Abstract
This article examines subjunctive approaches to history and memory as a novel aesthetic and ethical mode of Holocaust (post-)memory in two prominent examples of contemporary German-Jewish ...fiction. I argue that Katja Petrowskaja’s Vielleicht Esther (2014) and Robert Menasse’s Die Hauptstadt (2017) develop subjunctive modes of Holocaust (post-)memory as a response to a crisis of witnessing in the post-survivor era. Faced with the dying out of the survivor generation and the increasing institutionalization and hypermediation of Holocaust memories, these two authors invoke the subjunctive to self-reflexively account for their historical positionality and critique monolithic memory discourses (Petrowskaja), while also aiming to (re-)invest a stagnant culture of Holocaust memory with political urgency and futurity (Menasse). Subjunctivity thus emerges as a central yet underexamined mode of contemporary German-Jewish writing which has the potential to transform wider cultures of Holocaust (post-)memory, by moving ‘beyond the traumatic’ (Rigney 2018) in the direction of futurity.
The chapter deals with Katja Petrowskaja's text Maybe Esther. A Family Story as a trans-generational European-Jewish memory book. The book may be characterized as a deeply poetic and-at the same ...time-mainly non-fictional text, based on Petrowskaja's family biography but not limited to the family's memory. Catastrophes are omnipresent in this text and are the basis of a melancholic and ironic view on contemporary Europe. The understanding of the European history and present time is deeply postcatastrophic, sometimes hidden behind irony. But at the same time, the portrait of the family background is filled with a utopian hope, fueled by a belief in the power of language, culture, and "Bildung." Therefore, the chapter focuses on the tension between traditional cultural values, generational perspectives, and a completely dislocated, postcatastrophic family memory. Although German is the current literary language of the Ukrainian-Jewish-born author, Petrowskaja is writing between languages as different as Russian, Polish, Ukrainian, and German, thus reflecting her family's migration and flight through East and Central European countries. Although the Holocaust experience is the most important reference and remaining dark shadow in the author's writing, a fact that is underlined in the statement "The holocaust is our antiquity," there is a strong positive energy in this family history, an outcome of their educational engagement for deaf-mute children. Thus, Maybe Esther presents the Jewish family tradition as a true European heritage.
This chapter deals with Katja Petrowskaja's text Maybe Esther. A Family Story as a trans-generational European-Jewish memory book. The book may be characterized as a deeply poetic and-at the same time-mainly non-fictional text, based on Petrowskaja's family biography but not limited to the family's memory. Therefore, the chapter focuses on the tension between traditional cultural values, generational perspectives, and a completely dislocated, postcatastrophic family memory. There is a famous memory book in Polish, situated between the Polish, Ukrainian, and Austrian culture that was published in English in New York in 1946. The decisive features of the international success of her Russian-Polish-Ukrainian family biography include the rather optimistic energy in Petrowskaja's text, as well as her fragmentary portrayal of her family and their cultural world, and their engagement beyond national affiliation, surely is one decisive feature of the international success of her Russian-Polish-Ukrainian family biography.
