Katja Petrowskaja

In the organizer's words:

As if it were over - Texts from the war

Literature

How does war change the way we see? How does it change those who (have to) withstand it or those who watch it? One thing is frighteningly clear: war unsettles the gaze. We see pictures of smiling people and involuntarily ask ourselves whether they are still alive.

With her photo columns, which appeared in the Frankfurter Allgemeine Sonntagszeitung between February 2022 and fall 2024, Katja Petrowskaja has unintentionally written a chronicle of the war. She also counters the flood of images from the news - because she avoids images of ruined landscapes, images of the dead, of violence. Instead, she tries to show the remnants of "everyday normality" and, above all, to give dignity to the individual.

At the same time, Petrovskaya uses her texts to track down the stories that lie beneath the surface of the visible. And she tries to get to the bottom of what the pictures - often found by chance on the Internet or sent to her by friends - trigger in her. The individual views are thus transformed into an ongoing diary of the war.

Katja Petrowskaja, born in Kiev in 1970, studied literature and Slavic studies in Tartu and completed her doctorate in Moscow. From 2000 to 2010, she wrote for various Russian and German-language media (including taz, NZZ, Deutsche Welle). She has been a columnist for the Frankfurter Allgemeine Sonntagzeitung since 2011. Her literary debut Vielleicht Esther (2014) has been translated into more than 30 languages and has received numerous awards. Katja Petrowskaja has lived in Berlin since 1999.

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