Katja Petrowskaja's Translational Poetics of Memory
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 4070869 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Eneken Laanes (0000-0002-0725-9192, corresponding author) |
| Year | 2024 |
| Volume | 51 |
| Issue | 2 |
| Pages | 51-78 |
| Publication date | 2024-08-01 |
| Peer Reviewed | Yes |
| Open Access | No |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | New German Critique (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 0094-033X • E-ISSN: 1558-1462 |
| Publisher | Duke University Press (PUBLISHER • US) |
| DOI | 10.1215/0094033x-11165784 |
| OpenAlex | W4401244369 |
| Language | EN |
| References cited | 36 |
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
Art · Literature · Poetics · Poetry · Central European Literary Studies · Polish Historical and Cultural Studies · Polish-Jewish Holocaust Memory Studies
Making German Jewish Literature Anew
Voicing the Soviet Experience
Neighbors
Present Pasts
The Turkish Turn in Contemporary German Literature
From Gaza to Warsaw
Der Kampf um die europäische Erinnerung
The reconfiguration of the European Archive in contemporary German-Jewish migrant-literature
Memory in a Global Age
Transnational Memory
History, Memory, and Trans-European Identity
Introduction to the special issue – disputed Holocaust memory in Poland
The dual language model to explain code-switching
Unwelcome Memory
Are Russian Jews post‐colonial? Wladimir kaminer and identity politics
The Great Patriotic War as myth and memory
Conceptualizations of the Holocaust in Soviet and Post-Soviet Ukraine and Belarus
Encountering the Archive in Katja Petrowskaja’s Vielleicht Esther
Introduction
Bloodlands
Criminalizing Communism
The Postlingual Turn
Touching Tales of Turks, Germans, and Jews
On Not Knowing
Memory Unbound
| Citation velocity | historical |
|---|---|
| Highly cited | No |