Katja PETROWSKAJA: “There are no somebody else’s victims”

The name of Katja Petrowskaja rang loudly in Europe in 2013. The author first won the prestigious Ingeborg Bachmann Prize and then she was awarded the Italian Strega Prize for her literary debut – the novel Vielleicht Esther (Perhaps Esther) which tells the story of her family and also deals with epoch-making events. The October Revolution, the two world wars, the escape, emigration, Babyn Yar – the past century’s whole tragedy develops into a blend of destinies and real or probable names. Why Perhaps Esther? Is Petrowskaja not sure whether her grandmother, killed in Babyn Yar, was really named Esther? People who missed in action or were wiped off the face of the Earth… What did these people, whose histories are familiar in almost every Ukrainian family, leave after them, what do they want to say through the span of time? Katja Petrowskaja’s book is also sort of a search for her own identity and past.

This writer’s name rings a bell in Europe. In two years, Vielleicht Esther has attained a circulation of 50,000 copies, has seen five editions and been translated into more than ten languages. When the media began to report that “a Ukrainian female writer” had won a prize, people in Ukraine only scratched their heads. Who is she? Yet they quickly saved face: Knyhy-XXI published the book translated by Yurii Prokhasko. Besides, as Ukraine likes scandalous headlines so much, it has already seen a “little scandal” in which Petrowskaja was upbraided for daring to speak about Ukrainian society from abroad. This hurt Katja quite a lot because she used to raise and bring to the Maidan fantastic amounts of money, initiated the “Kyiv Dialogue,” and is so painfully worried about all the events in Ukraine. She says she will never forget Instytutska Street – the place she was born at, the place that ends her book, the place where people were shot.

We managed to meet in Berlin. The tangle of prejudices and doubts is being unraveled. The writer invites me to her spacious apartment in downtown Berlin, shows a gorgeous library, makes a cup of tasty tea, and gifts me several hours of meaningful conversation on her childhood’s topography, the map and the space of sympathy, and the need to reconsider the global anthropological problem.

 Your book was recently published in Ukrainian. You said in your previous interviews that you were even a bit afraid of a Ukrainian translation. What do you feel now that the book has come out? Can you feel its impact?

“Yurii Prokhasko’s translation is superb and interesting. I am very lucky. Yurii once suggested that I review the text, and I did so several times. You must be incredibly courageous to work frankly with the author. Yurii was keenly aware of this necessity, for the book is written on the borderline of two languages – it was written by a German person who had grown up in a Russian-language milieu, and Russian is transposed into German here.

“In other words, firstly, my German book is already a translation of sorts, for I did not write it in Russian, but there is no original for this translation. To be more exact, both the text and the ideas come from a certain interlinguistic and intercultural (rather than uncultured, I hope) space (laughs).

“World War Two is one of the book’s most important themes. Even my generation still felt the lasting impact of that war. The Soviet description of that tragedy was both very truthful and very deceitful. On the other hand, I was once astonished at the way modern-day Germans recall the war and their country’s role, guilt, and responsibility – this is known here as Erinnerungskultur, the culture of memory. So, linguistically, I moved between these two ways of recalling. But how can we apply this to culture, in which many words have remained unsaid or the same words may call up entirely different associations?

“It seems to me Yurii found the right method and intonation of writing and, what is more, a solution. I think it was not only an incredibly difficult search, but also something very interesting and transparent, and this feeling of transparent search dispelled all my fears.”

“THE TRAGEDY OF BABYN YAR IS A GLOBAL ANTHROPOLOGICAL PROBLEM”

 I just wanted to ask about the language, about what was going on inside you. Why did you decide to write in German?

“I’ve been living in Germany for 15 years, and the language began to set a certain rhythm inside me. Whenever I want to say something, this rhythm comes around automatically. At first I had no clear language-related strategy. Naturally, I recorded the tales of my parents and many others in Russian, but some stories turned into German almost immediately – they ‘wanted’ to be told in German. This was very much unexpected for me. For example, the story about a ficus. Father once told me that, when they were evacuating from Kyiv in the summer of 1941, their truck was filled to capacity, and there was even our neighbors’ ficus there. So, my grandfather removed the ficus and told my father to sit down at that place. It is the history of salvation. And suddenly my father says: ‘I don’t remember any ficus.’ You see, in Russian, there’s a very long distance between ficus and fiction. Fiktsiya means fiction as an invented story, while in German Fiktion means fiction as literature. Therefore, this literature, invention or conjecture explains the miracle of my father’s rescue and my own birth. In other words, literature is what is really going on.

“One more thing: if you write about a Soviet Jewish Ukrainian family in the Russian language, the text is very close to that of memoirs, but when you write in German, it is totally unclear who is speaking, who this ‘I’ is. The text assumes a certain level of abstractness, where my great-grandmother, ‘perhaps Esther,’ might have been anybody else’s grandmother. In other words, the change of languages causes something unexpected, for it is about not only who our ‘grandfathers’ were concretely and on whose side they fought, but also about the fact that it is our common landscape, our common sacrifices. This does not change the historical responsibility of one group of people to another. But, for me too, the German language was a way to stop lamenting about being a victim, which the native Russian language suggests for my history.

“Jewish origin prompts you to keep saying ‘we are a victim nation.’ It is like an inheritance, i.e., you are also a victim of sorts. Things are all too different with the ‘Soviet people,’ for if we agree that the Soviet people is a Patriotic War victim, then how will you explain the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact? If you write in Russian, you’ll find yourself in a contradictory context of ‘I am a victor’ and ‘I am a victim.’ If you write in German, you suddenly lose ground and begin to see this problem in terms of anthropology. There is man and violence, and nothing else. From this angle, it does not matter who reads. I wrote this book not because it is about my family. I just would like to be more unbiased – this is why German comes in handy. As is the case with many others, some of my relatives were also killed in Babyn Yar, but I write about this because it is a global anthropological problem, which we are unable to cope with and which occurred in my city – not because I am calling for sharing my sorrow. There are such things as space of sympathy and map of sympathy. As long as I sympathize with my city, I live in it. The book’s essential message is that one can understand another, that there are no ‘somebody else’s’ sufferings and victims – they are all ‘ours.’ We live in a common human space, this does not cancel our ethnic identification, our languages and preferences, but the catastrophe of this century and the sins of the Soviet empire are all mine.”

“VIELLEICHT ESTHER IS AN ATTEMPT TO CREATE A PERSONAL RITUAL OF MEMORY”

One of the key lines of Vielleicht Esther is search for yourself and your identity. Now that the book is finished, do you think you have found what you wanted to find?

“I did not set myself this goal. This must be a by-effect – you search for something but find something else. A search for your family’s history turns into a search for a language, identity or space. I wanted to gather histories. It is a small collection of the variants of fate. But I don’t think I searched for this. I searched for a particular way to accept history as it is and to bid farewell to the dead, the innocently killed, and to the past that held me in its grip. How can one overcome absolute evil or violence? It is faith that helps many in such cases. But I was not brought up in strict religious traditions which could help me resolve the problems of history and self-cognition. I don’t know any prayers – to be more exact, I do some, of course, but it is just knowledge. Maybe, the book is an attempt to create and perform a personal ritual of memory.”

Do you still continue to feel keenly about the book?

“I have never viewed this book as a rational exercise in therapy. It is a very strong sensation, when you let go of something – especially when you feel that you were unable to do better. I am lucky not so much because the book was a success as because it was received warmly and heeded, which is a striking feeling.”

Speaking of historical memory, we must admit that we still have many things to reconsider. But it is very important that this book has triumphed in Germany. What do you think was the reaction to your text?

“I feared very much that people would misunderstand me and think that I was using Jewish history again to drive them into a corner, I was afraid I had a ‘bonus topic.’ I deliberately wrote in German to avoid this. In other words, I made a Herculean effort to master the German language – it was sort of a reverse occupation, when all the Soviet victorious rhetoric (‘at any price’) was transposed into conquering the German language. There were so many comments on the book’s language. Sometimes they were so grateful that I was even embarrassed because I used to search for the right German words in dictionaries, surf the Google, and just exhaust myself in search of words when I only needed three, not four, syllables. I looked crazily for a right rhythm. This book is a search for the innocence of the language or even an attempt to bring innocence back to the language. For our hearts are torn to tatters because of the war and all these disasters. I tried to trace my way via the German language in order to see what was really happening but, on the other hand, not to violate my own soul. It is a very fine line, which is particular for each person. This book’s current life never stops surprising me. I finished the book in November 2013. The last chapter is about my comeback to the parental house on Instytutska Street, where I meet an old woman who says to me: ‘You are coming back here so often.’ Although I rarely visit this place, the woman and her words are not fictional. And I finish the book with the words: ‘Yes, I really come back here so often.’ Can you imagine what I felt when people were killed on Instytutska Street two months later?”

“LIES AND MISPLACED IDEAS TRIGGERED A NEW WAR – SUPPOSEDLY IN THE NAME OF PEACE”

 What do you feel every time you come back to Kyiv?

“…That I will never leave Instytutska Street. I left this place a long time ago, but I often come here, for my parents and friends live in Kyiv. Naturally, the city has changed very much, it is different now, but separation makes the city still more native. The same happens to people. And, in general, you know, there are ‘cities of childhood’ and ‘cities of maturity.’ They are not always identical. And the Maidan is, incidentally, a territory of my childhood. In reality, physical presence is important. I know that Ukrainians take a very dim view of the foreigners who speak about something. I can understand them. I’m not going to beat my breast and say how we all fought for Ukraine here. There is no such thing as somebody else’s sorrow – it is also yours.

“It seems to me that what began to happen after I’d finished the book is a curious continuation of the latter. There is nothing mystical in this. There are some things, which – if not discussed and thought over – come back on a different level. Thanks to the longtime efforts of society, Germany has a consensus about what peace and human life is. In Russia, this vanished quite a long time ago. What is going on now is the result of failure to reconsider the memory of war. It is lies, misplaced ideas, and the whole Soviet range of techniques. This triggered a new war – supposedly in the name of peace.”

A lot of problems arise due to the lack of knowledge. What do you think the German-Ukrainian discourse lacks?

“It lacks role models. What is Ukraine? How should this be told? Dmytro Stus used to ask if we have at least one world-level poet worthy of being translated. Where are positive cultural matrixes? What are they filled with? Ukraine is a multiethnic country. We should explain, not efface, diversity. We should work for inclusion, not for exclusion, and tell about our history. We all need each other.”