Abstract
Katja Petrowskaja’s Vielleicht Esther (2014) can be read as a poetic autobiography in which memory spaces constitute themselves by means of a poetics of deterritorialisation (Deleuze and Guattari) and multidirectionality (Rothberg). Borderlines between past and present and different memory discourses are put into motion, as topoi of travel literature and physical movement are employed within an aesthetic of association. This article shows how the travelling subject moves between historical and fictional places, through physical and virtual spaces of European memory, interlinking the author-narrator’s experience with that of Jewish family members, as well as with a wider global community. Challenging major memory discourses and narratives of belonging, as well as boundaries between fact and fiction, corporeal and digital movement, the performative ‘minor’ language of the narrative creates lines of flight and opens new spaces of memory. Tweetable Abstract: Deterritorialisation and multidirectionality: How corporeal and virtual movement in Vielleicht Esther creates lines of flight and spaces of memory.
Highlights
In her 2014 interview for Die Zeit, Katja Petrowskaja described her book Vielleicht Esther (2014) as a non-literary, factual piece of writing.1 VE constitutes a highly poetic autobiographical narrative, in which ‘lines of flight’ (Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus 509) break through grand narratives and individual memory discourses, while revealing the fine line between fact and fiction and opening multidirectional memory spaces
This is partly achieved through a poetic language of movement, employing topoi of travel literature, physical and virtual movement within an aesthetic of association and distortion of reality
Movement interlinks the author-narrator’s experience with that of Jewish family members whose histories she follows – by means of archival and online research, and in her imagination – and with a global ‘Internet-Judentum’ (52) [Internet Jewishness (ME 43)] and a wider, non-ethnic community.2. Her journey through physical and virtual, social and political spaces in the present traces the movements of family members in the past, criss-crossing the paths of others, and traversing existing national, ethnic, temporal and conceptual boundaries, creating a multidirectional (Rothberg) and multimedial space of memory
Summary
Katja Petrowskaja’s Vielleicht Esther (2014) can be read as a poetic autobiography in which memory spaces constitute themselves by means of a poetics of deterritorialisation (Deleuze and Guattari) and multidirectionality (Rothberg). Borderlines between past and present and different memory discourses are put into motion, as topoi of travel literature and physical movement are employed within an aesthetic of association. This article shows how the travelling subject moves between historical and fictional places, through physical and virtual spaces of European memory, interlinking the author-narrator’s experience with that of Jewish family members, as well as with a wider global community. Challenging major memory discourses and narratives of belonging, as well as boundaries between fact and fiction, corporeal and digital movement, the performative ‘minor’ language of the narrative creates lines of flight and opens new spaces of memory
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