{"id":4392,"date":"2015-06-05T19:35:54","date_gmt":"2015-06-05T23:35:54","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/glossen\/?page_id=4392"},"modified":"2021-12-30T14:35:04","modified_gmt":"2021-12-30T19:35:04","slug":"gabriele-eckart-glossen40-2015","status":"publish","type":"page","link":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/glossen\/archive\/most-recent-issue-glossen-402015\/gabriele-eckart-glossen40-2015\/","title":{"rendered":"Gabriele Eckart"},"content":{"rendered":"

The Functions of Multilingual Language Use in Katja Petrowskaja\u2019s Vielleicht Esther<\/em>\u00a0<\/strong><\/p>\n

This article examines several examples of code-switching between languages in Katja Petrowskaja\u2019s narrative Vielleicht Esther.<\/em> The text of this German-Ukrainian writer (born in 1970) about her genealogical research is written in German, but there are seventy-two instances of mixing German with other languages. The languages are English, Russian, Polish, Yiddish, Hebrew, Italian, and French. According to Istvan Kecskes, code-switching is a term that is used \u201cto cover various types of bi- and multilingual practices\u201d (258) as, for instance, the mixing of two languages within a sentence or the change in language between sentences. This study will examine the most important functions of this code-switching in Petrowskaja\u2019s text. As will be seen, they are mainly related to the negotiation of the first-person narrator\u2019s identity, as, for instance, her Jewishness and her post-Soviet and, above all, her linguistic identity.<\/p>\n

Since the first-person narrator (the author\u2019s alter ego) came as a native speaker of Russian to Germany after the fall of the Wall and speaks and writes in German now, it is not surprising that she is highly sensitive to the implications and consequences that the use of one language instead of another has for human existence. Raised in the Soviet Union, German was for her \u201cdie Sprache des Feindes\u201d (80)1. However, her roots are mainly Jewish and most of her Jewish ancestors, as she finds out during her genealogical research (it goes back to 1864), spoke German fluently and were proud of it. In addition, she loves Goethe; parts of her narrative rely on an intertextual play with Goethe\u2019s poems \u201cWanderers Nachtlied\u201d and \u201cErlk\u00f6nig\u201d \u2013 \u201cun\u00fcbersetzbare[] Leitsterne\u201d (79) which had directed her in the process of learning the German language. About the intensity of her longing for the German language, the narrator states:<\/p>\n

Mein Deutsch blieb in der Spannung der Unerreichbarkeit und bewahrte mich vor Routine. Als w\u00e4re es die kleinste M\u00fcnze, zahlte ich in dieser sp\u00e4t erworbenen Sprache meine Vergangenheit zur\u00fcck, mit der Leidenschaft eines jungen Liebhabers. Ich begehrte Deutsch so sehr, weil ich damit nicht verschmelzen konnte, getrieben von einer unerf\u00fcllbaren Sehnsucht, einer Liebe, die weder Gegenstand noch Geschlecht kannte, keinen Adressaten, denn dort waren nur Kl\u00e4nge, die man nicht einzufangen vermochte, wild waren sie und unerreichbar. (78-9)<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Julia Kristeva notes about writers who decide to write in a language other than their native one: \u201cObject of lucid love and nonetheless passionate, the new language is a pretext for rebirth: new identity new hope\u201d (287). This is certainly true for Petrowskaja\u2019s relationship to German \u2013 expressing herself in this new language, she can play with different possibilities in the negotiation of her identity after the collapse of the Soviet Union and the discovery of her Jewish roots; it leads to a spiritual rebirth.<\/p>\n

Also the following example will demonstrate Petrowskaja\u2019s positive relationship to multilingualism. While the narrator is in Poland to conduct research on her great-grandparents, the first-person narrator states: \u201cnirgendwo habe ich mich so perfekt verloren gef\u00fchlt wie hier [\u2026]. Ich dachte auf Russisch, suchte meine j\u00fcdischen Verwandten und schrieb auf Deutsch.\u201d (115) As the word \u201cperfekt\u201d already indicates, she interprets this feeling of loss positively. She states: \u201cIch hatte das Gl\u00fcck, mich in der Kluft der Sprachen, im Tausch, in der Verwechslung von Rollen und Blickwinkeln zu bewegen.\u201d (115) In other words, while switching from one language to another the narrator discovers new meanings of words and expressions and with them new perspectives from which to look at herself. To bring the famous tower of Babel into the discussion, Kathryn Starkey should be quoted, who asks in her examination of Wolfram von Eschenbach\u2019s medieval text Willehalm (1217) if the author sees the multilingualism that resulted from the tower\u2019s destruction more as a curse or a blessing. She answers: \u201cthe narrator ultimately recognizes that despite the potential problems of communication, linguistic difference is divinely sanctioned\u201d (30). God obviously did not want to punish humans by giving them different languages, but force them to mobilize all their creative potential when they must learn to cope with multilingualism. In regard to this positive effect of multilingualism, Manfred Schmeling and Monika Schmitz-Emans refer to Wilhelm von Humboldt who had pointed out that every language enabled \u201ceinen eigen-artigen Zugriff auf die Welt\u201d and concluded \u201cwarum sollte es f\u00fcr die Menschen dann erstrebenswert sein, nur eine Sprache zu haben?\u201d (13) Without doubt, also Petrowskaja evaluates linguistic difference positively; changing back and forth between languages enriches her first-person narrator\u2019s self-perception and her perception of the world: \u201cdie sprachwechsel, die ich unternehme, um beide seiten zu bewohnen, ich und nicht ich zugleich zu erleben, was f\u00fcr ein anspruch\u201d (117-18). But, there are problems connected with the use of more than one language as will be seen in the following.<\/p>\n

One of the reasons that the narrator considers speaking German as beneficial to her is that it functions as a mask. \u201c[G]etarnt mit meiner deutschen Sprache,\u201d she feels more secure: \u201calle denken, ich geh\u00f6re dazu, dabei bin ich nicht von hier.\u201d (116) However, in a nightmare, feelings of insecurity arise when a German word that comes from her lips in a dream slips into a Hebrew word that she experiences as threatening. It happens in Warzaw, after a visit to the Jewish ghetto and a performance of the video artist Katarzyna Kozyra the same day. The artist, playing a man in a sauna, shocked the audience when she, while standing on a table, dropped the towel \u2013 showing a false penis that was only \u201cangeklebt[\u2026]\u201d (116). Afterwards, the first-person narrator dreams \u201cvon der sauna, vom ghetto, von nackten k\u00f6rpern, gekr\u00fcmmt im tod oder im genuss\u201d (117). In this dream, she tells Katarzyna, the artist, that because of her first name she also could be \u201cpolin\u201d (117). Because this statement implies that, as a Polish Jew, she certainly would have ended up in the ghetto and afterwards in a German extermination camp, the dream becomes threatening when the German word \u201cschau\u201d slips into the Hebrew \u201cshoa\u201d and she accuses the Polish artist of having brought up this word. In this somber dream, she also realizes that losing control over certain words in her newly acquired language can lead to exposure because panicking about the word \u201cshoa\u201d might reveal her Jewish roots: \u201cich k\u00f6nnte jede sein, aber doch besser nicht, nie w\u00fcrde ich es tun, nein, lieber nichts tun, ich habe mich auch unter anderen versteckt, oder nein, eher zur schau gestellt, schau, ich habe nicht shoa gesagt, du hast shoa gesagt.\u201d (117) The dream \u2013 as can be seen, Petrowskaja does not capitalize the nouns in dream texts \u2013 continues with a reflection of the narrator\u2019s otherness and leads from the word \u201cscheu\u201d through the force of alliteration once more to the word \u201cshoa\u201d: \u201cich bin anders, aber ich verstecke mich nicht, warm, und sonst bin ich scheu, schau, shoa, kalt, wieder ganz kalt\u201d (118). In the following, the dreamer dramatizes the question of belonging and her difficult relationship to German: \u201caber ich kann so tun, und ich und ich und ich, was f\u00fcr ein seltsames wort, wie ort, was f\u00fcr ein ort, als ob ich zu jemandem geh\u00f6rte, zu einer familie, zu einer sprache, und manchmal sieht es sogar so aus, als w\u00e4re es so, ich kann mich nicht verstecken, und das alles auf deutsch\u201d (118). At this point, the memory of the artist\u2019s performance in the setting of the sauna dramatically influences the reflection of the narrator\u2019s relation to German:<\/p>\n

diese sprache, mein angeklebtes geschlecht, auf deutsch ist die sprache weiblich und auf russisch ist sie m\u00e4nnlich, was habe ich mit diesem wechsel getan? ich kann mir das ankleben, wie du, katarzyna, ich kann mich auf den tisch stellen und es demonstrieren, schaut alle, ich habe es! hier unten, o mein deutsch! ich schwitze, mit meiner auf die zunge geklebten deutschen sprache (118).<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Perhaps, the compulsive switch from \u201cschau\u201d to \u201cshoa\u201d that happens repeatedly in this dream has to do with the fact that the narrator learned German at the same time as her brother learned Hebrew; the reverberating sounds must have mixed with astonishing results in their small apartment in Kiev. In the following, the narrator reflects upon the question of how their study of languages was connected with their negotiation of new identities after the collapse of the \u201cNation der Proletarier und \u00dcbermenschen\u201d (18), as she calls the Soviet Union:<\/p>\n

Er wandte sich dem orthodoxen Judentum zu, aus blauem Himmel, wie wir alle dachten, ich verliebte mich in einen Deutschen [\u2026]. Sein Hebr\u00e4isch und mein Deutsch \u2013 diese Sprachen ver\u00e4nderten unsere Lebenswege, Betreten auf eigene Gefahr. Wir waren eine sowjetische Familie, russisch und nicht religi\u00f6s, das Russische war das stolze Erbe aller, die wussten, was Verzweiflung ist, angesichts des Schicksals der eigenen Heimat [\u2026].\u201d (78)<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

After quoting from a poem that praises the Russian language which, for her, has the same emotional value as the German line \u201co du fr\u00f6hliche, o du selige\u201d (87), the narrator points out: \u201c[W]ir bestimmten uns nicht mehr durch die lebenden und die toten Verwandten und ihre Orte, sondern durch unsere Sprachen.\u201d (78) According to this last statement, the languages you speak define who you are. This would mean that the narrator sees herself as a Russian-German. However, it seems that she cannot find rest in this new bilingual post-Soviet identity since something drives her to travel obsessively in search of her family\u2019s roots. The book Vielleicht Esther<\/em> is the testimony of this search; the theme is, as was mentioned before, the first-person narrator\u2019s genealogical research. She travels to Kiev where she grew up, to Poland where her great grandparents are from, and to the concentration camp Mauthausen in Austria where one of her grandfathers was imprisoned. Especially the searches in Kiev and in Warsaw turn into a discovery of her Jewish roots \u2013 roots she was not aware of during Soviet times. For generations, she finds out, the family had made a living by running schools for deaf mute children of Jewish families. In different European countries, mainly Poland, Russia, and Austria, they had taught their students in unique ways to speak by learning prayers. These prayers were in Yiddish and Hebrew because they were Jews. Her family had kept this knowledge secret from her for reasons of safety. After all, as the narrator demonstrates with abundant examples, Stalin\u2019s and his followers\u2019 politics were appallingly anti-Semitic. During her research in Kiev, the narrator discovers that for older Jews of the city, Yiddish was their first language \u201cegal ob sie religi\u00f6s waren und die Traditionen achteten oder ob sie ihren Kindern hinterherst\u00fcrzten, geradewegs vorw\u00e4rts in die helle sowjetische Zukunft.\u201d (213) She also discovers that many of them were proud of speaking German as their third language; when Germany invaded the Soviet Union in 1941 some of them did not escape because they hoped that their lives would improve under German rule: \u201cberuhige dich, zu den Deutschen hatten wir schon immer gute Beziehungen\u201d (197).<\/p>\n

At this point of the narrative, code-switching into Yiddish or into a mixture of Yiddish and German becomes very important for discovering and telling the story of the narrator\u2019s great-grandmother Esther. Due to her difficulties in walking she could not follow the German army\u2019s call to all Jews of Kiev to gather at the corner of Melnik and Dokteriwiski Streets at 8 a.m. on Monday, September 29, 1941. Esther felt bad about it; after all, the call sounded so typically German: \u201c[d]eutlich, klar und verst\u00e4ndlich\u201d (214) \u2013a clarity that pleased Esther. In addition, there was a threat in the call: \u201cEs stand da noch etwas \u00fcber Erschie\u00dfung. Bei Zuwiderhandlung Erschie\u00dfung. [\u2026] Also nur, wenn man sich nicht an die Regeln hielt.\u201d (214). The narrator describes the old woman moving very slowly down the stairs and along the street until she reaches a German checkpoint and utters the following bilingual mix to the soldiers:<\/p>\n

Cherr Offizehr, begann Babuschka mit ihrem unverkennbaren Anhauch [of Yiddish], \u00fcberzeugt davon, sie spreche Deutsch, zeyn Zi so fayn, sagen Sie mir, was zoll ick denn machen? Ikh hob die plakatn gezen mit instruktzies far yidn, aber ich kann nicht so gut laufen, ikh kann nyscht loyfn azoy schnel. (220)<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

The narrator guesses that the soldiers just shot Esther, perhaps even without interrupting their conversation, \u201cohne sich ganz umzudrehen, ganz nebenbei\u201d (221). Or, this is another possibility: Esther might have asked them: \u201cseien Sie so nett, Cherr Offizehr, sagen Sie bitte, wie kommt man nach Babij Jar?\u201d (221) and they shot her because this was annoying: \u201cWer mag das schon, auf dumme Fragen antworten zu m\u00fcssen?\u201d (221) In the end, Esther\u2019s body ended up with those of the approximately hundred thousand other people from Kiev who were shot by the Germans and the local police during German occupation and thrown into the infamous ravine Babij Jar. It perplexes the narrator to think that if her grandparents and parents had not left Kiev before the arrival of the German army, they also would have been killed and she would not exist. Therefore, she cannot stop thinking about the massacres that had not bothered her so much when she was growing up in Kiev not knowing about her Jewish roots. In the following, she reflects on the notion of \u201cthe Other\u201d and switches into Russian to point out the precise location of these horrible events:<\/p>\n

Ja, man nennt diese Opfer f\u00fcr gew\u00f6hnlich Juden, aber viele meinen damit nur die anderen. Das ist irref\u00fchrend, denn die, die da sterben mussten, waren nicht die anderen, sondern die Schulfreunde, die Kinder aus dem Hinterhof, die Nachbarn, die Omas und die Onkel, die biblischen Greise und ihre sowjetischen Enkel, die man am Tag des 29. September auf den Stra\u00dfen von Kiew in diesem endlosen Zug ihres eigenen Begr\u00e4bnisses die Bolschaja Shitomirskaja entlanggehen sah. (185)<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Walking around the ravine with the strange name Babi Yar (a Turkic word meaning ravine) that an ignorant German librarian mistook for \u201cBaby Jahr\u201d (183) when the narrator asked for books about it, she struggles with the negotiation of her identity:<\/p>\n

Ich m\u00f6chte von diesem Spaziergang so erz\u00e4hlen, als ob es m\u00f6glich w\u00e4re zu verschweigen, dass auch meine Verwandten hier get\u00f6tet wurden, als ob es m\u00f6glich w\u00e4re, als abstrakter Mensch, als Mensch an sich und nicht nur als Nachfahrin des j\u00fcdischen Volkes, mit dem mich nur noch die Suche nach fehlenden Grabsteinen verbindet, als ob es m\u00f6glich w\u00e4re, als ein solcher Mensch an diesem merkw\u00fcrdigen Ort namens Babij Jar spazieren zu gehen. (184)<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

That she reflects on the possibility of walking around here as an \u201cabstrakter Mensch\u201d has to do with her former Soviet identity that excluded knowledge of her ethnicity. This exclusion had created a \u201cNebel in der Familiengeschichte\u201d (91) that was beneficial; all Soviet children had to live with different exclusions in the history of their families, be they ethnic, political, or religious; it had made them equal. However, what was good then is not good anymore today for the narrator; she wants to know about her ancestors. Therefore, she searches in the past to lift this \u201cNebel\u201d and worries at the same time that the result of her search could undermine what she has seen until now as the person she was.<\/p>\n

Besides her great-grandmother Esther, she discovers traces of another relative in Kiev whose Jewishness had been kept secret from her, her great-uncle Arnold. Stories about Arnold\u2019s miraculous survival of all kinds of disasters had become legend in the family. Now, at a closer, post-Soviet look, it turns out that his real name was the Jewish Abram (he changed it after the war to avoid being the victim of anti-Semitism) and the legendary disasters that he had survived were caused by his Jewishness. The narrator reflects: \u201cMein ganzes Leben w\u00e4re anders verlaufen, komischer, aber auch j\u00fcdischer, so glaube ich heute, wenn ich von Anfang an gewusst h\u00e4tte, dass wir einen Abrascha [the Russian form of Abram] in der Familie hatten, ein Name, den ich nicht aus dem Leben, sondern nur aus Witzen kannte [\u2026]\u201d (205) Hinting at anti-Semitic stereotypes, she comments on these jokes: \u201cdie so endlose Folgen erzeugten wie Arnolds \u00dcberlebensfabeln, und vielleicht gab es diese Fabeln nur wegen der Witze.\u201d (205) Later, when the narrator reflects on the reasons for the suppression of Jews and other ethnic minorities in the Soviet Union, she states with sarcasm: \u201cIm gro\u00dfen Garten des Landes wurde jahrzehntelang versucht, m\u00f6glichst vieles zu pfropfen, besonders Apfelsorten, gleichzeitig wurde zielstrebig an der Reduzierung der Menschentypen gearbeitet.\u201d (236) This example shows how closely the examination of code-switching as, for instance, in the changes of the uncle\u2019s name from Yiddish to German, is connected with her struggle to come to terms with her identity after the collapse of the Soviet Union. Is she Jewish or an \u201cabstrakter Mensch\u201d and if both, to what degrees, and how should she feel about it?<\/p>\n

Since the narrator also searches for her family\u2019s roots on the Internet, most switches in Petrowskaja\u2019s text (there are thirty) go from German to English, the language of Google. Other English expressions are used as tools in the narrator\u2019s genealogical research, as for instance, in the sentence, \u201cEin Adolf unter meinen Juden, related through, damit hatte ich als letztes gerechnet.\u201d (131) However, there are also switches into English that touch difficult political matters and interfere with her former Soviet beliefs in what was right and wrong in history and with the meaning of historical dates. One relative, Mira, the author of the book Life beyond the Holocaust, lives, as the narrator discovers, in Oak Ridge, Tennessee, in the United States. But, this was the location of the Oak Ridge National Laboratory that, according to its website, was founded \u201cf\u00fcr die Atombombe, die den zweiten Weltkrieg beendete.\u201d (120) In her attempt to grasp \u201cdie inneren Verbindungen meiner Familie, unsere Leitmotive\u201d (120), she studies the Laboratory\u2019s website according to which the atom bomb saved the world: \u201cOak Ridge hat die Welt gerettet!\u201d (120) In the Soviet Union she had learned that differently. The \u201cGraphitreaktor\u201d (120) at Oak Ridge, she reads, was launched on November 4, 1943. The narrator thinks: \u201cDieses Datum haben wir in der Schule gelernt, an diesem Tag begann die Schlacht um die Befreiung von Kiew, meiner Heimatstadt.\u201d (120) As has been seen in other instances, crossing borders into other languages undermines the basics of her former Soviet identity and influences her in the negotiation of a new one.<\/p>\n

Dorothea Lauterbach, examining the functions of code-switching into French in Rilke\u2019s novel Die Aufzeichnungen des Malte Laurids Brigge (1910), states that in Rilke\u2019s time bilingualism in a literary text belonged to the \u201cerz\u00e4hltechnische[n] Innovationspotential\u201d (175) of modernity. In the globalized world of today, in which also code-switching into local dialects is highly valued as enriching the complexity of a literary text, we can claim the following: A text written in standard German that has no traces of other languages or dialects at all is aesthetically not up to date. In Petrowskaja\u2019s text Vielleicht Esther<\/em>, of a total of two-hundred eighty-three pages, there are seventy-two cases of switching from German into seven different languages; the text looks and sounds like the explosion of multilingual fireworks.<\/p>\n

The color that shines the brightest in this display, accompanied by a whistling that sounds the most delighted, is Polish. There are thirteen examples of switching from German into Polish; one can feel the narrator\u2019s fingers trembling with happiness while she types this multilingual mix \u201cPolen, Poly\u0144, Polonia, Polania, polan-ja, hier-wohnt-Gott, drei hebr\u00e4ische W\u00f6rter, die aus dem slawischen Polen ein gelobtes Land der Juden machten\u201d (55)2. One of her favorite Polish expression is the first verse of the Polish national anthem \u201djeszcze Polska nie zgin\u0119\u0142a, noch ist Polen nicht verloren\u201d (91). She loves Poland so much that she regrets that she cannot be Polish because, when her grandmother was born in 1905, Eastern Poland belonged to the Russian empire and in addition to that, as she knows now, her Polish family was Jewish. Her father also loved Poland; she had grown up listening to his praises of \u201cPolscha\u201d (the Russian word for Poland) that, according to his point of view, \u201cwar die weiblichste Erscheinung unserer sozialistischen Welt.\u201d (92) And she remembers how deeply he was mourning over what was done to Poland by its neighbors, including the Soviet Union: \u201cder Kanal, der Warschauer Aufstand, die polnischen Teilungen, Katy\u0144.\u201d (92-3) The narrator remembers: \u201cDie polnische Trag\u00f6die schmerzte ihn, als d\u00fcrfe er das eigene nur im Schmerz der anderen erkennen in einer Art \u00dcbersetzung.\u201d (93) When she asked her father how he could love the Poles who obviously did not like Russians and Jews too much, he said to her surprise: \u201cLiebe muss nicht erwidert werden.\u201d (93) Many insertions of Polish in Petrowskaja\u2019s text are quotations from Polish poetry. Others have to do with her former dreams of traveling to Poland \u2013 \u201cein unerreichbares, sch\u00f6nes Ausland\u201d (91) when traveling there was forbidden. As soon as the travel restrictions were lifted after the dissolution of the Soviet Union, she set out to go there \u2013 a trip that through spectatorship and comparison with her homeland started producing a basis for her post-Soviet self. During her latest trip to this country, most important were encounters with Poles who helped her in researching her family\u2019s Jewish roots and also enabled her to abandon some of her stereotypes about Poles, as for instance, they would all be Catholic. As Edzard Obendiek pointed out, communicating with people from other countries is the aspect of traveling that enables the travelers the most to access suppressed possibilities in their own lives, a space he calls \u201cdie Fremde in sich selbst\u201d (120). This certainly is true for the narrator\u2019s encounter with Pani Ania, a Polish woman who shows her \u201cdie sch\u00f6nsten ko\u015bcio\u0142y, der Stadt, die Reliquien der heiligen Ursula.\u201d (134) The narrator goes on to remember that she wanted to see the chalice of King Kazimierz at all costs, but when she expressed her admiration for Catholizism, Pani Ania told her in flawless English that she had studied for four years in England and was a practising Moslem. Astonished, the narrator reflects: \u201cSie war die perfekte Andere, fremd und doch wie ich, und ich dachte, mit solchen Menschen ist Polen tats\u00e4chlich nicht verloren.\u201d (134)<\/p>\n

Pani Ania surprised her even more when she showed her the Hebrew letters in the pavement of the streets in Kalisz. The emotional impact of the letters\u2019 discovery and the history of Polish anti-Semitism connected with it, is so strong that the narrator realizes, despite her new dreamed-of post-Soviet Russian German identity, she is also Jewish. As we remember, her brother had learned Hebrew when she had learned German; therefore, the letters must be familiar to her; she has seen Hebrew letters before. As Pani Ania told her, after the Germans had exterminated all Jews of Kalisz, the inhabitants of the town removed the \u201cMazewen\u201d (tombstones) from the local cemetery, cut them and used the stones to pave the streets: \u201cMit der R\u00fcckseite nach oben, so dass man die hebr\u00e4ischen Buchstaben nicht sah, wenn man auf die Steine trat.\u201d (135) Bitterly, the narrator \u2013 whose voice had always sounded so delighted when she talked about things she encountered in Poland before \u2013 comments: \u201cEs war ein System der Vernichtung mit mehrfacher Sicherung. Ob man davon wei\u00df oder nicht, jeder, der die Stra\u00dfen von Kalisz entlanggeht, tritt die Grabsteine mit F\u00fc\u00dfen.\u201d (135) When pipes had to be laid a few years before the narrator traveled to Kalisz, the workers took out the stones and put them back afterwards. However, in this process it happened by accident that some of the stones were turned around and the Hebrew letters appeared. After Pani Ania pointed to some of the Hebrew letters, the narrator tries to find more on her own on this \u201cunsichtbaren Friedhof der fremden Nachbarn, die nicht mehr da waren\u201d (136), as she sadly comments. Discovering them here and there, sometimes far apart, was a \u201cGl\u00fccksspiel, dessen Regeln niemand festgelegt hat und das jedem offensteht\u201d (136). Switching to English, she calls it a \u201cMemory for Erwachsene\u201d and adds bitterly that nobody played along because nobody noticed these letters. Overwhelmed by a grief not known to her until now, she has to go on code-switching from German to English to express her feelings: \u201cIch war so auf meine Buchstaben fixiert, dass ich die Autos nicht hupen h\u00f6rte, nur ein Lied in meinem Kopf: \u2018Hey, Jude\u2019, summte es, \u2018and any time you feel the pain, hey, Jude, refrain.\u2019\u201d (136) As the reader of Vielleicht Esther<\/em> is aware of at this point, the narrator read Mira Kimmelmann\u2019s book Life beyond the Holocaust (2005). Therefore, we can assume that for Petrowskaja\u2019s first-person narrator, the proper language for grieving about matters related to the Holocaust is English \u2013 a language she had learned in high school. Reflecting upon the book\u2019s title, she thinks, mixing English with the title of a book by Friedrich Nietzsche: \u201cBeyond steckte in meinem Kopf, auf Deutsch Jenseits, ein apokalyptisches Wort, Jenseits von Gut und B\u00f6se.\u201d (121) When Kimmelmann asked her via e-mail which language she preferred, English or German, the narrator felt relieved because she had worried about that her address in Berlin, Germany, could offend her. Listening on the phone to Mira calling from Oak Ridge takes her breath away: \u201cSie sprach nicht nur besser Hochdeutsch als ich, es war Vorkriegsdeutsch, langsam und gepflegt [\u2026]. Kein Hauch von Jiddish, kein polnischer Akzent. Deutsch war Miras Muttersprache.\u201d (123) Mira told her about other Jewish relatives from Poland who had survived the Holocaust, many of whom the narrator had never heard of; they lived now scattered all over the world. Very surprised, she thinks, in a mixture of German and English: \u201cUnd so habe ich eine neue Familie, related through Adam, sozusagen, \u00fcber tausend Ecken.\u201d (126) In this context of passionately searching for her Jewish roots, the narrator stumbles over another multilingual thought in her mind that is especially important for the negotiation of her post-Soviet identity since it includes Russian. Mira had told her Rabbi, Victor, in Oak Ridge about the narrator\u2019s search for her ancestors. Recognizing her name, he calls her in Berlin to tell her that he knew her father; they both had been political dissidents in Moscow during the Soviet regime until Victor had left for the United States. Very surprised, she thinks:<\/p>\n

Der einzige Rabbi, den ich kannte, war der Rabbi der einzigen \u00dcberlebenden unserer polnischen Sippe. Victor hatte auch keine Erkl\u00e4rung, und Mira brauchte keine. Dann riefen sie mich beide an, Victor und Mira. Erst sprach Victor. Ich dachte kurz \u00fcber das Paradoxon ihrer beiden Namen nach, als ob Sieg (Victor) und Frieden (Mir) mich gleichzeitig anriefen, aber dann begann Mira, mit mir Deutsch zu sprechen. (123)<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Both the English word \u201cvictory\u201d and the Russion word \u201cMir\u201d (peace) were used in post- Wall West- and East-German literature for very different reasons, as post-modern ornaments or to express political concerns. As critics pointed out (see, for instance, Eckart 57), the West German writer Karen Duve in her novel Regenroman (1994) uses the word \u201cVictory\u201d as a linguistic ornament: \u201cDie wei\u00dfe Schnecke b\u00e4umte sich auf wie ein Zirkustier, reckte den Vorderk\u00f6rper in die Luft und spreizte die F\u00fchler zu einem V. V wie Victory.\u201d (123) By contrast, the East German writer Grit Poppe uses the same English word in her novel Andere Umst\u00e4nde (1998) with a mimetic function for reasons that are clearly political. Remembering the events that led to the fall of the Wall, she mentions a woman who \u201chielt ein Pappschild mit dem Wort Freiheit in die H\u00f6he, darunter das gezeichnete Victory-Zeichen\u201d (138). In the East German author Helga Sch\u00fctz\u2019s novel Knietief im Paradies (2005), the Russian word \u201cMir\u201d (peace) was also used for political reasons. Spelling it according to the Cyrrilic alphabet as M\u0418P (peace), Sch\u00fctz uses it to point out one of the most controversial watchwords of socialism that became a slogan during the Cold War in the East. According to Sch\u00fctz\u2019s novel, in the early phase of the GDR, \u201cM\u0418P\u201d was used to justify the exercise of Stalinist power politics that led to the arrest of many, sometimes innocent, people. Playfully translating the word M\u0418P from the Cyrillic alphabet into German, Helga Sch\u00fctz\u2019s young first-person narrator creates a new word, \u201cMup\u201d (149) \u2013 a morpheme that in German does not mean anything. However, it sounds interesting, somehow like a playword for children, a nickname for a doll perhaps. As it turns out later in the novel, it is much more than a word for fun but rather, serves as a password for the liberation of a sixteen-year-old poet who was sentenced unjustly to \u201df\u00fcnf Jahren versch\u00e4rfter Erziehung im Jugendwerkhof\u201d (120). With the help of the neologism \u201cMup,\u201d she helps him to escape. In other words, while at first glance code-switching from German into Russian in Sch\u00fctz\u2019s novel and the coinage of the word \u201cMup\u201d seems to be merely for the purpose of post-modern play (similar to Duve\u2019s use of the English word \u201cvictory\u201d), on a second look, this is not true at all. Sch\u00fctz plays with the Russian word and its translation into German for political reasons in the context of Soviet domination and hegemony.<\/p>\n

What functions do the English word \u201cVictory\u201d and the Russian word \u201cMir\u201d have in Petrowskaja\u2019s novel? They are certainly not post-modern ornaments; there is something political in the way they are used. However, this is not all. Being placed so close to each other in one sentence, they suggest a celebration of the fact that the Cold War is over and with it the struggle for the meaning of words and dates. Simultaneously, the use of the words \u201cVictory\u201d and \u201cMir\u201d deeply touches at the narrator\u2019s preoccupation with topics of home, belonging, and identity. After all, both Victor (standing for the word \u201cvictory\u201d) and Mira (standing for the word \u201cpeace\u201d) are Eastern European Jews \u2013 one Jew who escaped from the Soviet Union for political reasons and another Jew who survived the Holocaust in Poland during German occupation. Both live in Oak Ridge in the United States where the first nuclear bomb was created, while the narrator herself is a Russian, now officially an Ukrainian, with Jewish roots (as she recently discovered), living in Germany and speaking German. That she tries to negotiate her identity in this context of national, political, and ethnic complexity, goes beyond mere aesthetic or political reasons; it is, as the narrator puts it, an \u201cexistentielle Gymnastik im Kampf um das Gleichgewicht.\u201d (22)<\/p>\n

Although there are only two examples of Yiddish in the novel, it plays perhaps the most important role in the negotiation of the narrator\u2019s new identity. She does not speak Yiddish, but discovers that most of her ancestors did; they had spoken it as their first language. When she brought her grandmother Rosa a record with Jewish songs from Eastern Europe as a gift from her first journey to Poland, the grandmother, whom she had never heard say a word of Yiddish, suddenly started singing in that language; during these moments, the narrator was able to glance into her grandmother\u2019s Jewish childhood. The narrator remembers only one Yiddish word that was still used in her family, the word \u201cmeschugge\u201d: \u201cSo ein Meschuggener\u201d (144), her grandfather had said about her great-uncle Judas Stern. This process of thinking about Yiddish turns into the biggest blow to her old Soviet belief system. It is the discovery that not only the Germans, but also Stalin was responsible for the disappearance of that language in the Soviet Union. Authors of books, as, for instance, the important Schwarzbuch \u00fcber die Massenvernichtung der Juden (produced by Soviet Jews and immediately destroyed by the Soviet government in 1948), were persecuted along with Jewish physicians who were accused of being poisoners. Outraged, she states: \u201cDie Erschie\u00dfung des J\u00fcdischen Antifaschistischen Komitees war eine der letzten Aktionen Stalins.\u201d (188) Among the members of the committee were writers \u2013 the last ones who still wrote in Yiddish. When she discussed this discovery with her father, he summarized the disappearance of this language saying: \u201cHitler hat die Leser get\u00f6tet und Stalin die Schriftsteller.\u201d (188) Troubled by this statement, she reflects upon the history of surviving Jews in the Soviet Union after World War II and concludes: \u201cSie wurden als heimatlose Kosmopoliten stigmatisiert, vielleicht weil man sie ungeachtet aller Grenzen t\u00f6tete, sie, die verbotene Beziehungen mit dem Ausland unterhielten und deswegen nicht zur gro\u00dfen Familie der sowjetischen Bruderv\u00f6lker geh\u00f6ren durften.\u201d (188-89) As can be seen clearly, the identity crisis caused by the discovery of her Jewish family-roots that had been kept secret from her goes hand in hand with the collapse of the narrator\u2019s old Soviet belief system.<\/p>\n

Petrowskaja\u2019s text also contains two cases of code-switching into French and three cases of code-switching into Italian. As exemplified by the following quotation from the guest book of Mauthausen \u201c\u00e0 la m\u00e9moire du mon grand-p\u00e8re\u201d (254), French is mainly used for the insertion of documentary material into the text. Code-switching into Italian, on the other hand, has the function of consolation since the Italian expressions are mainly lines from famous Italian operas that family members repeated in times of distress; they have the function of bringing relief, as can be seen in the following:<\/p>\n

\u2018Warum bin ich schuldig, dass ich mich in Alfredo verliebt habe\u2019, sang sie [her greandmother Rosa], wie die russische \u00dcbersetzung seltsamerweise lautet \u2013 \u2018L\u2019amore d\u2019Alfredo perfino mi manca\u2019. Jahre sp\u00e4ter fand ich heraus, dass es sich um die Arie der Violetta aus La Traviata handelte, ich erschrak jedesmal, so leidenschaftlich sang Rosa, so fremd erschien mir diese Leidenschaft meiner Babuschka, die seit vierzig Jahren ohne Mann lebte, und so gegenw\u00e4rtig. (66)<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

As can be seen in this last quotation, there are different languages attached to certain memories and the narrator switches back and forth between them with ease. \u201cBabuschka\u201d is the Russian word for grandmother, not written in Cyrillic, but in Latin letters. Similarly, in researching her grandfather\u2019s life, she uses the word \u201cDeduschka\u201d (225) instead of the German word \u201cGro\u00dfvater.\u201d Arriving at this point, the reader of Petrowskaja\u2019s text might assume that the search for a new post-Soviet identity has ended with her becoming Jewish; however, that is not so. Instead, the awareness of her Jewish roots becomes an important part of her new identity that is in balance with others, especially her passion for German. Remembering the time after the collapse of the Soviet Union when her brother learned Hebrew and she German, the narrator thinks: \u201cGemeinsam schufen wir, mein Bruder und ich, durch diese Sprachen ein Gleichgewicht gegen\u00fcber unserer Herkunft.\u201d (78) The \u201cHerkunft\u201d referred to here signifies the siblings\u2019 Soviet past, a time when asking for your family\u2019s roots had been politically incorrect. While her brother, learning Hebrew, decided to become an Orthodox Jew, the narrator, while learning German, decided to marry a German and to express herself from now on in that language. Referring to her Jewish ancestors\u2019 profession of teaching deaf mute children to speak, she notes about her Jewishness: \u201cUnser Judentum blieb f\u00fcr mich taubstumm und die Taubstummheit j\u00fcdisch. Das war meine Geschichte, meine Herkunft, doch das war nicht ich.\u201d (51)<\/p>\n

The last chapter of Vielleicht Esther<\/em> is dedicated to the description of her search for the history of her beloved \u201cDeduschka\u201d who survived the concentration camp of Mauthausen. As the only one of her four grandparents, he was not Jewish, but Ukrainian. As the narrator discovers in the documents, he was a Soviet prisoner of war who, in order to survive the camp, had to renounce his Jewish wife and children. Was this the reason that he did not return to his family after the war for so many years (the narrator was twelve when she met him the first time)? Far from reproaching her grandfather, she tries to understand the situation of being a Soviet prisoner of war in a German concentration camp that had caused his distress. On the way to Mauthausen, she read Thomas Bernhardt. Having the \u201cGeschrei auf dem Heldenplatz\u201d (245) in her ear that he describes so well, she is able to forgive her grandfather.<\/p>\n

In this last chapter about the narrator\u2019s non-Jewish Ukrainian grandfather, there are significant examples of code-switching into Russian. As she remembers, the grandfather hardly talked: \u201cEr sa\u00df im Sessel, l\u00e4chelte die Enkel an und schwieg.\u201d (227) Looking more like a \u201cvornehmer deutscher Greis\u201d (229) than a Soviet pensioner, sometimes he said \u201cda oder choroscho\u201d (\u201cyes or good\u201d) (229); that was all. To his granddaughter, the narrator of Petrowskaja\u2019s text, these snippets of the Russian language sounded as if he had a foreign accent \u201cso merkw\u00fcrdig und fremd t\u00f6nten die Worte aus seinem Mund.\u201d (229) The strange sound of the grandfather\u2019s words, as well as his silence regarding his past, has not only to do with his guilt towards his Jewish wife and children to whom he had returned so late in life, as the narrator discovers, but also with the fact that, under Stalin, he was ostracized as a former prisoner of war. Because of that, he had to endure hardship in the Soviet Union after 1945, hardship that reminded him of the hardship suffered in the German concentration camp. In Petrowskaja\u2019s text, her grandfather\u2019s silence about his experiences during and after the war runs parallel to the silence of the narrator\u2019s father about the reason why he had changed his name from the Jewish Schimon Stern to the Russian Semjon Petrowskij during the late 1940s; both men\u2019s silences were necessary for them to survive before the end of the Soviet Union.<\/p>\n

In addition, code-switching into Russian, as, for instance, in the description of the narrator\u2019s walk through the Austrian landscape on the way to Mauthausen, has clearly nostalgic reasons:<\/p>\n

Ich gehe zu Fu\u00df, gemessenen Schrittes, wie man Gedichte schreibt, einem inneren Rhythmus folgend, denn alle russischen Gedichte \u00fcber den Weg sind in f\u00fcnfhebigen Jamben geschrieben, Vy-cho-shu-o-din-ja-na-do-rogu \/ Einsam geh\u2019 ich auf dem Weg. (243)<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Although the narrator puts a question mark on many of the Soviet ideological paradigms she had believed in, there is no doubt that she is still longing for the Russian language, as this last example of code-switching demonstrates. Besides quotations of poems, there are also references to Russian songs, fairy tales, and recipes in Petrowskaja\u2019s text. The inserted Russian words are sixteen times in Latin and three times in Cyrillic letters \u2013 the latter ones look really foreign in the way they are inserted into the German text. However, there is one Russian word that is certainly not inserted for nostalgic reasons \u2013 the offensive expression for Jew. When the narrator\u2019s great-grandmother Esther decided to follow the German military\u2019s instructions on September 29, 1941, it had impressed her because of the precision: \u201cAlle, 8 Uhr und die genaue Adresse.\u201d (214) Thoughtfully, the narrator remarks: \u201cUnd weder die Friedh\u00f6fe noch das abwertende Wort \u017cyd auf den russischen Plakaten haben sie beunruhigt.\u201d (214) As in the cases of Yiddish and Hebrew, also this insertion of a Russian word enables the narrator to articulate her concerns about her disappeared Jewish ancestors and of all of those \u201cverschwundenen Dingen, die ich nicht haben und nicht deuten konnte\u201d (136) because the traces have disappeared.<\/p>\n

As one critic pointed out, although Petrowskaja describes a century of genocide, deportations, and war in her autobiographical novel Vielleicht Esther<\/em>, she does so playfully and keeps her \u201cleise Heiterkeit\u201d also in situations \u201cwenn die Situation von bedr\u00fcckendem Ernst ist\u201d (Hammelehle). The crossing into other languages that has been examined in this study clearly helped Petrowskaja to achieve this wonderful tone. It eases what she calls the \u201cGewaltpotential\u201d (9) of certain expressions and also gives her a special awareness of the ambivalence of meaning of certain German words. A good example is the word \u201cheil.\u201d About her investigation of the months before Hitler took power, the narrator remembers: \u201cobwohl alles schon in Gang gesetzt ist, schien mir die Welt noch heil zu sein, wenn es nicht mehr so sein wird, wird man einander mit Heil begr\u00fc\u00dfen\u201d (152)
\nAbove all, as has been seen in this study, the multilingualism in Vielleicht Esther<\/em> enables the narrator to negotiate her personal, ethnic, and linguistic identity after the collapse of the Soviet Union by looking at herself from different perspectives that come along with different languages.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Notes<\/strong>
\n1 All page numbers of Katja Petrowskaja\u2019s text are taken from Vielleicht Esther<\/em>. Berlin: Suhrkamp, 2014.
\n2 The homophony between the Slavic term for Poland and the Hebrew expression for \u201cdas gelobte Land\u201d without doubt has to do with the history of the Jews in Poland that dates back over a millennium. Due to Poland\u2019s religious tolerance, the country became a shelter for persecuted European Jews.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Bibliography<\/strong>
\nBernhard, Thomas. Heldenplatz<\/em>. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1988.
\nDuve, Karen. Regenroman<\/em>. Frankfurt am Main: Eichborn, 1994.
\nEckart, Gabriele. \u201cFremdbegegnungen in der ostdeutschen Nachwendeliteratur.\u201d Germano-Slavica XVI<\/em> (2008): 57-68.
\nHammelehle, Sebastian. \u201cFamiliengeschichte \u2018Vielleicht Esther\u2019: N\u00e4chster Halt Holocaust.\u201d http:\/\/www.spiegel.de\/kultur\/literatur\/katja-petrowskaja-vielleicht-esther-a-957065.html 1\/13\/2015
\nKecskes, Istvan. \u201cThe dual language model to explain code-switching: A cognitive-pragmatic approach.\u201d Intercultural Pragmatics<\/em> 3,3 (2006): 257-83.
\nKimmelmann, Mira Ryczke. Life beyond the Holocaust<\/em>. Knoxville: U of Tennessee, 2005.
\nKristeva, Julia. \u201cForgiveness: An Interview.\u201d PMLA<\/em> 117. 2 (2002): 278-295.
\nLauterbach, Dorothea. \u201cPoetologische Signale: Zur Funktion des Franz\u00f6sischen in Rilkes Roman.\u201d Manfred Schmeling. Monika Schmitz-Emans. (Eds.) Multilinguale Literatur im 20. Jahrhundert<\/em>. W\u00fcrzburg: K\u00f6nigshausen & Neumann, 2002, 173-87.
\nObendiek, Edzard. Der lange Schatten des babylonischen Turmes: Das Fremde und der Fremde in der Literatur<\/em>. G\u00f6ttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2000.
\nPetrowskaja, Katja. Vielleicht Esther.<\/em> Berlin: Suhrkamp, 2014.
\nPoppe, Grit. Andere Umst\u00e4nde<\/em>. Berlin: Berlin Verlag, 1998.
\nSchmeling, Manfred. Schmitz-Emans, Monika. \u201cEinleitung.\u201d Manfred Schmeling. Monika Schmitz-Emans. (Eds.) Multilinguale Literatur im 20. Jahrhundert.<\/em> W\u00fcrzburg: K\u00f6nigshausen & Neumann, 2002: 7-35.
\nSch\u00fctz, Helga. Knietief im Paradies<\/em>. Berlin: Aufbau, 2005.
\nSchwarzbuch<\/em> \u00fcber die verbrecherische Massenvernichtung der Juden durch die faschistischen deutschen Eroberer in den zeitweilig okkupierten Gebieten der Sowjetunion und in den faschistischen Vernichtungslagern Polens w\u00e4hrend des Krieges 1941-1945. First published in Russian, Jerusalem: Tarbut, 1980.
\nStarkey, Kathryn. \u201cTraversing the Boundaries of Language: Multilingualism and Linguistic Difference in Wolfram von Eschenbach\u2019s Willehalm.\u201d The German Quarterly<\/em> 75.1 (2002): 20-34.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The Functions of Multilingual Language Use in Katja Petrowskaja\u2019s Vielleicht Esther\u00a0 This article examines several examples of code-switching between languages in Katja Petrowskaja\u2019s narrative Vielleicht Esther. The text of this German-Ukrainian writer (born in 1970) about her genealogical research is written in German, but there are seventy-two instances of mixing German with other languages. The […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":394,"featured_media":0,"parent":4372,"menu_order":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","template":"","meta":{"footnotes":""},"class_list":["post-4392","page","type-page","status-publish","hentry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/glossen\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/4392","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/glossen\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/glossen\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/page"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/glossen\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/394"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/glossen\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4392"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/glossen\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/4392\/revisions"}],"up":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/glossen\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/4372"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/glossen\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4392"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}