This I have done with much trouble, and after many ineffectual attempts; but I refrain from pointing out the particular passages which I have supplied, so as not to disturb the historical interest of the greater part of my readers. For modern criticism, which has now attained to a degree of acuteness never before equalled, such a confession would be entirely superfluous, as critics will easily distinguish the passages where Pastor Schweidler speaks from those written by Pastor Meinhold.
The story that follows is an account of Mary Schweidler’s wrongful arrest and trial after a spurned suitor decided to get revenge on her by accusing her of magic acts. Unfortunately for Mary and her God-fearing father, the suitor is the local sheriff and he brings all his corrupt power to bear on those trying her for the crimes her father knows she did not commit. Ultimately, the girl confesses that she is indeed a witch in an attempt to avoid the terrible tortures she is being threatened with, and is sent to the scaffold to die. At the eleventh hour, however, she is saved by a valiant man of noble birth who is able to reveal the sheriff’s true motivation, prove that she was lying about the witchcraft, and see that justice is done.
The fairy-story structure and convincing eighteenth-century orthography (Meinhold was nothing if not a thorough scholar) captivated audiences immediately, and the text, originally published within a historical journal due to its relevance to the period of the Thirty Years’ War, became an instant hit among the German-speakers of Europe. Some libraries even classified it as a historical legal record. Certain experts, however, began to question just how much of it was the work of the ‘editor’ and how much was Schweidler’s, but it was not until one very important reader approached Meinhold for more information that the author was forced to confess.
Friedrich Wilhelm IV, King of Prussia, was an enthusiastic Romantic with a particular passion for all things medieval. He was also a committed Lutheran. As soon as he saw that a learned pastor had produced a historical study of a German girl caught up in a witch trial and saved by chivalric love, he knew he must read it. And no sooner had he read it than he sent to Meinhold praising his marvellous discovery and sensitive editing, and asking whether he wouldn’t like it to be published (lavishly, no doubt) as a stand-alone book with the king’s help. Appalled that his hoax had gone so far, Meinhold confessed to the king what he had, up until then, denied to everyone else: that the entire thing had been a fabrication designed to show up the poor literary critical skills of his theological bête noir. But the story was so well told that the king cared not one bit and insisted that the work should be published regardless, which it was, under the title Die Bernsteinhexe (The Amber Witch).
The king was not alone in disregarding Meinhold’s confession as a minor detail. Indeed, as happens so often with particularly well-crafted hoaxes, many of the book’s fans refused to believe it was the work of a quiet little pastor from Usedom. Meinhold was reduced to showing these determined fans his preparatory notes and rough drafts to prove what they did not want to believe was true.
Eventually, when the book’s true authorship was proved beyond doubt, the academic and publishing worlds, humiliated by Meinhold’s trickery, repaid him the only way they knew how: by ignoring him for the rest of his life. His literary output (which included another witch novel, about a girl called Sidonia von Bork) was never to receive the attention from German critics that others in Europe felt it deserved.
There is an amusing postscript to this story. In 1861 the eccentric Victorian translator and socialite Lucie Duff Gordon came across the book and knew that the horror-loving readers of her milieu would react enthusiastically to it. An accomplished writer in French and German as well as English, she prepared an excellent translation of The Amber Witch and published it in London. But nowhere did it say that the original author was Johannes Meinhold; she blithely passed it off as her own work, making her edition the first example of a literary hoax within a literary hoax. And Meinhold’s British afterlife did not end there: his book Sidonia was also taken up by an English-speaking lady novelist and translated for her countrymen. Indeed, Sidonia the Sorceress went on to be by far the best selling o
f the thirteen books published by the woman who wrote under the name Speranza. That woman was Lady Jane Francesca Elgee aka Lady Wilde, aka the mother of that real-life victim of a wrongful witch-hunt, Oscar Wilde.
ROBERT COLEMAN-NORTON
SUBSCRIBERS TO THE Catholic Biblical Quarterly in 1950 must have raised a quizzical eyebrow when they saw in the contents page that the respected Princeton historian Paul Robert Coleman-Norton had submitted an article called ‘An Amusing Agraphon’.
Agraphon is the Greek for ‘unwritten’ but to theologians it refers to teachings and sayings of Jesus which, although taken to be true, are not written down in the canonical Gospels. There are many examples, but few if any of them could be described as amusing. Coleman-Norton’s article began on page 439 of the esteemed journal and over the following ten pages told an extraordinary story. He was a teacher at Princeton when war broke out, and his intelligence work in Europe had, he wrote, taken him to Morocco. It was 1943 and his platoon found themselves in the French-controlled town of Fedhala, where there was a fine old mosque. Knowing his interest in matters of ancient history and literature, his colleagues were not surprised when he ventured inside to look around. He, however, got the surprise of his life when the kindly keeper of the place offered to show him some of the rare books and parchments that were held there, and proceeded to open up a book which contained, in amongst the usual Arab texts, a most unusual piece of Greek. It was one page only and had seemingly been slipped inside this other book at random. It was a Greek translation of a set of Latin homilies on the book of Matthew, concerning chapters 1–13 and 19–25. And there was something there that was entirely unfamiliar to him. It would of course have been a terrible faux pas to remove the scrap of paper for further study, and due to the circumstances of war there was no time to go back to his base and fetch a camera. Instead, Coleman-Norton sat down and made a hasty but perfectly accurate copy of the text and slipped it into his pocket to peruse at his leisure.
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