ON FINDING AND FABRICATING: MEMORY AND FAMILY HISTORY IN KATJA PETROWSKAJA'S VIELLEICHT ESTHER

This article argues that Katja Petrowskaja's award‐winning text, Vielleicht Esther (2014), brings a hyper‐local concept of family history to the debate on transnational memory. While the text documents the quest of the narrator for lost or forgotten parts of the life stories of family members who perished in the Holocaust, it also takes liberties by consciously moving beyond the conventional limits for narrativising family history. The imaginative techniques the narrator uses in framing and expanding the various stories are rooted in the narratives of transnational Holocaust memory, and the same applies to the narrator's framing of her own experiences during the search. This particular form of interweaving documentation and inventing situates Vielleicht Esther within a globalised transnational and trans‐generational locus of consciousness which the narrator herself inhabits. The text thus gives voice to the so‐called ‘third generation of survivors’. As a representative of this generation, the narrator thoughtfully exercises her right to participate in a discussion on the question of whether children or grandchildren of survivors may speak about the effect of the Holocaust on their own lives.