Counterfactualism in Contemporary German Jewish fiction: Katja Petrowskaja's MAYBE ESTHER: A FAMILY STORY (2014) and Jenny Erpenbeck's THE END OF DAYS (2012)

• In Event: Contemporary German Jewish Literature and Culture

Abstract

When her daughter looks at a poster of the racial taxonomies of the Nuremberg Laws and asks “Where are we here on this chart?” the first-person narrator of Petrowskaja’s MAYBE ESTHER muses, “The question really ought to be asked not in the present tense but in the past, and the subjunctive: where would we have been […] if we had been Jewish and had lived here back then.” Erpenbeck’s novel THE END OF DAYS is comprised of five books, separated by Intermezzi written in the subjunctive, that each offer an alternate life story for the infant who dies in the first.
Petrowskaja joins a new generation of German-Jewish writers from the Former Soviet Union (Kaminer, Vertlib, Gorelik, and Grjasnowa) whose works have challenged the centrality of the Holocaust in German Jewish memory and identity. While Petrowskaja’s text does not minimize the meaning of the Holocaust in her own family story or in German or European history, it calls to question the predestination of individuals to either guilt or victimhood by virtue of family lineage. The forked-path narrative structure of Erpenbeck’s novel (whose Jewish protagonist was inspired by Erpenbeck’s grandmother Hedda Zinner) similarly undermines the predestination of the individual.
This paper examines the narrative strategies that Petrowskaja and Erpenbeck employ to explore the meaning of the past for the present and the emancipatory power of the imagination. I focus especially on both authors’ use of the subjunctive mood to create so-called counterfactual histories. While the use of counterfactual histories can serve a desire to normalize the Nazi past (Gavriel D. Rosenfeld has observed this trend in contemporary culture); I will argue that they work in these texts work to create space for the individual exploration of identity and identification outside of essential categories, permitting a deeper engagement with the Holocaust past.

Author

• Elizabeth Loentz, University of Illinois at Chicago