Writer, journalist, literary scholar
Katja Petrowskaja (*1970 in Kiev) studied literature in Tartu and Moscow and works as a journalist for German and Russian-language media. Her literary debut “Maybe Esther” (2014) was awarded the Ingeborg Bachmann Prize and translated into over 30 languages. Most recently, her Photo Essays “Das Foto schaute mich an” at the Suhrkamp Verlag. The author lives in Berlin. She is a Member of the German Academy for Language and Poetry.
Katja Petrowskaja reminds us that ‘truth’ can be based on unreliable memories and that we are shaped by numerous voices from the past. For the author, the stories of her Ukrainian-Jewish family, in their fragmentary, unfinished form, unlock the traumatic experiences of the 20th century and at the same time enable emancipation.
Her writing in German questions the desire or demand for a clear affiliation; she liberates language from its historical contexts of "power". Her conviction that language is ‘innocent’ corresponds with her method, which takes chance as the starting point for writing. Thus, she calls her columns published in 2022 under the title “Das Foto schaute mich an” (The photo looked at me) “calendars of encounters”, since her work is based on the chance discovery of images on the internet, in newspapers, family archives, exhibitions and flea markets, among other places.
With her search for the potentials of images, Petrovskaya's work corresponds with LIAS's goal of opening spaces of possibility in contrast to supposed certainties. Katja Petrowskaja's work is characterised not least by a critical capacity, the discovery of questions in supposedly self-evident factual behaviour, the successful and unsuccessful coexistence in the friction of different languages and attributions. For the author, history becomes describable “in the gulf of languages, in the exchange, in the confusion of roles and perspectives”.
As a Public Fellow of LIAS in Culture and Society, Katja Petrovskaya is invited to interpret and communicate the academic work at LIAS to a broader public along the projects of the Fellows and to react to the LIAS programme with her own way of writing. She draws attention to new topics and, conversely, enriches scientific work and questions with a literary style of writing and a different view.
EDUCATION
1987-1992 Studies of Literature and Slavonic Studies in Tartu (Estonia)
1998 Doctorate in Literary Studies and Slavic Studies at the Russian State Humanities University in Moscow
LATEST WORKS
„Das Foto schaute mich an“. Columns. Suhrkamp, Berlin 2022
„Maybe Esther: A Family Story“. Harper, New York 2018
„Die Auserwählten. Ein Sommer im Ferienlager von Orlionok“. Photo reportage by Anita Back with an Essay by Katja Petrowskaja and a Foreword by Joachim Jäger. Braus, Berlin 2012.
since 2015 the Column „Bild der Woche“ in der Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung
2011 to 2013 the Column „Die west-östliche Diva“ in Frankfurter Allgemeine Sonntagszeitung