“How do you tell a story of war without reproducing violence?”

Born in Kiev in 1970, Katja Petrowskaja has been living in Germany since 1999. She was awarded the Ingeborg Bachmann Prize for German-language literature in 2013. From 2022 to 2024, she wrote a weekly column for the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung on the Russian war of aggression in Ukraine. The column led to a book, which was published by Suhrkamp. On 13th February, she spoke with Publix director, Maria Exner, in front of a live audience here at the Publix building. The transcription of the discussion has been attentively edited and linguistically adapted for this written version.

KatjaPetrowskaja, your novel, “Maybe Esther”, was published in 2014. It has been awarded numerous prizes and translated into 33 languages. Since then, you’ve published a further two books, each of which gather together texts with your observations on photography. How did that come about?

Katja Petrowskaja: I was basically forced to do so by the outbreak of the war in eastern Ukraine. I was on stage in March 2014 for the launch of “Maybe Esther” – this was a few days after the annexation of Crimea – and I had a strange feeling that while I’d written about the Second World War and about my home country, I was too late somehow. Concentrating on the Second World War, at that point, felt almost insincere.

For the longest time, I thought about how I was supposed to react to that war. What or how could I write about it? It was actually a picture of a miner from the Donbass that led me to write about photography. His gaze was fixed on us, asking: “Everything that’s happening in eastern Ukraine, where does it leave us?” It had been taken by the photographer, Yevgenia Belorusets. At that early stage, she was already at the nerve centre of those events. When the war broke out in 2022, she started reporting directly from Kiev. She documented the first 40 days in a diary for the Spiegel Online.

What did we overlook here in Germany during those years between 2014 and 2022? What did we miss that left us so astonished by what happened in February 2022?

Petrowskaja: Nobody can claim that they saw this war coming. What was overlooked was that Russia has been steadily escalating things since 1994. To claim that the West provoked Russia is very, very naive. It’s irresponsible. There was the second war in Chechnya, the war in Georgia, everything that happened in Syria, the annexation of Crimea, and the war in eastern Ukraine after the Nord Stream 2 pipeline was built. All that on the one hand. And on the other, there was this policy of appeasement in Germany, the idea that some sort of civilized approach to Putin would encourage him to be behave in a civilized manner too. While Germany cannot possibly be reproached for any sort of shortcoming in terms of remembrance culture, it’s easier to concentrate on history – as it turns out – than to recognise the monsters that have emerged from it. We’re still trying to find the reasons for this war but the only reason is annihilation.

How did you choose the photos for your column? Which pictures made it into your book, and which did not?

Petrowskaja: It’s important to remember that also my texts are snapshots. The book itself is not a report on the state of the war. It’s also not an embodiment of war through photography, it’s a collection of fragments. My main concern was always to home in on something, to capture a particular war event or to portray whatever state I myself was in. Because I’m not in Kiev, I’m not on the front lines, I’m not even in Ukraine. I wrote the book from the perspective of someone in Berlin who has friends and relatives in Ukraine. I was often sent photos taken by friends, which is why so many of the images had already had some exposure. Take the cover shot for example, a selfie of a young girl who was at the “Children’s City” orphanage when the war broke out.

What was the girl’s story?

Petrowskaja: The director of the orphanage had first sought to have the kids taken by relatives or neighbours. The girl ended up in a neighbourhood that was heavily bombed shortly afterwards. She thought one day in particular was going to be her last. She was very active on Instagram, so she got a little dressed up, and put her phone on the fridge… then it occurred to her “I’ve only ever seen the Second World War in black and white. I’ll do it the same way”. War is in black and white. She was 13 years old at the time. Angelina is her name. All the children from the orphanage were taken to Bavaria, where a wealthy woman gave them their own house, basically as a gift. The children then visited the Waldorf School in Mitte for a theatre project. Angelina introduced herself to the group with her photo printed out on an A4 page, and said she wanted to be the protagonist of her own life.

The book doesn’t display any of the much more widely viewed war photography from Ukraine.

Petrowskaja: There was so much fear when the war broke out, I just wanted to find safety. I simply described many of the pictures, without actually showing them. You could say I showed certain photos to keep others quiet, photos that were much worse, much more violent, and tragic.

The picture of the destroyed “Freedom Bridge” between Kiev and Irpin, for example. We first see it in your book, once volunteers had already begun clearing the debris.

Petrowskaja: There were so many pictures of destruction during the first days of the war. Important museums were flattened, and Mariupol was heavily shelled, and many people evacuated. But I wasn’t on the ground, and I couldn’t really report on it. I left that to the people who were actually there. There are very few photos that depict violence – there are some, of course, it’s unavoidable – but the untold stories were more important to me, the stories of tangible people as well as people’s impressions of the war here in Germany.

You found a lot of the photos on social media and then researched the people that appeared in them. Did you appreciate being able to see everything that way, diving into thousands of different experiences of the war?

Petrowskaja: Social media democratises the war, you could say. When it started, all the soldiers had mobile phones. But a ban – first unwritten, then official – was soon brought in on posting certain images, such as those taken directly on the front lines, for example.

A ban instated by the government?

Petrowskaja: By the war government, yes. I write about it in one of the texts. There’s a ban on photographing fragments from rockets for example. From my house in Kiev, I saw the remains of a rocket when I was there in summer 2023. And I took a photo of it. Every aspect of the war becomes visible given the fact that people everywhere take photographs. And I have to admit, what you see on Ukrainian Instagram channels differs drastically from what you see in the German media. What’s shown and what’s not shown are an important issue, for me as much as for anyone else. How do you tell a violent story without reproducing violence? There’s been a lot of discussion over the course of this war, not just in Germany, about what we show and what we don’t. Is it ethical to photograph a grieving father sitting next to the body of a son he lost only a few minutes prior?

When the war started, the Ukrainians seemed almost unflinching to so many of us here. They resisted, they supported one another and kept up with their daily routines almost stoically. Are Ukrainians uniquely resilient in your opinion?

Petrowskaja: What happened at the outset of the war was astonishing, it was like a picaresque novel. There were so many initiatives and so many amazing connections between people. While the government couldn’t react terribly quickly, everyone else was on board, from the smallest to the biggest of undertakings. Everyone got involved in everything when it started. That resilience was definitely there at the beginning, and it’s there still, although the situation is quite different now. But that resilience is no myth. I think people saw precisely what was at stake, what was under threat, and what they had to lose. This is obviously the legacy of the Maidan Revolution. I think something changed dramatically in the Ukraine at that point. People realised what they had to defend.

My dear Katja Petrowskaja, thank you so much for being here with us.

Petrowskaja: Thank you. It feels complicated to present and celebrate a book about the war. I really didn’t wish for this book.

Katja Petrowskaja, “As if It Were Over: Texts from the War”, Suhrkamp, 217 pages, €25

Photocredit: Paul Alexander Probst