«Everything in this book is true, except the German language». Linguistic patchwork in Katja Petrowskaja's novel «Maybe Esther»

Abstract

The article deals with the linguistic patchwork of the German-language novel Vielleicht Esther (2014), written by the Ukrainian-Jewish author Katja Petrowskaja. In the book, she traces the genealogy of her family and discusses the Nazi massacre in Babij Jar, a ravine in which her great-grandmother Esther was presumably slaughtered. Through analyzing the hybridization of German language, I argue that Petrowskaja forges an artificial linguistic code that not only allows her to transform her family saga into a universal story, but also to create a lingua franca that could transcend idiomatic boundaries. The multilingual, inclusive and hybrid linguistic patchwork is therefore interpreted as an attempt to establish a new unified discourse on the Holocaust, by ironically appropriating German language in order to put the event of Babij Jar in the same context of other Nazi exterminations.