The family tree, the web, and the palimpsest: Figures of postmemory in Katja Petrowskaja's Vielleicht Esther (2014)

Vielleicht Esther exemplifies the postmemorial family narrative: a traumatic past is traced from the perspective of the non-witness. However, Katja Petrowskaja's text complicates the boundaries of the text's genre and postmemorial discourse: established figures of postmemory, genealogy, and temporality, e.g. the family tree, are interlaced with a textile imagery and notions of the palimpsest, pointing to a topographical approach that entails affiliative, non-familial forms of postmemorial response and an understanding of historical responsibility as ‘implication’. Both affiliation and implication involve the reader in a particular way, while invoking broader debates about the shape of Holocaust memory in a future without survivors.