Il terzo spazio del perdono.Katja Petrowskaja, Vielleicht Esther e la post-lingua tedesca

This paper refers to new narratives practiced by transcultural writers of East-European origin but using German as a paradoxical “third space” in which their reconfiguration of (post-)memory and trauma can happen as a sort of cultural translation. Petrowskaja’s Vielleicht Esther (2014) will be taken as a case-study. It is about her “quête” to the sites where the events of her family history had taken place, reflecting on a fragmented and traumatized century and focusing on figures that pass through history without leaving a trace. She recollects traces in Poland, Ukraine, Russia, on thresholds of history: Russian Revolution, destruction of the European Jews and World War II, Fall of the Berlin Wall, New Europe. German language, situated in a polyphonic texture of Jewish and Slavic languages is the element in which the story may be re-collected and told. Thus, the journey maps modern European topography, languages lost and found, and new identities of those who inherit or disinherit that historical past. A comparison with Canetti (Die gerettete Zunge) is drawn to differentiate between two ways of using German: as a “second language” in which one’s own memories “unconsciously translate themselves” (Canetti) and as third space in which cultural translation may take place (Petrowskaja).