‘Your Heimat is our Nightmare?’: Post-Soviet Poetic Interventions in German Culture

Dr Natasha Gordinsky Haifa, Israel Dr Katja Petrowskaja Berlin, Germany ‘Your Heimat is our Nightmare?’: Post-Soviet Poetic Interventions in German Culture 6.30pm, October 14th 2021 In the past decade post-Soviet Jewish writers, poets and artists who live and work in Germany have played a crucial role in the ongoing debate on the various forms of migrant belonging in contemporary German culture. This lecture seeks to grasp the poetics of (non) belonging. Natasha Gordinsky will explore how different artists represent and de-stabilize performatively the meaning of Heimat, and reflect on this highly charged concept, both in German and Soviet contexts, in a dialogue with Kiev born German writer Katja Petrowskaja. Dr Natasha Gordinsky is Senior Lecturer at the Department of Hebrew and Comparative Literature at the University of Haifa and currently a visiting scholar at the University of Potsdam. She is an author of two books. Dr Katja Petrowskaja holds a PhD in Literary Studies from the Russian State University in Moscow and works in Berlin as an author and free-lance journalist for press and radio. Her first book Maybe Esther (2014) was translated into 20 languages and has won several prestigious literary prizes.