The Reconfiguration of the European Archive in contemporary German-Jewish Migrant-Literature

• A considerable number of Eastern


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More than half a century after the end of the Second World War and the liberation of the concentration camps, the children and grand children of the survivors still struggle to come to terms with the Holocaust -an event that brought out the most unimaginable evil in the midst of the civilised world. The loss of embod ied knowledge of the event has led to the devel opment of various means to store information and to reconstruct personal experiences which were never transmitted to the present gener ations. The tendency of second and third gener ation descendants of survivors to compen sate for this lack of family memory by means of literary writing has already been widely investigated. 1 Marianne Hirsch coined the term 'postmemory' in order to define the spe 1 See e.g. Grimwood 2007, McGothlin 2006, Schlachter 2006, Flanzbaum 2012, Berger 2010, Gilman and Steinecke 2002 cial relationship that 'the generation after bears to the personal, collective or cultural trauma of those who came before' (Hirsch 2008: 106). In this article, I wish to turn to a special branch of second and thirdgeneration writing, namely German Jewish literature written by authors with an Eastern European background. As they have memories and postmemories of both the National Socialist occupation and the subse quent terror of the Nazi regime, I suggest that they lift secondgeneration Holocaust memory to another level. I show this by analysing Katja Petrowskaja's novel Vielleicht Esther ('Maybe Esther', 2015) -in which Petrowskaja presents the legacy of the Holocaust as well as her experi ences of the Soviet regime during her childhood and youth in Kiev. Her way of employing an Eastern perspective on the devastating aspects of the European past is typical of a wave of Eastern European writers who currently have a significant influence on the German book The reconfiguration of the European Archive in contemporary German-Jewish migrant-literature Katja Petrowskaja's novel Vielleicht Esther Jessica Ortner Abstract • A considerable number of Eastern European migrant authors of Jewish origin are currently lifting Holocaust memory to a new level. Writing in German about events taking place in remote areas of the world, they expand the German framework of memory from a national to a transnational one. By par taking in reconsidering what is 'vital for a shared remembering' of Europe, this branch of writing reflects the European Union's political concern for integrating the memories of the socialistic regimes in Euro pean history writing without relativising the Holocaust. In Vielleicht Esther, Katja Petrowskaja consults various national and private archives in order to recount the history of the mass shooting of over 30,000 Ukrainian Jews at Babij Jar -a canyon near Kiev. Thus, she 'carries' a marginalised event of the Holocaust into the German framework of memory and uncovers the layers of amnesia that have not only concealed the event amongst the Soviet public but also distorted and for ever made inaccessible her family's past. market. 2 By exploring interconnections between two great European traumas, the Holocaust and the Gulag (Assmann 2013, Leggewie andLang 2011), they contest the view of the Holocaust as the pivotal trauma of Europe and at the same time recontextualise the Holocaust in its specific local environment.
This aesthetic practice has political impli cations as it deals with a question which has become an urgent matter for the memory pol itics of the European Union. As Oliver Plessow puts it, European memory actors ever since the Eastern Enlargement of the European Union have immersed themselves in one of the most abrasive conflicts of interpretation history has to offer, finding themselves negotiating between two major competing 'memory frames' … on the one hand, the understanding that the Holocaust as a unique event should remain Europe's sole moral and political compass, and on the other hand, the view (bolstered by the eastern European countries that joined the EU in 2004) that Nazism and Communism must be remembered as equally menacing 'totalitarian' dictatorships. (Plessow 2015: 379) I begin by outlining the remarkable devel opment of the Holocaust from a largely ignored event in the immediate postwar years into a politically relevant memory for the European Union. Afterwards, I describe the memory con test between the Eastern and the Western parts of the European Union, which, since the Eastern enlargement, has arisen from this development.

Political developments -the global institutionalisation of Holocaust memory
Using the metaphor of a crescendo, Aleida Ass mann has shown that the increased distance from the Second World War has not resulted in a decline but rather in a growing public attention on the Holocaust (Assmann 2013: 56-9). After having been almost completely ignored during the 1950s, from 1960 on a growing awareness of the dimensions of the Holocaust arose, first man ifesting itself in Germany and later spreading to the entire Western world. Decisive moments in the recognition of the event amongst the Ger man public were the Auschwitz trials in 1965 and, to an even greater degree, the broadcasting of the American TVserial Holocaust at the end of the 1970s. By the 1980s, the commemor ation of the Holocaust was institutionalised as a polit ical concern of the German government. Shortly before the turn of the millennium, in 1999, the German Bundestag decided to place a Memor ial to the Murdered Jews of Europe at the core of Germany's capital. Thereby, the event was given a tangible and lasting place in the cultural memory of the re united Germany. The memor ial, finished in 2005, established the Holocaust as a negative founding myth that was meant to oblige every future government to uphold the rights of minorities and to ensure a peace ful cooperation with world society (Assmann 2013: 67;Thierse 2005). 3 Paradoxic ally, by officially embedding guilt at the core of its collective memory, Germany, the perpetrator country per se, became a pioneer for a particu larly rigorous way of addressing the past that is admired and imitated around the world today.
From the year 2000 on, 'the Holocaust was transformed into a transnational memory and turned into an ultimate "moral touchstone" mak ing "the need to avoid another Holocaust … a foundation for (official) European memory" too (Assmann 2010b: 98;Levy and Sznaider 2006: 18, 184 "reunite itself on the bedrock memory of its crimes" or to "place the remembrance of these crimes at the geographical center of its capital city" -a task, therefore, at the very limits of what is possible for a social community' (trans lated by Thomas Dunlap for the home page German History in Documents and Images (GHDI)). Assmann (2013: 78-81) emphasises that the consolidation of a nega tive memory as the founding myth of a community is an entirely new phenomenon. At the Stockholm International Forum on the Holocaust in 2000, representatives from fortysix governments agreed on a declaration that similarly expressed the intention to 'plant the seeds of a better future amidst the soil of a bitter past'. 5 The conference was the starting point for the foundation of the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA) that, with its thirtyone member countries, eleven observer countries and seven permanent international partners, functions as an infra structure for a supranational memory commu nity (Assmann 2010b: 103). 6 Counteracting the current loss of a living, communicative memory of the Holocaust, the IHRA aims at stimulat ing the transition of Holocaust memory into durable forms of remembrance by promoting 'education, remembrance and research about Toten ruhen zu lassen? Tatsächlich könnte heute das Vergessen eintreten; denn Zeit zeugen sterben, und immer weniger Opfer können das Grauen des Erlittenen persönlich weitertragen. Geschichte verblaßt schnell, wenn sie nicht Teil des eigenen Erlebens war. Deshalb geht es darum, aus der Erinnerung immer wieder lebendige Zukunft werden zu lassen. Wir wollen nicht unser Entsetzen konservieren. Wir wollen Lehren ziehen, die auch künftigen Generationen Orientierung sind' (Herzog 1996). 5 Declaration of the Stockholm Internation on the Holocaust, nd. 6 The Stockholm conference was initiated by the former Swedish president Göran Persson and was extremely successful, with almost the entire political spectrum of the European Union present, including the former president of the United States, Bill Clinton. According to Jens Kroh (2012: 206), the declaration of the IHRA, formerly called the Task Force for International Cooperation on Holocaust Education, Remembrance, and Research (ITF), is based on the thesis of the uniqueness of the Holocaust. Nevertheless, as the homepage of the IHRA shows, it has now widened its ambit to dealing also with genocide on a more general level. the Holocaust'. 7 As an intervention against 'the inexorable laws of natural decay and human for getting', the IHRA seeks to 'translate the tran sient into the permanent, that is, to invent tech niques of transmitting and storing information deemed vital for the constitution and continu ation of a specific group' (Assmann 2010a: 43).

The divided memory
Increasingly, Europe has become a 'politically charged discursive space' in which various mem ory actors continuously consider 'the relevance of certain topics' and 'draw up a dividing line between what is forgettable and what is valu able for those doing the remembering' (Rigney 2008: 80 and2016: 70). In the words of Aleida Assmann, the European Union is concerned with selecting what should be perceived as 'vital for a common orientation and a shared remem bering' and therefore belong to the European 'canon' and what should remain a latent mem ory, stored in the 'archive' which is accessible for experts but deemed irrelevant to the broader public (Assmann 2010a: 43). In this process, the Holocaust, perceived as the universalised 'Other of European values', has become a pivotal part of the European 'canon' (Rigney 2014: 344). Along the lines of the aims of the IHRA, the 'recogni tion of the Holocaust as a collective, painful past' has become obligatory for a nation in order to be considered worthy of becoming a member of the European 'community of values' (Kroh 2012: 206, 211; Van der Laarse 2013: 73). Nevertheless, after the dissolution of the Iron Curtain and the Eastern enlargement of the European Union from 2004 on, the special status of the Holocaust became a point of con tention between the 'old' core of the European Union and the postCommunist countries that increasingly 'demanded the inclusion of 7 Declaration of the Stockholm International Forum on the Holocaust, nd. their wartime experiences in the panEuropean remembrance of this war' (Mälksoo 2009: 654). Indeed, Maria Mälksoo speaks for a number of scholars in pointing out that there has been a 'noticeable imbalance in both the remembering and the study of the immediate past in the East and the West of Europe': While the atrocities of the Nazis have been analyzed with remarkable rigor and depth, reaching even the levels of metacriticism of Holocaust memory and representations …, the crimes of the communist regimes in the former Soviet bloc have not received similar academic and political attention in Europe. (Mälksoo 2009: 660-1) According to Claus Leggewie, the biggest challenge of the European Union's memory pol itics today is forging a European memory that neither flattens out the Holocaust to a universal analogy of all kinds of genocides and thus erases the historical differences between Stalin's terror and the systematic destruction of an entire people , nor lets the Holocaust outcompete Stalin's organised destruction of alleged enemies of the state. Rather, the EU should devote undivided attention to both totalitarian pasts (Leggewie and Lang 2011: 11, 24-5). Never theless, the call to incorporate 'the histories of the former communist countries into the large European master narrative' is often accompan ied by a tendency to equate the two totalitar ianisms (Neumayer 2015: 334-5), thus down playing the differences between the two types of political crimes. Despite various initi atives launched by the European Union, intellectu als and organisations who endorse the thesis of the Holocaust being a unique event and as a 'dominant site of atrocity and victimhood' are still competing with proponents of the idea that Stalinism and Nazism were 'equally criminal', as the former Latvian minister of foreign affairs and Member of the European Parliament,

Literature as agency of collective memory
I argue that the UkrainianGerman writer Katja Petrowskaja tests possibilities for reconciling the current memory contests between Eastern and Western European versions of the past by simul taneously commemorating specific events of the Holocaust and the terror of the socialist regime during and before her lifetime. As a migrant, the autobiographical narrator of the novel functions as a 'carrier of memories' (Erll 2011: 12) who imparts the experiences of the population liv ing in the Soviet sphere of control to the novel's implied German reader, who is imagined as being ignorant about living conditions in East ern Europe. Furthermore, the narrator is engaged with telling the story about the major group of the Jewish population of Eastern Europe, who perished outside the concentration camps, and thereby to enlighten an aspect of the Holocaust which she perceives to be excluded from Ger many's collective memory. Thus, Vielleicht Esther widens the thematic scope of Holo caust novels written by the generations born after 1945.
The autobiographical narrator Petrowskaja recounts her family story from a present point of view in which she looks back at her former lim ited understanding of history that was formed by her socialist school education. The task of retracing her family history is interwoven with precise descriptions of the memory politics of the Soviet regime -politics that concealed the complexity of the immediate past by means of omnipresent tales of the Great Patriotic War. Hence, she not only depicts the fate of her fam ily during the Nazi occupation, but also unravels the layers of amnesia in the Soviet Union, the disruption of the communicative transmission of memories within the realm of her family, and the simplified Holocaust remembrance in Germany. By recontextualising the Holocaust and at the same time providing an Eastern European perspective on the past, she dis rupts the preconditions of the ongoing mem ory contest. On the one hand, she disrupts the (Western European) idea of the Holocaust as a unique event by reflecting the need to supple ment European history writing with an Eastern European perspective. In particular, she criti cises German memory culture for its exclusive focus on the iconic place of Auschwitz that in her view covers up the extensive use of mass shootings for exterminating Jews living in the Eastern European areas. On the other hand, she disrupts the exclusive notion of the Eastern European population as mere victims and points out that the Eastern European countries -par ticularly Poland and Ukraine -besides Stalinist and Socialist terror should incorporate the Nazi genocide of the Jews and the complicity with the respective regimes in their cultural memories. Her own family history becomes an example of the complex conjunction of victimhood and collaboration in the Eastern European regions, where the Stalinist suppression had already started before the war and continued long after. By reconstructing her grand father's role as a socialist official, it shows that her grandfather was not merely a victim of Stalin's warfare and later a prisoner of war in Germany; he might also have been an accomplice in the socialistic atrocities which took place before the war. 8

The family as mediator of history
By representing her own search for family his tory, Petrowskaja aims to introduce these pre viously censored and thus delayed memories as 'salient and vital for a common orientation and a shared [European] remembering' (Assmann 2010a: 43). According to Ann Rigney, family writings and narrations of individual experience ease the mediation of memories across temporal and cultural boundaries. By presenting 'indi vidual experience to third parties in a vivid and highly imaginable way', so Rigney claims, the recipient may become involved in the past of others and thus vicariously include other people's pasts as 'prosthetic memory' (Rigney 2010: 87). 9 In the words of Alison Landsberg, art and especi ally the mass media may forge a moment of contact between an individual and a historic experience through which 'the person does not simply apprehend a historical narrative but takes on a more personal, deeply felt memory of a past event through which he or she did not live' (Landsberg 2004: 2). In this way, a cultural arte fact can become an agent for the reorganisation of cultural memory. More precisely, art, by cir culating memories across national borderlines, can expand the framework of memory from a national to a transnational one by including events taking place in remote areas of the world. Avishai Margalit observes that 'thick' relations in general are relations to 'the near and dear', whereas one only produces 'thin' and remote relations to the population of other countries (Margalit, quoted in Olick et al. 2011: 471;Müller 2010: 28). In contrast, Rigney notes that 9 Prosthetic memory is a term coined by Alison Landsberg (2004). She defines it as a new form of memory that 'emerges at the interface between a person and a historical narrative about the past, at an experimental site such as a movie theatre or museum. In this moment of contact an experience occurs through which the person sutures himself or herself into a larger history … In the process I am describing, the person does not simply apprehend a historical narrative but takes on a more personal deeply felt memory of a past event through which he or she did not live' (Landsberg 2004: 2).
the 'virtual contact with singular experiences' in another zone of Europe can accomplish an 'imaginative thickening' of the reader's relations to remote and nonfamilial individuals and thus help to 'lay the basis for shared points of refer ence and memories in the future' (Rigney 2008: 87 and2012: 622). '[C]reative writing [may] help to create "thick" relations with groups with whom one is already economically and polit ically connected but with whom one does not (yet) share a cultural memory' (Rigney 2014: 354). Also Marianne Hirsch argues that the emotional 'idiom of the family can become an accessible lingua franca, easing identification and projection across distance and difference' (Hirsch 2008: 114-15). 10 On the one hand, postmemorial writing restores relations within the family by reconstructing memories which were never transmitted from one to the next generation. On the other hand, telling history through the emotionally powerful and 'thick' framework of the family offers a possibility for identification for persons without familial rela tions to Holocaust survivors. Hirsch's central point of argument is that postmemor ial work strives to 're activate and reembody more distant social/national and archival/cultural memor ial structures by reinvesting them with resonant individual and familial forms of mediation and aesthetic expression' (Hirsch 2008: 111). Thus, an unfamiliar version of the past can be changed from a seemingly irrelevant archived memory into a 'vital' memory for the individual reader. 10 Marianne Hirsch (2008: 106-7) defines post memory as 'the relationship that the gener ation after those who witnessed cultural or collective trauma bears to the experiences of those who came before, experiences that they 'remember' only by means of the stories, images, and behaviors among which they grew up. But these experiences were transmitted to them so deeply and effectively as to seem to constitute memories in their own right.' Rigney and Hirsch agree on the notion that stories of the past told through the framework of the family may revive archival knowledge and make it relevant for readers living in cultural or national contexts other than those where the recounted events originally took place.

'Selection' of the lost
In her novel Vielleicht Esther, Petrowskaja uses the 'idiom of the family' precisely in order to familiarise her German readership with histor ical experiences which took place in a zone of Europe which has usually been considered less 'vital' for an understanding of Europe's devas tating past. In the following, I discuss to what degree and by which means Petrowskaja tries to achieve 'thickening' of transnational rela tions between her and her family's experiences in Ukraine and her German readership and whether or not she succeeds in reviving and reembodying archival forms of knowledge, as Marianne Hirsch suggests.
In her autobiographical novel, Petrowskaja deals with the traumatic past of her Jewish fam ily, who lived through the years of both Nazi and Soviet occupation. 11 On the grounds of an indefinable and seemingly unfounded feel ing that something is missing (17) -that an entire generation was lost (21) -the autobio graphical narrator obsessively starts to assemble names of distant relatives, relatives that still in 1940 were living in Łódź, Kraków, Kalisz, Kolo, Vienna, Warsaw, Kiev and Paris (26). As the narrator is unable to define which of the Levis, Sterns, Krzewins, Gellers and Hellers might be presentday descendants of those relatives, she decides to include all of them as members of her family. Everything else would be the equivalent to a 'selection', an impermissible separation between kinsfolk and foreigners, between the familiar and the 'Other' (27). 12 By employing the word 'selection' (Selektion), Petrowskaja alludes to the practice of the National Socialists, who upon the arrival of the trains at the concentra tion camps would sort out those who were unfit for work. Throughout the entire novel, selection as opposed to inclusion is used as a metaphor for the segmentation of cultural memory, which Petrowskaja defines as a typical characteristic of postsocialist memory culture. Warsaw serves as a paradigmatic ex ample of this segmentation. Before visiting the town, she writes, tourists have to choose which city they want to visit: the city of the Warsaw Uprising, which is a central part of Poland's narrative of suffering, or the city of the Jewish ghetto. Only those Jews who died at Katyń -one of the pivotal events of Polish victimisation under Socialism -are considered part of the Polish people. But their wives and children were still Jewish and had to stay in the ghetto and thereby at the margin of Poland's cultural memory (105) Despite Petrowskaja's attempt to avoid selection, the logic of the digital archive forces her to do so as Google marks the hits related to her search commands yellow. The yellow colour singles out her search word just as the yellow star singled out the Jews. The Yellow Star that the Jews had to wear during the Nazi regime, made yellow the colour of the Jews, so the auto biographical narrator Petrowskaja. The family name 'Stern', which she 'would have had' if her grandfather had not changed it to Petrowskij for reasons of safety (142), seems to intrinsically connect her family to the stigmatising mark of the Yellow Star. Hence, an eightpage list of people named Stern, which she finds in the Yellow Pages, appears to her an indistinguish able number of 'Yellow Stars' ('Gelbe Sterne', 28). Each yellow marked hit in her Google search, she writes, becomes a building block of her past and thus constitutes her 'Internet Judaism' (52); a Judaism which has no other content than the yellow colour. Hence, Judaism is reduced to selec tion and Petrowskaja's last connection to the Jewish people is her search for the missing grave stones (184).

The beginning of history and the end of storywriting
The decisive motivation behind the narrator's attempt at restoring her family history is the death of Lida, the older sister of Petrowskaja's mother. With Lida's death, the last embodied connection to the past vanished. Having learned to cook the traditional Jewish meals and to bake the traditional Jewish pastry from her grand mother, Anna, Lida had been the last person to carry forward their Jewish origin. Lida was also the last person to have continued her family's traditional profession of teaching deaf and mute children. When Lida died, Petrowskaja writes, she understood the meaning of the word his tory. History is when there is nobody left to ask; when there are only sources left (30). For decades, Petrowskaja presumes, Lida must have cele brated the birthdays of the murdered in silence, kept secret the war, as well as the time before the war: 'she remembered everything, but revealed nothing' (34). All that is left are 'frag mentary recollections, questionable notes and documents in distant archives' (30). 14 In the course of the novel, the autobiograph ical narrator Petrowskaja attempts to assemble the last bits and pieces of family memory and tries to supplement them with material derived from various public archives. Nevertheless, her expectations of being able to order and restore family history are disappointed. The more infor mation she finds, the more questions appear: seventy years after their deaths, she uncovers unknown relatives but loses them the second she finds them as she reads their names on the death records of Yad Vashem (122). All her naive imaginations about the probable lives of present descendants of her relatives are disap pointed (28). Furthermore, she proves wrong the myth about the founding father of her fam ily, Ozjel Krzewin, who, according to the fam ily tales, had inherited a school for deafmute children from his father and continued a trad ition that was passed on for seven gener ations. Petrowskaja finds a marriage certificate that forces her to alter this tale. The marriage attesta tion says: 'Hudesa Krzewina, mother of Ozjel Krzewin, illiterate. Ozjel Krzewin, the groom, son of Hudesa, father unknown, age 20' (130). Petrowskaja's mother perceives the information that Ozjel was an illegitimate child as a scan dal that her daughter should conceal. The bride, Estera, was a minor and a deafmute. According to the family legend, she died young, whereupon Ozjel married Anna, the greatgrandmother of Petrowskaja. Nevertheless, documents in the archive prove that Estera outlived Ozjel. But unlike Ozjel, who fled Warsaw in 1915 together with his second wife, Anna, and their daugh ter, Rosa, Estera and her sons by Ozjel, Adolf and Zygmund, as well as her daughterinlaw, Zygmund's wife, Hela, either perished in the Warsaw Ghetto or were deported and killed. The knowledge she obtains shatters the fam ily myth which used to give her shelter and a sense of origin (94). As Petrowskaja reveals these details as well as her mother's request not to do so, she rejects any censorship of the truth -painful as it may be. Petrowskaja is unable to order and arrange the past -indeed, the past has 'betrayed her expectations' and 'escaped' her hands (133). So, as opposed to writing a coher ent family story that could 'revive and reembody' the archived knowledge, as Marianne Hirsch expects, it seems that Petrowskaja can only describe the process of searching and lay open the disappointing results.

The literary excavation of Babij Jar
In 1941, two years after Ozjel's death, his wife, Anna, as well as one of their daughters, Elena, were killed in the Holocaust. They fell victim to one of the largest mass executions during the Holocaust: the massacre of Babij Jar. So did Petrowskaja's greatgrandmother on her father's side, whom he only knew as babushka. ' "I think", her father ponders at some point, "her name was Esther. Yes, maybe Esther".' 15 Thereby he expresses an uncertainty that is symptomatic of the entire novel.
Babij Jar was a huge canyon that was for merly located on the outskirts of Kiev. On 29 September 1941, the German occupying forces rounded up and shot 33,771 Jews in the course of two days, using the canyon as a mass grave. Up to 200,000 victims suffered the same fate during the following years. In a central chapter of the novel, Petrowskaja recollects the pub lic and historical as well as the familial and individual facts of the massacre and traces the different stages of forgetting, distorting and restoring this story. By recounting the politically imposed amnesia of this event, she addresses the rigid memory politics of the Soviet regime that inhibited the perception of the genocide against the Jews as different from 'the tragedy of all Soviet people (whether Jews, Russians, Belarusians, Ukrainians)' (Baranova 2015). The official version of the Second World War and the Nazi occupation was 'an important tool in state propaganda' and 'the narrative of the War was masterly used by the authorities for the for mation of a unifying Soviet identity' (ibid.). The neglect of the Jewish aspect of the massacre was necessary in order to shape a sense of unity. Both the living and the dead had to belong to the big 'enforced family' of the Soviet Union (228). The entire Soviet population was victimised in the same way, nobody collaborated, and everybody fought for liberation from fascism -a liberation which the Great Patriotic War finally achieved -according to the official narration. When she was a child, the autobiographical narrator Petrowskaja reports, the Great Patriotic War was her most important access to world history (229). She fervently participated in the celebra tion of the 9 May (230-1) and played 'us against the fascists' in the backyard (40). Only later did she discover what was left out of this history: for most of the countries in the Eastern blocincluding her native Ukraine -the 9 May did not mean liberation but 'the beginning [of ] a different oppressive regime for the states occu pied by the Red Army' (Leggewie 2008: 220).
As a consequence of this amalgamation of memory, the Soviet regime did not consider Babij Jar as a place worthy of special attention (190). On the contrary, it was used as a garbage dump by a tile factory, filled up with mud from a broken dam and eventually levelled and turned into a park. As Petrowskaja remarks, 'the Soviet government wanted to liquidate Babij Jar as a place too' (189). In 1961, a famous poem by the Russian poet Yevgeny Yevtushenko finally broke the silence about the massacre, identifying the Jews as its main victims and addressing the lack of a memorial. The poem was translated into no less than seventy languages. Nevertheless in Kiev, so Petrowskaja asserts, the conceal ment went on (191). It was only after more than twenty years of silence that 'public pres sure resulted in a small memorial'. However, the inscription still included the event in the overall history of the Soviet martyrdom. It reads: 'Here in 1941-3, the German fascist invaders executed more than 100,000 citizens of Kiev and prison ers of war' (Gitelman 1997: 20). Also a pompous Soviet monument, which was erected a decade later, ignored the fact that only the Jews were systematically persecuted because of their ethnic origins. Finally, fifty years after the massacre, a menorah monument was erected at the cor rect place and in memory of the Jewish victims (Oldberg 2011). In the following years, a great number of other monuments were erected, each dedicated to different victim groups: one to the executed Ukrainian nationalists (1992), one for two Orthodox priests (2000), and another one for the murdered children. Ingmar Oldberg (2011) notes that the erection of the great number of other memorials weakens the impact of the menorah monument. As in Warsaw, Petrowskaja understands this wealth of memorials as a segmentation of memory and thus once again as a 'selection' that excludes the Jewish genocide from the collective memory of Ukraine (191).

Identifying the blind spot of family memory
As individual memory is inevitably influenced by the social environment, the framework of memory dictated by the Soviet regime caused a blind spot in Petrowskaja's family memory. As Babij Jar was omitted from the cultural mem ory of the Soviet Union, it was excluded from the 'politically shared discursive space which regulates what is important and sayable at any given time' (Rigney 2016: 70). As Rigney fur ther points out, making archival traces 'share able' is a complex matter and the lack of media that could make Babij Jar into a 'shared repre sentation' seemed to impede the private trans mission as well (ibid. 70). As a child, Petrowskaja and her parents paid annual visits to Babij Jar. Unaware of her family's connection to this place and only dimly aware of the atrocities which had taken place there, she experienced the tours as a 'lifeaffirming ritual'. Much later, her parents explained to her that their grandparents were 'laid to rest' in Babij Jar (187). But also this belated transmission of the family trauma con tained an omission: it omitted the circumstances of their deaths and the issue of who was respon sible (197). Her attempt to restore this part of her family history puts to the test her ability to substitute empirical connections to the past with 'imaginative investment projection and creation' (Hirsch 2008: 107). In order for narrations to be considered as postmemory, following Hirsch, information derived from private archives, such as fragmented stories, photos (or -as it is the case in Vielleicht Esther -cooking recipes) are blended and supplemented with fictional elem ents often bolstered by material from public archives. Postmemory is an almost compulsory attempt to restore the broken chain of com municative transmission of memories through imagination. Postmemorial art, one could add by referring to Ann Rigney, invents a language for an event that, in the absence of a medium, had not been 'turned into a sharable and shared rep resentation' (Rigney 2016: 70). Nevertheless, just as the autobiographical narrator Petrowskaja is unable to create a coherent story about her Pol ish ancestors, her 'salvaging fantasy' also fails when it comes to converting the information she gathers about her greatgrandmothers to a 'sharable' narration (77). This is the case, even though both her mother and her father have testimonies from individuals who witnessed the events. For example, Anna's former house keeper, Natascha, had told Rosa, the narrator's grandmother on her mother's side, that she had accompanied Anna and Elena part of the way to the determined meeting place. She reported how Anna had calmed her down, expressing the reassuring conviction that there was noth ing to fear (197). 16 The passage begins with a vivid imagination of how Natascha, constantly crying, had followed Anna along the crowded Bolschaja Shitomirskajato that led to Babij Jar. Yet Petrowskaja refrains from representing the conversation between Natascha and Anna in direct speech. Instead, she makes use of 'indir ect transposed speech', in which the narrator constantly remains present as an active inter preter (Genette 2010: 110). By not pretending that it is Anna and Natascha themselves who speak, she produces a distance that inhibits the impression of authenticity. Petrowskaja uses the same narrative form, when she renarrates what she had learned about the fate of 'maybe Esther', the babushka of her father. The housekeeper of her father's former home had told him what he had seen from the window (223). Petrowskaja envisages that she herself witnesses the scene from the window 'as if she was god', thus simul taneously employing a subjective and an omni present point of view. From this contradictory perspective, she imagines seeing how the old and frail woman, who can hardly walk, addresses two German officers. The narrator imagines how 'maybe Esther' politely asked the officers to help her reach the meeting place. Convinced to speak German, she addresses the officers in Yid dish. Immediately after, the narrator withdraws this version and imagines another wording in which maybe Esther trustfully asks the way to Babij Jar -the place where she is supposed to be killed. Either way, the outcome of the scene is the same: the officers shoot her without even interrupting their conversation (221). 17 By con stantly informing the reader about her uncer tainty about how to tell this event and about her incapability of picturing the scene in a real istic manner, Petrowskaja indicates the fictional character of her account. Despite her alleged omnipresent point of view, she cannot come any closer to the characters and thus fails in shaping an imaginative contact to the past in the manner of a postmemorial work of art: No matter how hard I stretch myself in order to look at their faces, tense the muscles of my memory, my phantasy, and my intuition, I do not see their faces, that of the German officers and that of Babushka. I cannot see their faces, do not understand, and the history books are silent. (221) 18 This unsatisfying position is as close as she can get to her family trauma. Referring to the traditional metaphor of writing as weaving, Petrowskaja remarks that she cannot satisfy the need to spin together the scraps and loose threads of information (134). Her family his tory cannot be restored as coherent narration but merely as fragmented accumulations of information which only momentarily concen trate around short but nonetheless powerful attempts to imagine what might have happened. Thus, Vielleicht Esther could be characterised as a metatext about a novel that is impossible to write.

The archive as educational tool
Does Petrowskaja thus fail in reviving the archive 'with resonant individual and familial forms of mediation and aesthetic expression', which, according to Hirsch, is essential to post memorial writing (Hirsch 2008: 111)? Indeed, her helpless reactions to the information she obtains, her declared incapability of creating a comprehensible story, and her distanced manner of narrating seem to indicate this. The various archives she searches do not lift the veil separ ating her from the past but rather complicate it. Furthermore, she seems inferior to the archive of the internet as Google's algorithms prevent her from finding anything else than what she expected all along (12). Rigney assumes that in order to enable contemporary readers 'to imagine themselves in unfamiliar social frames' they need to get a vivid and highly imaginable access to the historic event (Rigney 2008: 87). However, this precondition does not seem to exist in the case of Vielleicht Esther. Nonethe less, I suggest that Petrowskaja's manner of lay ing open disjointed scraps of a shattered family history has the potential to 'thicken' the relation of the reader to the traumatic legacy: the novel offers the reader the opportunity to identify, not with the victims, but with the position of the autobiographical narrator Petrowskaja herself (ibid. 87). The reader is invited to share with her the position of a descendant who only learns about the traumatic past of her family when it is too late to get access to embodied memories and is thus left with loose scraps and threads which she is unable to reunite.
Exactly through the lens of this fragmented family history, Petrowskaja points out the gaps in the official German understanding of the past.
One of her main concerns is to moderate the major attention given to Auschwitz as the 'geo graphical center' of the Holocaust (Ezrahi 1996: 126). The aim of 'translating' the massacre of Babij Jar into the German framework of mem ory becomes obvious in a passage in which she directly addresses an implied (German) reader, whom she expects to be totally uninformed about the event. Recounting her father's flight from Kiev, she writes: the tribal brothers of this boy, although tribal brother is such an unbiased word, let's say Jews … well, those who stayed were rounded up in Babij Jar … and there they were shot. But of course you know that. After all, Kiev is as far away from Berlin as Paris. (218) 19 The geographical distance between Berlin and Paris may well be equal to that between Berlin and Kiev, Petrowskaja implies, but the mental distance between north and south is much smaller than that between west and east. Therefore, one of the major atrocities of the national socialist occupiers does not play any significant role in Germany's cultural memory. This lack is embodied in a librarian, who upon Petrowskaja's request for books about the mas sacre of Babij Jar, asks: 'Meinen sie Baby Jahr'? ('Do you mean baby year?', 183). By circulating the history of Babij Jar, its enforced absence in family memory, its marginalization in German memory, as well as the impossibility of restor ing it, Petrowskaja aims to widen her readers' understanding of Europe and European history and at the same time to inscribe the Holocaust into Eastern European history writing. 20 Even though Petrowskaja does not succeed in reviv ing the archive in the narrow sense of imagining the individual fates behind the historic facts in any realistic way, she nonetheless succeeds by describing her own need to interact with arch ival material, by questioning the ability of the archive to reveal unquestionable truths about the past and by informing her German readership about events she suspects to be marginalised in the public perception of the European past.

The silence of the grandfather
In the last chapter of the novel, Petrowskaja turns to the riddle of her grandfather Wassilij, who was victimised by both totalitarian regimes. Thus, his life story exemplifies the intercon nection between the National Socialist and the Communist atrocities which makes it necessary to remember those histories together. By unrav elling the story of her grandfather, Petrowskaja both addresses the subject of the nonJewish victims of the Second World War and the grey zone of being victim and perpetrator at the same time. Given that 'categories such as vic tims, perpetrators, collaborators and bystanders … are very difficult to apply' as 'individuals and national and ethnic groups in this region often shifted their roles with the many, often violent, turns', Petrowskaja hereby deals with an unre solved and painful aspect of the past (Sindbaek Andersen and TörnquistPlewa 2016: 2).
As the only Ukrainian in the family, he fought in the Great Patriotic War. In 1941, he was captured during an ambush attack and 20 Petrowskaja also circulates various other incidents that took place in Eastern European and which she suspects to be marginalized in European history writing too; e.g. the manmade famine in Ukraine (43) As a prisoner of war, her grandfather was one of the many millions of victims who were excluded from the cultural remembrance of the Soviet Union. Whereas the surviving sol diers were celebrated in pompous parades every 9 May -a festivity which was supposed to unite the entire population of the Soviet Union in the joy of victory -the millions and millions of Russian prisoners of war were never mentioned (228). As Petrowskaja ironically remarks, it was forbidden to be imprisoned during the war, and if it happened anyway it was forbidden to survive. The survivor is a traitor and death is better than betrayal (231). 21 When he finally returned, her grandfather kept silent about his experiences: those during the war, those of his imprisonment and those after his liberation. For the autobiographical narrator Petrowskaja, there is something troubling about his silence and she fears that it hides a terrible guilt. In particular, she becomes suspicious about his role in the socialist regime. Why did the Great Purge between 1936 and 1938 not affect him even though he had undertaken several trips to the Baltic States because of his high position in the Ministry of Agriculture (228)  kitchen garden was a paradisal apple tree. Using the metaphor of the Fall of Man, she suspects the apples to be contaminated with the blood of others. She recounts that such a tree was also situated in front of a beautiful little palace in the centre of the city of Kiev. In her childhood and youth, she used to go there a lot. She describes it as a beautiful, paradiselike place. But at some point, she learns that the palace was the central torture chamber of the People's Commissariat for Internal Affairs (NKWD) in the 1930s. In connecting the park in front of the palace with her grandfather's garden through the metaphoric picture of the paradisal apple tree, the garden is turned into a symbol of the 'enforced big fam ily' (228) of the Soviet Union in which the bio diversity of the flora was increased, whereas the species of men were forcefully reduced (236).

Conclusion
Belonging to the third generation born after the Holocaust, Petrowskaja exemplifies a new level of Holocaust writing in her novel Vielleicht Esther. This writing is influenced by the ever increasing distance from the Second World War, the subsequent loss of embodied memory and the opening of the Eastern European archives. By trying to restore her personal family history, Petrowskaja draws attention to archival material which has long been 'concealed in the Western public consciousness' and thus deemed irrele vant for 'the "European account" of World War Two' (Mälksoo 2009: 654). Her family history undermines fixed perceptions of the past as it introduces the German reader to lesserknown aspects of the Holocaust as well as to atrocities committed by the Stalinist and Soviet regimes such as the Holodomor, the imprisonment of returning prisoners of war by the Soviets, and the prisoners' exclusion from the cultural mem ory of the Soviet Union. Thus, she both shows the necessity to understand the Holocaust as an integral part of Eastern European history writing and the necessity of recontextualising the Holocaust by breaking it down to specific events instead of using it as a common moral icon. When writing about her grandfather, she approaches a particularly difficult and painful part of the past. Even though he suffered tre mendously both during his imprisonment as a Russian prisoner of war and in the Gulag, he is not a mere victim. Her investigations into his time of imprisonment condenses the interrela tion between Nazism and Stalinism that makes it impossible to determine unambiguously the question of who was victim and who was perpe trator. Translated to the public realm, Petrows kaja's autobiographical novel endorses a multi faceted understanding of Europe that spends 'undiv ided attention towards both totalitarian pasts' (Leggewie and Lang 2011: 11, 24-5), avoids to simplify history and instead faces the complicated entanglement of suffering and guilt on both sides of the former Iron Curtain.