The Impostor

by Javier Cercas

  On the corner of the street where my office is located, there was an Irish pub. Blanca and Montse suggested they go in; Amézaga agreed, and I said my goodbyes. I felt a pang of jealousy, I don’t know whether it was because of the drinking session they were about to embark on or because I imagined that, even though I was no longer there (or precisely because of it), they would keep talking about Marco. Before leaving, I asked them a stupid question, one I’d never asked anybody though I’d wanted to for a long time: I asked whether they believed Marco was an ordinary man or an extraordinary man. The three of them chorused:

  “Extraordinary!”

  I went up to my office; I didn’t need to jot down their reply on my notepad.

  PART III

  The Flight of Icarus

  1

  When was the first time? When did Marco first say he had been a prisoner at Flossenbürg? Where did he say it? To whom did he say it? I don’t know precisely; nor do I think that even Marco knows. All indications, however, are that it must have happened around 1977.

  At the time, Marco was fifty-six and had already been lying about his past for some considerable time, or at least embellishing it or embroidering it, mixing lies with truth. Franco was two years dead and the country was completely reinventing itself; as was Marco: he had furnished himself with a personal history as an anti-Franco resistance fighter, had changed his name, his wife, his home, his city, and almost his job since, though he was still a mechanic, he was principally a trade union leader at the C.N.T. Marco was studying history at the Autonomous University, and one day he came across a book entitled La deportación, published in 1969 by Ediciones Petronio. It was a translation of a French text offering an overview of the Nazi camps. The book contained a chapter on the subject of Flossenbürg; in this chapter, there were various photographs of the camp: photos of the barracks and the watchtowers, of prisoners working in the quarry, of the cremation furnace, of Reichsführer-SS Heinrich Himmler visiting the facilities. One of these pictures caught Marco’s attention. It depicted a monument on which were engraved the number and the nationalities of prisoners who died in the camp; Marco noticed that among them were people from most European countries, and more especially, Spaniards, but very few: fourteen, to be exact. This information was inaccurate—which is important in the context of history with a capital H, but in our story matters little. What is important is that, when he saw the photograph, Marco, with the infallible sense of a compulsive liar, knew instinctively that the tiny number of Spaniards who died made it possible for him to fabricate a stay in a lesser-known concentration camp he had never heard of, with only the remotest possibility that anyone could contradict him; after all, at the time, Marco knew very little about the Nazi camps, but he knew three things that were crucial to his deception: firstly, most people in Spain knew even less about the subject than he did; secondly, very few Spaniards had been in the Nazi camps; thirdly, the vast majority of these had been in Mauthausen. Years later, Marco assured me that, as soon as he saw this photograph, he decided to pass himself off as a prisoner of Flossenbürg to bear witness to the memory of the fourteen dead Spaniards whom nobody now remembered. Bullshit: Marco decided to pass himself off as a prisoner of Flossenbürg because he couldn’t resist the temptation to add a new chapter to the story of the anti-fascist resistance fighter he’d been crafting for years.

  He added it immediately. As I said: I don’t know to whom he told this first lie, whether to his wife, whom he had just won over and with whom he was living in Sant Cugat, to his comrades in the C.N.T., or to his friends at the university, whom he had also succeeded in charming; what I do know is that, that same year, two men who were jointly writing a book about Spanish Republicans who had been sent to the Nazi camps heard that Marco had been among them and went to visit him. From a documentary or historiographical point of view, at least, the subject was virgin territory (or almost: in the same year the novelist Montserrat Roig wrote a long article on the subject, though this was limited to Catalan prisoners); the two men in question were Maríano Constante and Eduardo Pons Prades. Constante was a communist and a survivor of Mauthausen concentration camp; Pons Prades was an anarchist and a prolific writer, and our man knew him because he was a member of the union of liberal professions within the C.N.T. It was to Pons Prades that Marco told his story. He did so with his usual skill, intermingling his real and his fictitious past, but most importantly he did so cautiously, because he’d had neither sufficient time nor interest to manufacture a biography as a camp prisoner, something that was of little value in Spain at the time, and consequently he couldn’t lie safely with convincing details; in fact, in his account to Pons Prades, Marco devoted only a single sentence to his time in the camp, a diabolically effective sentence, admittedly, formulated as a safeguard or a loophole in the event that he was challenged by witnesses: “I spent very little time in Flossenbürg, and since I was transferred from one place to another and was kept in solitary confinement, I could not make contact with anyone.” The remainder of the story, which is also brief, we already know: it recounts his fictitious membership in the U.J.A. after the Civil War, his fictitious furtive departure from Spain, his fictitious incarceration in Marseille and his fictitious time in a subcamp of Flossenbürg; also his exploits during the Civil War and his time in Kiel prison, both true—true but glossed with a veneer of the heroism and sentimentality Marco favoured in such cases.

  The book by Constante and Pons Prades was published in 1978 and in the same year, Pons Prades included an abridged version of Marco’s story, with some variations, in a pioneering article that appeared in the magazine Tiempo de Historia about the Spanish Republicans imprisoned in Nazi camps. Marco wasn’t very happy with either of these versions, not because they didn’t correspond to the story he’d told Pons Prades, but probably because he immediately realised they were wrong. He had managed to elbow his way into the photograph, but it was a blurred, washed-out photograph. During this period of collective metamorphosis, everyone in Spain understood the power of the past, Marco better than anyone, but he had just recycled part of his true past—his time as a volunteer worker in Kiel in the 1940s—without having the information to construct a solid fictional past. It’s clear that at this point in his life, Marco was ashamed of having been a volunteer worker in Hitler’s Germany, but he must have wondered whether the experience might be of genuine use—particularly the episode of his arrest and imprisonment—beyond the anecdotal use he had made of it in the two published accounts of his time in Germany. In these, Marco had linked his fictional time in Flossenbürg with his genuine time in Kiel prison without giving it much thought. Now he must have been wondering whether it would be easier to fabricate a connection, make it more convincing, whether he could shore up his time in Kiel. Could he? What evidence was there of his presence in Nazi Germany? The important thing was to be able to control this hidden part of his past, he must have thought; afterwards he could decide what to do with it.

  This hypothetical reasoning (or something like it) would explain why, on April 12 of that year, Marco wrote to the Spanish consul in Kiel requesting information about his time in Germany thirty-five years earlier. The letter is postmarked Barcelona and bears the seal and the letterhead of the C.N.T. To give greater impetus to his request, Marco signed it as secretary general, C.N.T. Spain; in fact that was not his title—he would be elected to the post precisely ten days later—at the time he was merely secretary general of the Catalonia chapter of the C.N.T. The letter reads:

  To the attention of the Spanish Consul,

  We would like to request information about Enrique Marco Batlle, a Spanish national, who was stationed in the Deutsche Werke camp in Kiel, located in Bordesholm.

  He was arrested by the Gestapo in Kiel on March 7, 1942.

  Remanded to Kiel prison, but does not remember the precise date.

  Charged with conspiring against the Third Reich.

  Tri
ed by a Court Martial, date unknown.

  Transferred to a Gestapo prison, about which he remembers only that it was located on Blumenstrasse.

  Transferred to Flensburg or Flossenbürg camp.

  Liberated by British Forces in 1945.

  All documentation for the period having disappeared, as it pertains to this person, we would be grateful if you could take an interest in the matter and provide us with such documentation and proofs as attest to the abovementioned facts.

  By the same token, we would be grateful if you could furnish us with an address for Bruno and Kathy Shankowitz, residents of Ellerbeck, Kiel.

  We remain, señor, yours faithfully,

  For the Secretariat of the National Committee Secretary General, Enrique Marco Batlle

  P.S. During this same period, he was listed as missing by the International Red Cross.

  To judge from the letter, Marco’s fears about his fictional status as a camp prisoner were justified, as was his worry that he had been inaccurate. He doesn’t even seem to know that it was the Americans, not the British, who liberated Flossenbürg, nor even how Flossenbürg is spelled (so hesitates between it and Flensburg, a town near Kiel). I would highlight three other details in the letters: Marco did not forget Bruno and Kathy Shankowitz, his friends and guardian angels in Kiel; he signs himself Marco, the name he went by in Germany, rather than Marcos, the name he went by when he signed this letter and while he was leader of the C.N.T.; Marco seems to be attempting to rectify the story of his time in Germany, or at least explore the possibility, perhaps so as to make the story more consistent and not to have to hide the fact that he was a voluntary worker: who knows whether Marco was trying to change the story of his time in Germany to that of the many Spaniards who, like him, went there willingly, but, unlike him, ended up in a Nazi camp against their will. Who knows.

  * * *

  —

  Marco’s letter received no response. Marco forgot about it; his post as secretary general of the C.N.T. during a period marked by great hopes, abrupt reversals and fierce internal struggles kept him sufficiently occupied such that he didn’t have time to concern himself with anything other than his work at the union. He didn’t think about the matter again (or there is no evidence that he thought about it) until four years later, when the transition from dictatorship to democracy was almost over, the C.N.T. had splintered into a thousand pieces, he had been expelled from the union and was languishing in one of the factions created by the schism, uncertain about his future and eager to find somewhere to invest that perpetual uncertainty, somewhere that might provide relief for his mediopathy. In March 1982, Marco wrote again to the Spanish consul in Kiel; this time he did so as a private individual, without the seal and the letterhead of the C.N.T., addressing it from his home in Sant Cugat. Marco enclosed a copy of his original letter, reiterated his request for information, justifying it by saying “I am motivated by no other intention than to document this period of my life which remains, even to me, somewhat mysterious.” Regretfully, he adds, “The lives of public figures are subject to certain constraints and in my case I find myself obliged to prove the how and wherefore of these events.”

  This time, Marco was more fortunate: and at the end of the following month, he received a letter from the Consul General of Spain in Hamburg. It was dated April 21, 1982, and in it the diplomat, Eduardo Junco, informed him that the first letter had never been received since there was no consulate in Kiel and the second had arrived only thanks to the Prussian diligence of the German postal service; he also informed Marco that he had initiated proceedings to obtain the requested information. He was unable to obtain much. Although the Spanish diplomat wrote to Marco several times over the following year, the only thing he managed to discover was that at the Missing Persons service of the West German Red Cross, there was no record of him. In mid-1983, the letters stopped; perhaps the consul realised it was a vain search; perhaps Marco grew tired of asking him to continue. The fact is that, some time later, Marco found a position at FaPaC and lost all interest in researching his true past in Kiel and using his fictitious past as a prisoner in Flossenbürg.

  His interest was not rekindled until fifteen years later, in the late Nineties. By this time, Marco knew that his days as vice-president of FaPaC were numbered—in principle, one could only remain a member of FaPaC while one had children of school age, and his elder daughter had already left school, and the younger was about to—so he realised that he would have to look for a new occupation suited to his energy levels and his requirements. It was at this point that he remembered the Amical de Mauthausen, the association that represented almost all the prisoners of the Nazi camps in Spain. Marco had known of the existence of the Amical for many years, but only now did he think of approaching them. He had felt no need to do so before, being busy with other responsibilities; nor could he have done so, in part because there were too many survivors likely to uncover his deception and in part because he hadn’t yet crafted a character plausible enough to risk meeting with genuine survivors of the camps. Having decided that now was the time to join Amical, since the number of survivors was steadily declining, and those who remained were now very old, Marco set about the serious work of constructing his character. The first thing he needed to do was control his true past in Germany, so his first effort, in late 1998, was to write again to the General Consul in Hamburg. The consul wrote back, referring Marco to the consular head of social services, José Pellicer, and so the two entered into correspondence as they sought out any traces of our man in Germany; Marco’s implicit aim being to rewrite his time in the country, his explicit aim to claim compensation as a victim of the Nazis.

  Not content with this, however, in early 1999, during the Christmas holidays, Marco travelled to Germany with his wife and visited Kiel. It was a disappointing visit, at least from what he told Pellicer in a letter written shortly after his return and dated January 7. In it, Marco says that he searched for the places he remembered in Kiel—the barracks in Bordesholm, the shipyards of the Deutsche Werke Werft, the prison and the university library—but everything had disappeared or had become unrecognisable, all save the former Gestapo gaol, which was now a police station; of his time in the city in the 1940s, there was no trace, nor of his arrest and trial; at the prison, he was told that all documents had been transferred to the Schleswig-Holstein state archive. Marco concluded his letter by asking Pellicer to continue his research, and this he did; for his part, Marco continued to fashion an identity as a former camp prisoner. An interesting document emerges in April 1999. On the 25th, La Vanguardia published a letter to the editor entitled “Life Is beautiful? Not always,” signed Enric Marco. The letter begins with the disagreeable impression made on our man by Life Is Beautiful, a sweet film about life in the Nazi camps for which actor Roberto Benigni won an Oscar that same year. “It is a feeling of rejection that I cannot quite describe,” Marco wrote, “although I have to admit that, in my case, I managed to survive thanks to the conviction that life is vital, regardless of circumstances, that you have to imagine that life is beautiful, to leap, to soar above the barbed wire where there is no real possibility of escape.” Immediately after this, in a terse paragraph, Marco gives an account of the punishments he suffered and those he witnessed in his fictitious experience as a camp prisoner, and concludes with a hymn to himself and a hymn to life not unlike that in Benigni’s film: “I still feel the pride of refusing to be annihilated, at having won the game, at still being alive, and feeling that, in spite of everything, life is beautiful. Everyone’s life. Yes, it is true, I felt an uncomfortable queasiness, one that might seem irrational in someone whose experience so closely mirrors the film. Perhaps I should go and see it again when my stomach stops churning.” There can be no doubt: Marco was publicly submitting his application for admission to the Amical de Mauthausen with all attendant honours; he was also quickly fashioning his new character.

 
Nothing was of greater help to him than his knowledge of Flossenbürg. His first visit to the village was in the spring of that year with his wife, with whom he had planned a holiday in Prague. While he was planning, or perhaps after they had arrived in Prague, Marco mentioned to Dani that Flossenbürg—the place where he had told her he had been a prisoner of the Nazis for several years—was not far from the Czech capital, and suggested they visit the camp, or what remained of it. Unlike his trip to Kiel, his visit to Flossenbürg was a success, though he had visited the former in search of his true past, and was visiting the latter in search of a fictitious past. By this time, the memorial site had already existed for several decades, but an institution tasked with administering the memorial had not yet been created—it was founded shortly afterwards, in late 1999—and the only resource in the village was an information office at the Town Hall. Marco and his wife were given a rapturous welcome; the reception was justified: although former prisoners of various nationalities visited the camp every year, this was the first time those in the information office had met a former prisoner from Spain.

  On their first trip to Flossenbürg, Marco visited the remains of the concentration camp with his wife—the SS Headquarters, the Appellplatz, the camp kitchen, the laundry, the Platz der Nationen, the crematorium—and took home all the information leaflets he could find. On his return to Barcelona, he set about reading them, or rather assimilating them, together with all the information he could track down on the camp prisoners in general, and the experience of the Spanish in particular. He quickly realised he had hit the jackpot. He discovered that, in Spain at that time, there were almost no serious studies about the camps, certainly not about Flossenbürg, a minor camp that was all but forgotten, particularly in Spain where nobody, or almost nobody, had even heard of it. He discovered that his deception would have been much trickier if he had chosen one of the well-known camps like Dachau or Buchenwald, and almost impossible if he had settled on Mauthausen, which had held the majority of the almost nine thousand Spaniards sent to the Nazi camps; Flossenbürg, by contrast, had seen very few Spaniards, and he could find no evidence of any that had survived the camp and were still alive, meaning that no-one in Spain could dispute his story (to say nothing of the fact that, unlike Mauthausen, where most of the Spaniards were housed together and knew one another, Flossenbürg had numerous, widely dispersed subcamps, and the prisoners had little contact with each other). And although he quickly learned that his deception would have been much easier had he been a Jew and claimed to have been sent there from Germany rather than from France—the transportation of Jews had left little paperwork compared to that of non-Jews and, unlike those from within Germany, deportations from France were reasonably well documented—he also discovered that a number of Flossenbürg prisoners appeared in the archives under incorrect names and many had not even been listed in the arrival register. Twenty-five years earlier, Marco had successfully passed himself off as an anti-Francoist agitator in a famously anti-Franco union with no shortage of members who had been anti-Franco resistance fighters, so why should he not be able to pass himself off as a former prisoner in a little-known Nazi camp among the few, ever-diminishing, increasingly elderly Spaniards who had been interned in Nazi camps? Besides, why would anyone attempt to unmask him? What purpose would it serve? What for?