Fake Identity?

Hochstapler geben vor, jemand zu sein, der sie nicht sind. Sie konstruieren eine Lebensgeschichte, die sich bestimmter kultureller Vorannahmen und Stereotype bedient, um für andere glaubhaft zu sein. Doch ist Identität nicht stets auch Produkt eines erzählerischen Selbstentwurfs? Am Beispiel von wahren und imaginierten Fällen von Betrügern in Nordamerika fragen die Beiträge des Bandes nach den Motiven von Hochstapelei, den Mechanismen der Täuschung - und warum diese funktionieren.

Autorentext
Caroline Rosenthal ist Professorin für amerikanische Literatur- und Kulturwissenschaft an der Universität Jena. Stefanie Schäfer, Dr. phil., ist dort wissenschaftliche Assistentin.

Leseprobe
Acknowledgments The present volume results from an international symposium held at the Friedrich-Schiller University Jena in April 2012, which most of the con-tributors attended. We are grateful to the Leipzig Consulate, the GKS, and the Alumni Association of Friedrich-Schiller University Jena for issuing publication grants which made this book possible at a time of economic austerity, and to Canadian indigenous writer Drew Hayden Taylor, whose short fictional piece truly embellishes this academic publication. We would particularly like to thank Mareike Dolata for her enthusiasm and tireless efforts in helping to edit this volume. Jena, December 2013 Caroline Rosenthal and Stefanie Schäfer Introduction Caroline Rosenthal and Stefanie Schäfer In 2008, after a spectacular thirty years of successfully impersonating other identities, Christian Karl Gerhartsreiter from Siegsdorf in Bavaria was discovered to be an impostor. The Bavarian had continuously reinvented himself in personas of ever increasing social status. He was, among others, Chris Gerhart, an affluent American; the thirteenth Baron of Chichester and descendant of the famous sailor; and finally became James Frederick Mills Clark Rockefeller, art collector, Wall Street trader, and a descendant of the famous American oil magnate. He married a rich businesswoman who divorced him twelve years later when she began to suspect that he was not who he pretended to be. Gerhartsreiter/Rockefeller's sham was only exposed when he kidnapped his seven year old daughter and became the subject of a manhunt on the American East Coast. Commentators on the Gerhartsreiter case agree that the story of his imposture reads too fantastic to be true (see Haas 2013, Seal 2011). Ger-hartsreiter's was a con game par excellence: He had no social security number or tax report, no credit cards or passports in his name, but con-vinced others to support him, both financially and socially. He so success-fully performed a legendary WASPish identity that bystanding socialites even identified his "Rockefeller chin [], a dead giveaway" (Seal 2011, 10). Not only did his acquaintances fail to see that his identity was faked, they over-construed it to show themselves as experts on such things as the chin of a scion. The Gerhartsreiter case thus renders the cultural conceptions at work in the making of personal identity: It has to be constructed and performed by a Self but also validated and authenticated by an Other. Impostor cases show that authenticity, the concept that is vital in identity formation, is a construct based on stereotypical markers of language, behavior, and dress. Imposture as discussed in this volume means posing as somebody more privileged. It entails shedding one's previous identity to take on a new one for personal gain, social, or financial improvement. Impostors are therefore invested in their performance in myriad ways. The present volume uses the impostor narrative to examine cultural constructions of identity and authenticity in North America through a literally negative lens. Confidence games, going Native, and racial passing are all renditions of the same process that is exposed when the audience stops to believe and authenticate it. In the deconstruction of 'true' identity the parameters at work in any identity construction become visible. Imposture and Authenticity: The Economy of Identity An imposed identity, just like any identity, is constituted in performative acts and becomes real or true when others take the masquerade at face value. As the Gerhartsreiter case and others have shown, impostors often 'become' the other person and leave their old identity behind. The new identity becomes true in an act of authentication. Authenticity thus func-tions as the 'currency' of identity formation. Imposture offers a means for historicizing and contextualizing what is authentic: 'Faked' white, male, or upper class identities illuminate that such categories are artificial to begin with. By the same token, 'fake' identity gives us insight into the myths and tropes that propel North American culture and the paradigms of the Western self at large. According to Aleida Assmann (2012), Western culture places a specific, culturally distinct meaning on authenticity which "shap[es] the orientation of values, attitudes, and action" (33). Authenticity builds on the premise of sincerity; we assume the other person is sincere and therefore also true. Authenticity and sincerity are both semantically dependent on their negatives, inauthenticity and insincerity. The counterfeit thus represents the standard by which authenticity is determined (see Balkun 2006, 17). Earnestness and truthfulness are verified by an instrument of social control. In Susanna Egan's view, this instrument is an embodied censorship authority that tracks down fake autobiography and literary imposture: the "doubt police" (2011, 28). Assmann, in turn, identifies this authority as a "suspicious gaze" that is able to unearth discord, a kind of radar for fakeness. Both Assmann and Egan argue that identity, or textual identity as claimed in self-narration, is subjected to a litmus test of authenticity. Assmann's suspicious gaze and Egan's doubt police point to the dy-namics of (fake) identity performance. In meeting others, we engage in an act of social positioning: "imposture presupposes posture" (Egan 2011, 150). If the identity of another person turns out to be fake this entails our own failure of judgment. Hence, we have an investment in encountering others. Authenticity therefore does not only designate an innate quality; in the symbolic economy of identity negotiation and recognition, it carries cultural value itself. While the impostor narrative per se has received little scholarly atten-tion, authenticity has stimulated increased interest in recent years. Philipp Vannini and Patrick Williams find that authenticity is sought-after as a "marker of status or method of social control" (2009, 3). Somogy Varga's philosophical take positions authenticity as an ethical ideal. He critically revisits, respectively, the "inner sense" and the "productionist" authenticity models. The former locates authenticity on the inside of the self, as brought forth by self-inspection; the latter finds authenticity in the world around us, available as a means for authenticating ourselves through our actions. The "inner sense" and "productionist" models of authenticity also underlie scholarly assessments of the term (see Varga 2011, Guignon 2013). Julia Straub, for instance, presupposes an inner sense model to argue that the very attempt to evoke authenticity is contingent, as claiming authenticity entails verbalizing that which is primarily an experience: "Once marked as authentic, the mediated character of the allegedly authentic comes to the fore, spoiling the illusion of the 'unspoiled' as it were." (2011, 10) At the turn of the nineteenth century, modernist thinking posed new questions about the links between the real and the self, as well as the self and…

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