Petrowskaja's Vielleicht Esther (Maybe Esther): Poetic of Memory

Katja Petrovskaya is a German prose author and journalist born in Kyiv, who today is known for her outstanding memoir-like narrative style and her contribution to memoir literature. Her most famous book is the novel Maybe Esther, with which she debuted in 2014. The novel, which focuses on the history of Petrowskaya’s family, belongs to the series of retrospective, mostly autobiographical memoirs that have dominated the German book market since the 1990s. The narrator tells the story of her family, namely her relatives, both from her mother’s and father’s sides, and above all the story of her grandmother, who might have been called Esther, which influenced the title and the main motif of the novel. In many ways, Petrovskaya's novel is similar to all those written in the tradition of German memorial literature, although Petrovskaya's alter ego – the narrator – emphasizes in her stories that she creates a fiction. This bachelor thesis, therefore, focuses mainly on the way the memories are constructed in the book and on the methods of fictionalization used in the creation of the plot, as well as on the alienation effect created by using the German language.