Katja Petrowskaja’s acclaimed autobiographical debut Vielleicht Esther (2014) is based on two primary experiences, Petrowskaja’s emigration from Kyiv (Soviet Ukraine) to Berlin and her literary “return home,” a journey that takes her to sites of extreme violence in World War Two, including Warsaw, Kyiv, and Mauthausen. This journey home in search of her family story takes her through the geographic space between Germany and Russia that Timothy Snyder terms the “bloodlands.” This paper examines how Petrowskaja connects divergent histories and memories across national borders to plot her Ukrainian Russian family story in the extensive landscape of violence in the “bloodlands.” It highlights how Petrowskaja, who writes for the implied German reading audience, moves between German and Soviet memory cultures and frames of reference to bring to the fore tragedies of World War Two that occurred outside of the Western frame of reference. Interpreting the wartime experiences Petrowskaja transmits through family stories and her contemporary position as a Jewish Ukrainian Russian-speaker who writes in German, it shows how Vielleicht Esther renders the losses and erasures of the twentieth century visible. Ultimately, Petrowskaja’s narrative exemplifies literature’s ethical and affective power to recover silenced histories and foster a transnational culture of remembrance.
Brigitte Rossbacher (Wed,) studied this question.