In exploring their own families’ histories, these two women writers confront the past, reflect on a fragmented and traumatized century and the responsibility we all have as inheritors of our countries’ pasts. In
Belonging, Nora Krug wrestles with the idea of Heimat, the German word for the place that first forms us, where the sensibilities and identity of one generation pass on to the next.
Maybe Esther by Katja Petrowskaja is a poignant, haunting investigation of the effects of history on one family as well as a deeply affecting exploration of memory. A conversation about searching for the past and how it affects the present.
The author and illustrator
Nora Krug was born in 1977 in Karlsruhe, Germany and has lived in Brooklyn, NY since 2002. Her visual memoir
Belonging: A German Reckons with History and Home (German title: Heimat) was chosen as a best book of the year by the
New York Times, The Guardian, NPR, Kirkus Review, the
San Fransisco Chronicle, and the
Boston Globe. It was the winner of the 2019 National Book Critics Circle Award. In this extraordinary graphic memoir, Krug dissects antisemitism in her own family’s history and Germany’s national guilt over the Holocaust. Krug is Associate Professor of Illustration at the Parsons School of Design in New York City.
Katja Petrowskaja was born in 1970 in Kiev. She studied at the University of Tartu, Estonia, and was also awarded research fellowships to study at Columbia University in New York, and Stanford in California. Katja Petrowskaja received her PhD in Moscow. Since 1999, she has lived and worked in Berlin.
Maybe Esther is her first book, and is translated into 20 languages.She was awarded the Ingeborg Bachmann Prize, one of the most prestigious prizes for literature in the German language, in 2013 . She has worked as a journalist for Russian, Ukrainian and German media. She is a columnist of the
Frankfurter Allgemeine Sonntagszeitung.
Presented in collaboration with the Center for German and European Studies, Brandeis University.
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