Contemporary Ukrainian writers as an ‘avant-garde’ of exile in the German literary field? Katja Petrowskaja and Kateryna Mishchenko

Abstract

In a recent podcast Kateryna Mishchenko asked whether she, as a Ukrainian author, has the right to participate in German discourses, and whether she can do so through the German language. This refers both to the public debate on the ‘Krieg in Europa’, following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, and, inextricably linked to it, memory discourses on the Holocaust and World War II. This article discusses Mishchenko’s perspective on the war in Europe in literary and non-literary texts in comparison to that of Katja Petrowskaja. Petrowskaja moved to Berlin in 1999 and made a name for herself with her family history Vielleicht Esther (2014). Both authors can be regarded as prominent voices within a post-Soviet exile community in Berlin. The article asks how contemporary authors from Ukraine who find themselves exiled in Germany are contributing to a politicization of the German literary field, and what role their contribution to a transnational memory of the Holocaust and World War II plays within this process, drawing on Hannah Arendt’s understanding of refugees as a transnational avant-garde in her essay of 1943.

Keywords:

• Post-Soviet
• Avant-garde
• Exile
• War
• Holocaust
• Transnational memory
• Europe
• Ukraine

Introduction

In her recent contribution to Stimmen zum Ukraine-Krieg, a series of podcasts produced by Mitteldeutscher Rundfunk, Kateryna Mishchenko asks whether she, as a Ukrainian author, has the right to participate in German discourses, and whether she can do so through the German language. This refers both to the public debate on the ‘Krieg in Europa’, following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, and, inextricably linked to it, memory discourses on the Holocaust and World War II. Having fled from Kyiv to Berlin in 2022, Mishchenko has been highly present in print media, talk shows, digital platforms, and is frequently invited to comment as a writer and translator in exile on current events in the context of her own work. In this article I will discuss Mishchenko’s perspective on the war in Europe in literary and non-literary texts in comparison to that of Katja Petrowskaja. Petrowskaja, who moved to Berlin in 1999 and made a name for herself with her family history Vielleicht Esther (2014), has adopted a similar role, making the case for Ukraine and placing it within a European historical narrative.¹ Both authors can be regarded as prominent voices among an increasing number of of writers and artists from Ukraine and other post-Soviet states who find themselves exiled in Berlin since February 2022.

In the following I will ask how exile authors from Ukraine are contributing to a politicization of the German literary field within a European context, and what role their contribution to a transnational memory of the Holocaust and World War II plays within this process. I will address these questions in reverse order: I would argue that the ‘Eastern European turn’² in German writing has not only moved German memory discourses further east. It is also contributing to a greater presence for international politics in the literary field, while creating a dynamic across different media. Authors who find themselves in exile — or acting as speakers for those left behind — are bringing an existential dimension to this, while raising questions on German and post-Soviet memory discourses.

In this sense, the authors discussed represent an ‘avant-garde’ of writers whose personal experience is transformed into a transnational perspective. Hannah Arendt described such a process in her essay ‘We Refugees’, published in The Menorah Journal in 1943. In her essay Arendt overturns the condition of the refugee — which she experienced herself — in order to propose this condition as the paradigm of a new historical consciousness. The refugee who has lost all rights, yet refuses to be assimilated at any cost, gains an inestimable advantage: For him (or her) ‘history is no longer the privilege of Gentiles. They know that the outlawing of Jewish people has been followed closely by the outlawing of most European nations. Refugees driven from country to country represent the vanguard of their peoples — if they keep their identity’.³ Today’s Ukrainian and other post-Soviet refugees have not suffered the loss of rights, language, professional existence and social standing in their countries of arrival, described by Arendt so poignantly, at least not on the level experienced by Jewish exiles fleeing from National Socialism and other groups of refugees today. Intellectuals like Mishchenko are able to communicate through German and other languages, they do not need visas and were already part of international cultural networks before leaving Ukraine. Nevertheless, they have still to some extent suffered the loss described by Arendt. They have developed a different historical consciousness as a result of it, or are in the process of doing so. This loss may have already occurred in the country they have left, or, as in Petrowskaja’s case, be interlinked with a postmemorial sense of pain that makes her part of the Jewish community as a community of victims: ‘Ich hatte keinen Grund zu leiden. Trotzdem litt ich, von früh an, obwohl glücklich und geliebt […].’ (VE 23)⁴

Applying the idea of a ‘vanguard’ to the literary field, one could think of these authors as an ‘avant-garde’. Their positioning in the German literary field potentially impacts on other positions and capital in this field, and on the way literature and politics interact. In this process perspectives on past and present also change.⁵

Transnational Memory

In the MDR podcast to be analysed in the second part of the article Mishchenko deals with the language of war, with terms such as Untermenschen and Vernichtungskrieg, and asks whether she, as a Ukrainian, has a right to actively participate in German memory and political discourses. Recent research on ‘transnational’ memory in German literature would suggest a yes as the answer. In her article from 2017 Jessica Ortner points out that ‘a considerable number of Eastern European migrant authors of Jewish origin are currently lifting Holocaust memory in a German context to a new level’.⁶ Focusing on events taking place in the ‘European East’ — in former communist countries which tended to be regarded as removed from a (West) German perspective during the Cold War, and as a cultural ‘Other’ in different historical periods, they expand the German framework of memory from a national to a ‘transnational’ one, exploring interconnections between two great European traumas, the Holocaust and the Gulag.⁷ While this has been a perspective prominent in the work of minority writers, transnational memory is not necessarily restricted to minority literature.⁸

Both, Petrowskaja’s Vielleicht Esther and Mishchenko’s work participate in this ‘Eastern European turn’ in recent German-language literature, with German-Jewish writing in particular having seen a surge in voices from Eastern Europe since around the turn of the millennium.⁹ Vielleicht Esther has also been discussed as an example of family or multigenerational novels about the Holocaust and Second World War.¹⁰ It may be worth noting that Mishchenko does not approach the past by way of her family history, or as a Jewish experience, and she does not have a Jewish family background. Instead, she takes a passionate stance on current events in Ukraine from a human rights perspective, placing events in the wider context of German and European history. What she has in common with Petrowskaja, however, in addition to her reception as a Ukrainian exile in the German literary and cultural landscape, is how this makes her part of a transnational avant-garde.

Petrowskaja, born in the Ukrainian capital Kyiv in 1970, grew up in a family where being Jewish, and a specific historical experience linked to it, was not discussed. This was at least in part due to the official discourse in the Soviet Union, which excluded religious or ethnic belonging from its grand narrative of twentieth-century history and identity. In Vielleicht Esther the narrator traces the history of her ancestors through the twentieth and back into the nineteenth century, with a focus on those who fell victim to the Holocaust, such as her great-grandmother Esther, killed during the massacre of Babyn Yar, but also other instances of historical violence. Her journey leads her across Europe, to cities like Vienna and Moscow, to the Warsaw Ghetto and Mauthausen, as sites of her family’s story, intricately linked with European history.¹¹ On the one hand, she feels a sense of pride in being part of a lineage whose members represent a European tradition of Enlightenment (91, 94). This applies to Simon Geller, who in around 1860 founded a school for deaf-mute Jewish children in Vienna, a family tradition of teaching to be continued through several generations. On the other hand, many of the narrator’s ancestors seem to have found themselves in outsider roles which made them victims rather than progressive agents. This also applies to her great-uncle Jeguda Stern, an unemployed non-party member who was classified as mentally unsound by the Soviets, following his attempt to assassinate a German diplomat in 1932 in Moscow. The narrator identifies with their outsider status within and beyond an imagined historical Jewish community, as enlightened Europeans and victims of violence and persecution. Their traces form part of the topography of European history she maps on her journey.

In the course of her search, the narrator becomes increasingly conscious that by virtue of her Jewishness and the history associated with it, she is brought to a place beyond choice, historical facticity and understanding in a Kantian sense. Trying to comprehend the scale of the massacre of Jews committed by the Nazis at the ravine of Babyn Yar in Kyiv in September 1941, one of the largest mass executions of the Holocaust, confronts her with an experience of alterity — and community — that goes beyond family or ethnic boundaries, to the level of humanity itself. When walking around the site of the killing, she is struck by the absence of humanity that it signifies for her, also in relation to the official commemoration of the event: ‘Was mir fehlt, ist das Wort Mensch’ (VE 191). Inextricably linked to the narrator’s place of childhood, Kyiv is a site of genocide, a crime against humanity, with members of her own family among its victims:

Kiew war einer von vielen Orten, wo es passierte, man sagt, es sei das größte zweitägige Massaker des Holocaust. 33771 Menschen tötete man in zwei Tagen. Eine merkwürdig genaue Zahl’ (VE 186).

Babyn Yar thus constitutes a central Leerstelle in the mosaic of the family history and provides a key focus for the narrative. It is a historical site of genocide, located on the eastern margins of Europe, which seems to have been largely forgotten within (post-)Soviet and German discourses of memory.¹² However, Petrowskaja also points to individuals who resist the pressure of dominant discourses and have the courage to trace a forgotten event in their narratives. They succeed in keeping a record in spite of physical traces having disappeared from where it took place. One example is the work of Anatoly Kuznetsov who witnessed the massacre as a child and began to bring visitors to the site as well as collect interviews by other witnesses (VE 191) for his book on Babyn Yar, to be published in 1966. One of these visitors was the Russian poet Yevgeny Yevtushenko who, under the impression of his visit, wrote a poem on Babyn Yar, which was published in a Russian literary journal in 1961 and reached a wide readership.¹³

The narrative also takes account of members of different communities, and individuals killed in Babyn Yar before and after the two-day-massacre:

Kriegsgefangene, Partisanen, Matrosen der Kiewer Flotte, junge Frauen, […] Passanten, die von der Straße weg festgenommen wurden […], ukrainische Nationalisten, die zuerst mit den Deutschen kollaboriert hatten’ (VE 186).

Throughout the book, this ‘multidirectional’ perspective makes her own family history an example of the complex entwinement of victimhood and guilt in Central and Eastern Europe, and affects questions of belonging.¹⁴ This also becomes apparent from the narrator’s research into the part of individual family members in historic events. By reconstructing her grandfather’s role as a socialist official, he is not reduced to a victim of Stalin’s warfare and later a prisoner of war in Germany; instead, he might also have been an accomplice in the Stalinist atrocities which took place before the war. Petrowskaja struggles to find a coherent frame in which to bring together different stories and perspectives, gradually accepting both its fragmentary and fictional nature as an essential feature of her narrative. The ‘maybe’ [‘vielleicht’] in the book title, Vielleicht Esther, alerts the reader to ambiguity as a central feature of the narrative, and in turn, of various modes of historical memory. The episodic chapter structure reveals emerging gaps of knowledge and memory.

‘Geopoetics’ as an Act of Resistance

The fragmentary character of the space constructed in the course of her journey resembles a mosaic with gaps and ‘Fugen’ (VE 12). According to her fellow Ukrainian writer Yuri Andrukhovych, the ‘autogeographic’ interlinking of biography and geography through an associative aesthetic which distorts and thus questions reality has been a feature of a Central and Eastern European ‘geopoetics’ that reclaims European identity and history from Soviet discourses and geopolitics.¹⁵ Apart from linking it to contemporary German-Jewish literature or archival postmemory, Vielleicht Esther can thus be placed in the wider context of post-Soviet writing that has emerged in German-language and other European literatures in the last two decades.

With the Russian invasion and occupation of parts of Ukraine on 24 February 2022, in a major escalation of the Russo-Ukrainian War which began in 2014, an increasing number of Ukrainian writers and oppositional voices from Russia and those post-Soviet states still closely aligned with Russia found themselves exiled. In this context, memory narratives in Vielleicht Esther, as well as in works of Ukrainian and other post-Soviet writers have taken on a political meaning, both for their readers and their authors. This also applies to Petrowskaja’s most recent book, Das Foto schaute mich an (2022), in which she addresses current political issues more directly, using snapshots of a Soviet and post-Soviet reality from the 1980s to today. The photographs spark associations and memories, which are put into short reflective texts.¹⁶ From 2015, and influenced by the Russian annexation of Crimea, Petrowskaja had written a series of newspaper columns, based on photographs, for the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung. Fifty-seven of these were then included in the book. The texts were written before the current invasion of Ukraine, but invite associations with it. Soviet imperialism is interlinked with more contemporary Russian geopolitics, both in response to the annexation of Crimea in 2014 and, by extension, events in 2022.

In her newspaper columns and interviews Petrowskaja had criticized Russian geopolitics and memory discourses already before 2022. She diagnosed a lack of critical confrontation with less-heroic aspects of the Soviet Union’s role during World War II in Soviet and post-Soviet collective and cultural memory.¹⁷ Her background in journalism, as well as having grown up in a family of critical intellectuals has informed her own understanding of an engaged literature. In her contribution to a collection of essays from 2018 Petrowskaja explains: ‘Wir waren nicht religiös, aber das Wort, die Literatur, ist uns zu einer Art Religion geworden und wir glaubten daran’.¹⁸ She remembers her parents and their friends critically discussing topics that were taboo under the Soviet regime from an ethical point of view. Such topics included the crushing of the Prague Spring by Soviet tanks, the war in Afghanistan and the treatment of political prisoners. Petrowskaja’s work straddles different media. Her journalistic approach also informs her literary work, both with regard to its ethical perspective, and her partly documentary approach. In addition, her journalism offers further platforms for exchange with a wider public. Being awarded the prestigious Bachmann Prize in 2013 established Petrowskaja in the German literary field.¹⁹ She gained increased attention by public media after the Russian invasion of Ukraine in 2022, when the Russian annexation of Crimea was suddenly perceived internationally as a ‘war in Europe’, and a ‘Zeitenwende’.²⁰ In turn, Petrowskaja’s own statements take on a greater political urgency. On talkshows on the German public channel ARD she argues that the West has a moral obligation to intervene militarily in the conflict.²¹ Reflections on her family being directly affected by the events — including her own mother finding herself in a cellar sheltering from Russian bombardment in Kyiv, gives her appeals an even greater impact.²² In his article for Die Zeit in July 2022, journalist Bernd Neumann sees Petrowskaja — together with other Ukrainian intellectuals who find themselves in exile, such as Kateryna Mishchenko — taking a clear political stance on this war as an act of resistance on the part of their people:

Schaut man sich unter ukrainischen Intellektuellen gegenwärtig um, gibt es verschiedene Tonlagen, um über den Krieg zu sprechen. Da ist zum Beispiel Katja Petrowskaja, die auf einer Veranstaltung im Literaturhaus Berlin kürzlich sagte, es gebe für sie im Moment nur zwei Dinge: entweder kämpfen oder in eine kleine Brigade eintreten und Unterstützung im Hintergrund leisten.²³

However, who these intellectuals regard as ‘their people’ goes beyond their family members and fellow Ukrainians.

‘Euromaidan’

Writer, publisher and translator Kateryna Mishchenko, who is at the centre of Neumann’s article, flew from Kyiv to Berlin with her five-year-old son shortly after the Russian offensive began in February 2022. However, for Mishchenko, the political tectonic plates had shifted long before. This shift is palpable in ‘The Black Circle’, her contribution to Euromaidan (2014), a collection of memories and reflections by Ukrainian intellectuals who participated in large-scale protests in Kyiv and other Ukrainian cities from November 2013 to February 2014, which became known as ‘Euromaidan’.²⁴ Demonstrations and civil unrest had begun in response to President Yanukovych's sudden decision not to sign a political association and free trade agreement with the European Union, instead choosing closer ties to Russia. Despite the violent response on the part of the police, resulting in forty-nine killed and 157 wounded protesters, the movement was successful. It led to the ousting of President Yanukovych. While this was soon to be followed by the Russian annexation of Crimea in 2014, for Mishchenko and others participating in the movement, its success constituted an important experience of civil unrest winning against an overpowering system. The Maidan square in Kyiv offered a public space for academics and students to be part of this movement, together with activists from across Ukrainian society.²⁵ In the course of the protests Mishchenko realizes that active opposition against Ukrainian oligarchs and a political system controlled by Putin’s government is essential, both in a national and transnational context. It becomes evident to her that the Euromaidan is not so much about economic advantages resulting from EU accession, but about the fight for democracy and independence from Russian imperialism. She takes a strong stance for political activism by writers, both through their work and other channels of public discourse. Mishchenko puts this struggle for national freedom into a broader European and global context, concluding her essay with a call to European governments to support Ukrainian citizens:

Da ist sie wieder, die ‘tiefe Besorgnis’ der EU und der USA. Das muss ein Traum sein! Europa hat die Augen geschlossen. Im Traum sieht es den Maidan. Aber wenn es aufwacht, kann es sich nicht mehr an den Traum erinnern, nicht begreifen, dass die Ukraine kein fernes Randgebiet mehr ist, sondern der Schauplatz dramatischer europäischer Veränderungen. Die Ukraine und Europa sind zwei Schlafwandler, zwischen denen auf einmal eine ganz andere als die Schengen-Mauer steht.²⁶

The text voices a moral call for European and American government support of the protests in order to defend European and global democratic values, thus also moving Ukraine out of a marginal borderland position towards the centre of Europe from a western perspective. On the one hand, making a case for a country that has to defend itself against the Russian aggressor and, as Mishchenko says, is fighting for its ‘existence’, reflects the perspectives of Serhij Zhadan, another Ukrainian author and contributor to Euromaidan, who makes a case for patriotism (which he differentiates from nationalism). On the other hand, Mishchenko stresses the European and global dimension of what is happening in Ukraine, and makes it a call for transnational citizenship and solidarity. This perspective has also informed the author’s statements on various German talk shows, public events and across social media. Her strong medial presence and performance have brought her wider attention: ‘Irgendwann war sie überall. In den Zeitungen, auf den Podien, in den Talkshows. Selbst im Berliner Dom saß Kateryna Mishchenko auf einmal ganz vorne im Altarraum […] und diskutierte über die aktuelle Friedensethik, als hätte sie nie etwas anderes getan’.²⁷

In ‘Ein schwarzer Kreis’ Mishchenko introduces a historical dimension that is further emphasized if one reads her use of the word ‘Schlafwandler’ as a reference to Christopher Clark’s book on World War I, which was published in 2012 and widely discussed at the time. In it Clark interprets pre-war structures and alliances. European powers are portrayed as players conditioned to keep walking along a precipitous escarpment, sure of their own moral compass, but unknowingly impelled by a complex interaction of deep-rooted cultures, patriotism and paranoia. They were, according to Clark, ‘sleepwalkers, watchful but unseeing, haunted by dreams, yet blind to the reality of the horror they were about to bring into the world’.²⁸ However, in the images of dream and reality that Mishchenko evokes throughout her text, sleepwalking has a more ambivalent meaning. Walking in a dream means believing in the power of protest and active citizenship despite the inhumanity experienced because of the violent government response, i.e. it has its own rationality and a utopian dimension: ‘Schon bald hatte ich beschlossen, mich der Unwirklichkeit ringsum ganz und gar hinzugeben, ihr und ihrer Traumlogik zu folgen, also dem Unmöglichen, das vor meinen Augen möglich geworden war’.²⁹ It includes the awareness of a dark ‘Abgrund’ that opened up beneath her feet when witnessing the killing of protesters during the Euromaidan. ³⁰ This abyss has become even more visible since 2022: ‘Ich denke, es braucht eine erweiterte Geschichtsschreibung’, she explains in her interview with Neumann: ‘Es gibt nicht nur eine horizontale Beschreibung der Geschehnisse, wie wir sie als Chronologie kennen, sondern auch eine vertikale’.³¹ This vertical line, she says, is very active right now. When asked whether her own contribution to this vertical description of events should be understood as philosophy, art, or literature, Kateryna Mishchenko refers to Alexander Kluge’s approach to his writing.³² In his work as a subjective chronicler of emotions that form an intricate part of history Kluge draws on various disciplines and art forms.

Bearing Witness

Her recent anthology of essays by Ukrainian authors reflecting on the current reality of the war, Aus dem Nebel des Krieges. Die Gegenwart der Ukraine (2023), which Mishchenko edited together with Katharina Raabe, can be seen as a follow-on project to Euromaidan, revisiting ideas that emerged in 2014, now in the context of a continuing war. The book has already been placed on the Sachbuch-Bestenliste of DLF Kultur/ZDF/DIE ZEIT. Its overall format is similar to that of Euromaidan. It brings together texts by Ukrainian authors, activists and journalists with contributions by two key figures in German memory studies and Central Eastern European history: Aleida Assmann and Karl Schlögel. The book takes up core ideas that Mishchenko reflected on in ‘The Black Circle’: to develop a historical understanding from the dark experience of terror and destruction, and to resist a political system employing such forces.³³ In her piece, ‘Spiegel der Seele’, opening Aus dem Nebel des Krieges, she writes: ‘Wenn ich früher die Nacht als einen Rückzugsort des sozial Verdrängten gesehen habe, erscheint jetzt die Existenz selbst im Schatten. Ich muss von neuem versuchen, den Menschen und das Menschliche in einem konkreten historischen Moment zu verstehen — das ist es, was diese lange Nacht des Vernichtungskrieges für mich bedeutet’.³⁴ In the daily speeches by the Ukrainian president, Volodymyr Zelenskyy, she finds ‘die Position einer radikalen Menschlichkeit als Gegenpol zur Entmenschlichung des Krieges’.³⁵ In her book, Men in Dark Times, Hanna Arendt maintained that, even in situations of political evil, there are those who function as moral exemplars.³⁶ Zelenskyy has undoubtedly taken on this role in his public appearances, both for his domestic and wider international audiences. From the position of a refugee who finds herself separated from her normal life, Mishchenko again stresses the global dimension of the conflict, together with her responsibility and that of others to bear witness:

Wenn man in den Geflüchteten oder den Ukrainern in ihrer Heimat nicht nur Opfer sieht, die man zutiefst bedauert, sondern Zeugen, dann wird auch dieser Krieg nicht als große Naturkatastrophe, sondern als kalkulierter Genozid wahrgenommen werden.³⁷

She and other refugees are an avant-garde of witnesses that others not directly affected must take as an example to prevent the ‘Entmenschlichung des Krieges’ taking hold in Ukraine and beyond. For Mishchenko, this is a war of annihilation, a form of genocide, which necessitates the fight of humanity against fascism, embodied by the Russian government and its soldiers. Here and in other texts she refers to the Holocaust.

In her 2022 MDR podcast Mishchenko interlinks the suffering of victims in the current war with those of the Jewish victims of the Holocaust, through explicit references to Paul Celan’s famous poem ‘Todesfuge’. The Ukrainians are finding themselves treated as ‘Untermenschen’, to be annihilated both physically and culturally. Does this comparison create a ‘noeud de mémoire’, in terms of multidirectional memory as defined by Marc Rothberg, i.e. a knotted intersection of memory and history that shows both difference and similarity,³⁸ or is it an act of provocation in the context of German Holocaust memory?

In der ersten Morgendämmerung nach der Flucht aus Kiew hatte ich einen kurzen Traum. Im Himbeergarten von meinen Großeltern sah ich eine große olivgrüne Schlange. Augenblicklich stand sie vor mir und wollte angreifen. Ich habe ganz vorsichtig das Tor geöffnet und sie langsam auf die Dorfstraße herausgelockt. Dann war das Tor zu und ich allein.

“Ein Mann wohnt im Haus der spielt mit den Schlangen der schreibt”. Diese Worte aus Celans ‘Todesfuge’ gingen mir durch den Kopf, als ich aufwachte. Das Haus des Russlandmeisters ist irgendwo in einem anderen Universum, und ich habe kein Haus mehr. Er hat mich in meinem dornigen Himbeerversteck erwischt, ohne zu wissen, dass es mich überhaupt gibt. Ich habe Angst vor diesem kommenden Bösen, und es hat keine Ängste, denn es gibt keinen Bezug zu mir. Ich bin nicht eines Bezuges wert, nur einer Vernichtung.

“Der schreibt wenn es dunkelt nach Deutschland”. Vernichtungskrieg ist ein deutsches Wort, und es bezeichnet sehr genau, was sich in meinem Land heute abspielt und gleichzeitig nachgespielt wird.³⁹

Mishchenko mourns the disintegration of value and meaning this war represents. She not only empathises, but identifies with the darkness and despair that inform Celan’s poem in the light of the disintegration of human values under National Socialism. In ‘Todesfuge’ ritual is converted into ‘a grotesque funeral dirge cried out into the dark’.⁴⁰ For Mishchenko this process is ‘re-enacted’ in Putin’s war, which is making her own reality both absurd and threatening in the context of German and European history of the twentieth century. A central part of this re-enactment is how Putin taps into cultural memory of the Soviet Union’s struggle against Adolf Hitler’s Third Reich on the Eastern Front during World War II. In his ‘Address concerning the events in Ukraine’ of 21st February 2022 Putin justifies his invasion by claiming that the Ukrainian government, supported by ‘neo-Nazis and Banderites’ is carrying out a ‘genocide’ against Russians in Ukraine.⁴¹

Nun weiß ich vielleicht immer noch ungefähr, was das heißt, plötzlich untermenschlich zu werden. Der Hass gegen die Ukrainer, der mich an der faschistischen Rede vom 21. Februar so erschrocken hat, ist wie eine klebrige Marke. Uns wäre die Sprache, unsere Territorien, und überhaupt unsere Existenz geschenkt. So großzügig waren sowjetische Mächte. Und ihre ressentimentalen Nachfolger möchten nun eine richtige Dekommunisierung durchführen. Hinter diesem ganz frei gebrauchten Begriff steckt der Wunsch der Vernichtung.

Ich schreibe auf Deutsch. Ich weiß nicht, ob das eine Subversion in Bezug auf faschistische Anspielungen des russischen Krieges sein sollte, oder ob ich mich in dem Bunker der deutschen Sprache verstecke und hier nach großen Antworten suche, auf die Fragen:

Was heißt denn heute “nie wieder”?

Wie soll eine antifaschistische Agenda des 21. Jahrhunderts aussehen?

Was ist die Position der deutschen Enkel- und Urenkelgeneration in Bezug auf diesen Vernichtungskrieg?

Und darf ich als ukrainische, vom russischen Regime zu einem Untermenschen erklärte Person im deutschen Diskurs mitsprechen?⁴²

At the end of her text Mishchenko asks whether she has a right to appropriate the Holocaust and to address the German historic guilt and responsibility arising from it from a victim’s perspective. The author specifically addresses the Germans in her 2022 podcast. She calls on their responsibility to prevent crimes against humanity committed by Russian soldiers under the leadership of a fascist government. This raises a number of questions that merit further discussion. Some of these the author formulates herself, while reflecting on her own writing.

One of her questions regards the language she choses to write and publish in as an exiled writer. Explaining it with her aim of subverting fascist allusions in the Russian discourse bears similarities with Petrowskaja’s decision to write Vielleicht Esther in German. In her interview with Der Standard in 2015 Petrowskaja explains how writing in German — for her as a child the language of Bach and Nazis in war films — allowed her to transcend stereotypical roles of victims and perpetrators dominating Soviet and post-Soviet discourse.⁴³ Writing in German, rather than in Russian or Ukrainian as their first and second languages, thus allows both authors to create their own narrative space and open new perspectives on European history. Furthermore, Mishchenko asks whether writing in German on greater historical questions means sheltering from a more direct engagement on the part of the exiled writer who is finding herself in in a safe, thus somewhat privileged position, in contrast to those remaining in the war zone, or even physically participating in the fighting.⁴⁴ However, writing in German allows both authors to address a wider audience. Moving between literature and other public media, both in terms of platforms of communication and their own literary style, allows their voices to have a wider impact in public discourse.⁴⁵ Mishchenko and Petrowskaja both combine, or switch between, complex literary language and an accessible stye of writing, addressing historical events and current political issues.

Conclusion

Transnational memory and international politics have been gaining prominence in the German literary field. This can be partly seen as a development in the context of the ‘Eastern European turn’ that German-language literature has been taking in the new millennium.⁴⁶ Following the Zeitenwende in 2022, it has taken on a new dynamic: Firstly, memory discourses that situate themselves in a transnational, European framework, while questioning both German and post-Soviet discourses, have become highly topical. Secondly, the work by Ukrainian authors like Petrowskaja and Mishchenko is marked by an urgency to speak out as authors. Their work, reception and conception of themselves, as well as the historical context they find themselves in, moves them closer to an avant-garde of exile writers as described by Arendt than, for example, a Zeitgenossenschaft as embodied by Heinrich Böll and the Gruppe 47 in post-war Germany. To varying degrees this also applies to exile writers from other post-Soviet states.⁴⁷ In Petrowskaja’s case it applies more to her recent and journalistic work than to Vielleicht Esther. Petrowskaja and Mishchenko both write or publish in German and maintain a strong presence across different German-language media, while participating in transnational artists’ networks. There are other Ukrainian writers working from Germany who may have been given less attention by the wider public, in spite of their active participation in the Berlin literary scene, such as Nadiia Telenchuk, a poet born in Kherson, Ukraine. And there are other very audible voices, for example that of author and musician Serhij Zhadan whose works, written in Ukrainian, have been translated and widely discussed in German media. This includes Zhadan’s war chronicle on social media. Zhadan, who shares Mishchenko’s perception of this war as a genocide and has argued against pacifism received the Peace Prize of the German Book Trade in October 2022 and the Hannah Arendt Prize for Political Thought.

Furthermore, transnational or cosmopolitan perspectives are ascribed to both Petrowskaja and Mishchenko — which is also reflected in Suhrkamp’s announcement of Mishchenko’s reading in the Literarische Colloquium in May 2023 under the title ‘Im kosmopolitischen Exil’.⁴⁸ When making a case for foreign military intervention in Ukraine, in Germany as a country that has consciously kept its distance from any military involvement in international conflict after 1945, Mishchenko stresses that she sees herself and other Ukrainians primarily as Ukrainian and international ‘citizens’: ‘Warum sollten wir uns ergeben? Warum sollten wir diese Diktatur zulassen? Die Ukrainer haben in diesem Krieg eine maximal ethische Position. Wir stehen für uns und für andere.’⁴⁹ Their plea for the end of the war is in essence a plea against inhumanity.

According to Bourdieu’s field theory, the dynamic described marks a changing of positions in the current German literary field, moving it closer to the political field, while opening it further to international trends. In contrast to the prominent role of the author as a public intellectual up to the 1980s, political engagement seemed to have lost some of its value in the literary landscape around the beginning of the new millennium.⁵⁰ What has emerged in recent years, however, is a development — now further accelerated through the Eastern European turn and the Zeitenwende — toward a literature that deliberately seeks out public forums through formats like essays, feature articles, panel discussions and corresponding internet platforms, thus moving the question of contemporaneity or political engagement back into the centre of both writerly and public interest. While this cannot only be attributed to exile writers from Ukraine, or to Eastern European writers who have brought different perspectives and aesthetics to German-language literature already before the war in Ukraine,⁵¹ their work is substantially contributing to this shift. The authors discussed thus constitute an avant-garde for a literature that is transforming individual and national experience into a transnational, engaged perspective. Such a perspective increasingly informs contemporary German-language writing beyond minority literatures, too.⁵²

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Sabine Egger

Dr Sabine Egger (MA Cologne, PhD Humboldt University of Berlin) lectures in German Studies at Mary Immaculate College, Limerick. She is Joint Director of the Irish Centre for Transnational Studies and member of the Royal Irish Academy Committee on Languages, Literatures, Communication and Cultures. She has published widely on memory, identity, alterity, borderland spaces and transnationalism in twentieth and twenty-first century literature and culture. Her current research focuses on physical movement and train journeys with a specific interest in post-Soviet discourses within a European context. Publications include her monograph Dialog mit dem Fremden. Erinnerung an den ‘Europäischen Osten’ in der Lyrik Johannes Bobrowskis (K&N, 2009), as well as co-edited journal issues and volumes on Polish-Irish Encounters in the New and Old Europe (Lang, 2011), Connections in Motion: Dance and Modernism in Irish and German Literature and Culture (Lexington, 2019) and Sarmatia — Germania Slavica — Central Europe: From the Borderland in the East … to a Border Aesthetics (V&R, 2021).

Notes

1 Katja Petrowskaja, Vielleicht Esther (Berlin: Suhrkamp, 2014) (=VE). In the following, page numbers are given in round brackets in the text.

2 Brigid Haines, ‘Introduction: The Eastern European Turn in Contemporary German-Language Literature’, German Life and Letters 68.2 (2015), 145–53.

3 Hannah Arendt, ‘We Refugees’, in Altogether Elsewhere: Writers on Exile, ed. by Marc Robinson (Boston: Harcourt, 1996), pp. 110–19 (p. 119).

4 On postmemory see Marianne Hirsch, The Generation of Postmemory. Writing and Visual Culture After the Holocaust (New York: Columbia UP, 2012).

5 See Pierre Bourdieu, Die Regeln der Kunst. Genese und Struktur des literarischen Feldes (Frankfurt a.M.: Suhrkamp, 2001), p. 89.

6 Jessica Ortner, ‘The Reconfiguration of the European Archive in Contemporary German-Jewish Migrant-Literature. Katja Petrowskaja’s Novel Vielleicht Esther’, Scandinavian Jewish Studies, 28.1 (2017), 38–54 (p. 39).

7 Ortner, p. 43.

8 Stuart Taberner has argued for a broader conceptualisation of transnationalism. See Stuart Taberner, ‘Transnationalism in Contemporary German-Language Fiction by Nonminority Writers’, Seminar 47.5 (2011), 624–45; Stuart Taberner, Transnationalism and German-Language Literature in the Twenty-First Century (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017).

9 On German-Jewish literature see Agnes Mueller and Katja Garloff (eds.), German-Jewish Literature after 1990 (Rochester, NY: Camden House, 2018); Jessica Ortner, Transcultural Memory and European Identity in Contemporary German-Jewish Migrant Literature (Martlesham: Boydell & Brewer, 2022).

10 Friederike Eigler, Gedächtnis und Geschichte in Generationenromanen seit der Wende (Berlin: Schmidt, 2005); Maria Roca Lizarazu, Renegotiating Postmemory: The Holocaust in Contemporary German-Language Jewish Literature (Martlesham: Boydell & Brewer, 2020).

11 Sabine Egger, ‘The Poetics of Movement and Deterritorialisation in Katja Petrowskaja’s Vielleicht Esther (2014)’, Modern Languages Open (2020), Collection: Rethinking ‘Minor Literatures’ — Contemporary Jewish Women’s Writing in Germany and Austria, https://modernlanguagesopen.org/articles/10.3828/mlo.v0i0.297 [accessed 30 January 2023].

12 Egger, ‘The Poetics of Movement and Deterritorialisation in Katja Petrowskaja’s Vielleicht Esther’.

13 In her introduction to the 2023 edition, Masha Gessen observes that Kuznetsov told the story of the Babyn Yar massacre, as well as that of ‘Soviet efforts to suppress this history.’ (Anatoly Kuznetsov, Babi Yar: A Document in the Form of a Novel. A new, complete, uncensored version, transl. by David Floyd (New York: Picador/Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2023), pp. ix–xxiv.

14 Michael Rothberg, Multidirectional Memory. Remembering the Holocaust in the Age of Decolonization (Stanford, CA.: Stanford UP, 2009).

15 Juri Andruchowytsch, Kleines Lexikon intimer Städte. Transl. by Sabine Stöhr (Frankfurt a.M: Suhrkamp, 2016), p. 12.

16 Both Petrowskaja’s and Mishchenko’s work with visual media, and other questions of intermediality arising from this article, will be further discussed in the 2024 publication of a paper I presented at Out of the USSR: Travelling Women, Travelling Memories, co-hosted by the Universities of Tampere and Turku, Finland, 2–3 February 2023.

17 Katja Petrowskaja, ‘Licht auf das große Ganze’, Interview with Karin Pollack, Der Standard (17 October 2015) https://www.derstandard.at/story/2000023983449/katja-petrowskaja-licht-auf-das-grosse-ganze [accessed 15 April 2023].

18 Shelley Kästner, Jewish Roulette — Vom jüdischen Erzbischof bis zum atheistischen Orthodoxen, 21 Gespräche (Zurich: Salis, 2018), pp. 18–19.

19 In 2010 Petrowskaja received a Robert Bosch fellowship to undertake research on Vielleicht Esther. In addition to the Ingeborg Bachmann Prize for excerpts of chapter 5, she received further literary awards in the following years. These included the Aspekte Literature Prize (2014), the Ernst Toller Prize, the Schubart Literature Award and the Premio Strega Europeo (2015), as well as the Human Rights Award of the Gerhart and Renate Baum Foundation (2022) and the Gustav Regler Prize in 2023.

20 In his speech on 27 February 2022 the German chancellor Olav Scholz called the Russian invasion of Ukraine a ‘Zeitenwende’, and the beginning of a new war in Europe. See https://www.zeit.de/politik/deutschland/2023-02/zeitenwende-rede-olaf-scholz-bundestag-analyse [accessed 30 February 2022].

21 Maischberger. Die Woche, ARD (9 March 2022), https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fmsBLrAFvHg [accessed 10 August 2022]; Anne Will, ARD (13 März 2022), https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Za_wyxjmHfU [accessed 10 August 2022].

22 Katja Petrowskaja, ‘Ein Amulett für den ukrainischen Widerstand‘, Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung (6 March 2022), https://www.faz.net/aktuell/feuilleton/debatten/katja-petrowskaja-botschaft-aus-kiew-an-die-russischen-muetter-17851106.html [accessed 10 August 2022].

23 Peter Neumann, ‘Kateryna Mishchenko: "Warum sollten wir uns ergeben?" Kateryna Mishchenko ist als Meisterin des Dialogs gerade überall präsent. Was treibt die ukrainische Autorin an? Eine Begegnung in Berlin‘, Die Zeit 29 (2022). 14 July 2022, https://www.zeit.de/2022/29/kateryna-michenko-ukraine-dialog-intellektuelle [accessed 10 August 2022].

24 Kateryna Mishchenko, ‘Ein schwarzer Kreis’, in Euromaidan. Was in der Ukraine auf dem Spiel steht, ed. by Juri Andruchowytsch (Berlin: Suhrkamp, 2014), pp. 21–37. The anthology also contains short essays by international historians and journalists like Martin Pollack and Timothy Snyder. Among the pieces by Ukrainian writers is ‘Mein Kiew’ by Katja Petrowskaja.

25 Mishchenko, ‘Ein schwarzer Kreis’, p. 32.

26 Mishchenko, ‘Ein schwarzer Kreis’, p. 36. Passage highlighted by S.E.

27 Neumann, ‘Kateryna Mishchenko’.

28 Christopher Clark, The Sleepwalkers: How Europe Went to War in 1914 (London: Penguin, 2012), p. 562.

29 Mishchenko, ‘Ein schwarzer Kreis’, p. 24.

30 Mishchenko, ‘Ein schwarzer Kreis’, p. 37.

31 Neumann, ‘Kateryna Mishchenko’.

32 Neumann, ‘Kateryna Mishchenko’.

33 Darkness is also prominent in the everyday reality of socially disadvantaged and marginalised groups portrayed in Kateryna Mishchenko and Miron Zownir’s book Ukrainische Nacht — Ukraïnska nich (Leipzig: Spector Books, 2015). According to the blurb this exposes ‘fault lines in Ukrainian society, in which the harbingers of revolution can already be felt’.

34 Kateryna Mishchenko, ‘Spiegel der Seele’, in Aus dem Nebel des Krieges. Die Gegenwart der Ukraine, ed. by Kateryna Mishchenko and Katherina Raabe (Berlin: Suhrkamp 2023), pp. 9–18 (p. 9).

35 Mishchenko, ‘Spiegel der Seele’, p. 16.

36 ‘[…] even in the darkest of times we have the right to expect some illumination, and such illumination may well come less from theories and concepts than from the uncertain, flickering, and often weak light that some men and women, in their lives and their works, will kindle under almost all circumstances.’ Hannah Arendt, Men in Dark Times (New York: Harcourt, 1968), p. ix. See also Cindy Horst, Odin Lysaker, ‘Miracles in Dark Times: Hannah Arendt and Refugees as “Vanguard”’, Journal of Refugee Studies, 34.1 (2021), 67–84.

37 Mishchenko, ‘Spiegel der Seele’, p. 13.

38 Rothberg, Multidirectional Memory, p. 7.

39 Kateryna Mishchenko, ‘Gedanken von Kateryna Mishchenko’, Gedanken von … Stimmen zum Ukraine-Krieg. MDR Kultur (14 July 2022), https://www.ardaudiothek.de/episode/gedanken-von-oder-stimmen-zum-ukraine-krieg/gedanken-von-kateryna-mishchenko/mdr-kultur/10653617/ [accessed 30 July 2022].

40 Karl S. Weimar, ‘Paul Celan’s “Todesfuge”: Translation and Interpretation.’ PMLA 89.1 (1974), 85–96 (p. 90).

41 ‘Transcript: Vladimir Putin’s Televised Address on Ukraine’, Bloomberg Politics (24 February 2022), https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2022-02-24/full-transcript-vladimir-putin-s-televised-address-to-russia-on-ukraine-feb-24#xj4y7vzkg [accessed 10 April 2023]. This discourse includes allusions to a Ukrainian nationalist past that led in parts to collaboration with the Germans after their invasion in 1941.

42 Mishchenko, ‘Gedanken von Kateryna Mishchenko’.

43 Petrowskaja, ‘Licht auf das große Ganze’.

44 Kateryna Mishchenko was awarded a fellowship of the Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin for 2022/23.

45 This would be the aim of a littérature engagée according to Sartre’s concept. See Jean-Paul Sartre, Was ist Literatur?, ed. and transl. by Traugott König (Reinbek: Rowohlt 1997 [1981]).

46 See, for instance, Nora Isterholt; ‘In der Zugluft Europas’. Zur deutschsprachigen Literatur russischstämmiger AutorInnen (Bamberg: University of Bamberg Press, 2017).

47 It would be worth exploring to what extent Ukrainian and other post-Soviet writers currently form an exile community in Berlin, and in how far Russian writers are excluded from it. An interview with Oksana Sabuschko, conducted in December 2022, points toward the latter (‘Sprache ist verräterisch’. Interview by Jens Uthoff. taz (7 January 2023) <https://taz.de/Ukrainische-Autorin-ueber-Russland/!5903497/> [accessed 9 May 2023].

48 PARATAXE Symposium XII. Fluchtpunkt Berlin — osteuropäische Literaturen unter Druck. Gespräche, Lesungen und Diskurs. Literarisches Colloquium Berlin (12 May 2023), https://www.suhrkamp.de/gespraech/kateryna-mishchenko-v-42871 [accessed 3 April 2023].

49 Neumann, ‘Kateryna Mishchenko’.

50 See Sabine Egger and Hanna Rompf, ‘Einleitung', Germanistik in Ireland. Jahrbuch der German Studies Association of Ireland, 15 (2020). Special Issue: Zeitgenossenschaft/Contemporaneity, 5–19 (pp. 5–7).

51 One may think of Saša Stanišić or Herta Müller. For examples of non-minority literature see Egger and Rompf, ‘Einleitung’, pp. 6–7.

52 See Taberner, ‘Transnationalism in Contemporary German-Language Fiction’, p. 641.