Center for German and European Studies

Authors in Conversation IV: Nora Krug and Katja Petrowskaja

In cooperation with the Goethe-Institut Boston Goethe-Institut logo

Thursday, August 13, 2020
12-1:30 pm Eastern Time (US) / 6-7:30 pm German time
Zoom Webinar

CGES Online Recordings

You can watch a recording of this and other CGES webinars by clicking the button above.

About the Event

Book title of Nora Krug's "Belonging"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 our search for the past and how it affects the present.

About the Speakers

Nora Krug

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.

Find more information about Nora Krug on her website. Watch an interview with Nora Krug about her book Belonging, produced and recorded by Louisiana Channel, Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, 2019.

 

Katja PetrowskajaKatja Petrowskaja was born in 1970 in Kiev, Ukraine. 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, it was translated into 20 languages. Petrowskaja was awarded the Ingeborg Bachmann Prize, one of the most prestigious awards 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.

Read a conversation with Katja Petrowskaja about her book Maybe Esther by the Los Angeles Review of Books from March 2018.

Photo credit: N. K. - Nina Subin, K. P. - Heike Steinweg