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.
In his 2018 travelogue Entlang den Gr & auml;ben. Eine Reise durch das & ouml;stliche Europa bis nach Isfahan, Navid Kermani describes a journey from eastern Germany to Poland, Lithuania, Belarus, Ukraine, Crimea, southern Russia, Georgia, Azerbaijan, Armenia, and Iran. Kermani covers a large geographic area and travels in time, searching for his parents' roots in Iran while traversing territories marked by century-old conflicts and shifting borders. He describes many locations from a postmigrant and western perspective: as the son of Iranian exiles, he represents a minority within Germany, but travels to Eastern Europe as a westerner. The transnationalization and multidirectionality of Holocaust remembrance figure prominently in Kermani's book, which is influenced by Timothy Snyder's Bloodlands. Traveling east toward Iran, Kermani's associations shift subtly from postmigrant German to Iranian perspectives. The "border" in its multi-layered meanings-as political borders between nations, literary borders between genres, and border crossing within literary theory-is an overarching theme in Entlang den Gr & auml;ben.
This article focuses on German-Bosnian author Sa & scaron;a Stani & scaron;i & cacute;'s texts Herkunft (2019), "In diesem Gew & auml;sser versinkt alles" (2016), and Wie der Soldat das Grammofon repariert (2006) in the context of the events that constitute Europe's violent twentieth-century history. In a first step, it reconstructs the transeuropean inscription of these narratives in particular through the establishment of specific "lineages of war." In a second step, the essay reconstructs the texts' diegetic engagement with death in the context of the Bosnian war of the mid 1990s. Memory processes in both texts are the product of a continuous negotiation of competing historical memories (Rothberg) and as part of an ongoing dialogue. By establishing a lineage between World War Two, the deadly atrocities taking place during the Bosnian wars, and today's violence from the Extreme Right in Germany, this article traces the ways in which Stani & scaron;i & cacute;'s narratives question the idea of Germany as a monolithic cultural space, to instead show its functioning within a multiplicity of memory threads. His texts emphasize that Germany today is, and for some time has been, more than its geographical borders can contain and more than its invisible internal borders can hierarchize.
Josef Haslinger's novel J & aacute;chymov (2011) engages with a particular troubling episode of Czechoslovakia's immediate postwar history: the arrest of the entire national ice hockey team on 13 March 1950 and its members' subsequent imprisonment and condemnation to work in the uranium mines of J & aacute;chymov, having been accused of treason, criticism of the regime, and the intention to emigrate. In the novel, an aging publisher in poor health, Anselm Findeisen, gets to know the daughter of one of the prisoners, Bohumil Modr & yacute; (1916-1963), and encourages her to tell her father's story including the traumatic impact of what happened on her father and herself. The novel uses a multidirectional model of memory, integrating and moving between various historical narratives: the history of the "Third Reich"; Czechoslovakia before, during, and right after World War Two; the past of other Eastern Bloc countries, and finally also the history of Western Europe. The main characters in the novel J & aacute;chymov seek to develop strategies on how to communicate on traumatic events. In doing so, the text tries to imagine a "life in common" informed by a reflection on the "bloodlands," the history of trauma and violence-experienced in many different ways-that needs to be acknowledged in order to understand Europe today.
This article examines the themes of memory, trauma, and intergenerational legacy in Ulrike Draesner's novels Sieben Spr & uuml;nge vom Rand der Welt (2014) and Die Verwandelten (2023). Drawing on the theoretical frameworks of postmemory, dialogical remembering, and multidirectional memory, the study explores how Draesner addresses Nazi racial policies and their long-lasting impact on subsequent generations. The novels, set in the 'Bloodlands' as defined by Timothy Snyder, focus on transgenerational trauma in families entangled in the consequences of forced sterilization, Lebensborn policies, and displacement. Particular attention is paid to how Draesner contrasts narratives of 'positive' and 'negative' eugenics and reflects on German and Polish perspectives of shared and individual trauma. By intertwining personal and collective histories, Draesner creates a literary dialogue that transcends national boundaries, offering a nuanced approach to understanding the intergenerational effects of historical violence and memory.
This paper examines the theme of silence in Sasha Marianna Salzmann's essay "Der Gro ss e Hunger und das lange Schweigen" in response to Russia's invasion of Ukraine on 24 February 2022. In their essay, Salzmann examines this invasion in the context of their own long unawareness of Ukrainian history, stemming from the silences within their Russian-speaking Soviet-Ukrainian family. Salzmann weaves reflections on language and its potential to harbor murderous silences into their diagnosis of contemporary Russia's festering ailment: the amputation, imposed by the regime, of historical memory for the sake of an ideologically expedient narrative. Salzmann juxtaposes what can be interpreted as fragile "postmemory" and a monumentalizing mnemopolitics, which exemplifies what Timothy Snyder has called Russia's "politics of eternity"-an ideological strategy that suppresses human plurality and finitude through a static, binary framework. Drawing on Michael Rothberg's concepts of "multidirectional memory" and "the implicated subject," this paper traces patterns of implication in Salzmann's account, conditioned by their positionality as a Jewish person with a post-Soviet, Russian-Ukrainian background writing in German.
