Katja Petrowskaja’s Translational Poetics of Memory

Abstract

A new perspective on Katja Petrowskaja’s Maybe Esther (2014) goes beyond earlier interpretations of the novel, which tend to privilege analytic frameworks of minor literatures, German Jewish literature, or Holocaust postmemory. This article reads the novel as cultivating a translingual approach to transnational memory of the entangled histories of the Holocaust and Soviet state terror in Central and Eastern Europe. Drawing on precepts of multilingualism that are more than merely additive, the analysis foregrounds Petrowskaja’s innovative contributions to translingual and even postlingual practices in contemporary literature. As this article demonstrates, she writes translationally at the porous borders of ostensibly discrete languages by highlighting the materiality of language, deploying prose rhymes and homonyms, and using idiomatic expressions across languages. The article argues that Maybe Esther is more than a text of a minoritarian German Jewish literature alone, for it can also be viewed as a transnational text that only happens to be written in German. Drawing on Michael Rothberg’s concept of “multidirectional” memory and Kristin Dickinson’s concept of “omnidirectional” disorientations in translation, the article argues that Petrowskaja’s entangled remembering of the mass violence and state terror of the twentieth century can be described as a translational transnationalism attentive to multiple localities, histories, and memory cultures in Europe.