How does war change images? How does it change the way we see? How does it change those who endure it or watch it unfold? With her photo columns, which appeared in the Frankfurter Allgemeine Sonntagszeitung between February 2022 and autumn 2024, Katja Petrowskaja has unwittingly written a chronicle of war.

It begins on the eve of war, with a landscape in Georgia along the Great Military Highway. Animals. The threat of war hangs in the air. On the next page, the cry: My Kiev! The incomprehensible reality of war, the intrusion of the monstrous into one's own life.

About the author
Katja Petrowskaja, born in Kiev in 1970, has lived in Berlin since 1999. She studied literature and Slavic studies in Tartu and received her doctorate in Moscow. From 2000 to 2010, she wrote for various Russian- and German-language media outlets (Neue Zürcher Zeitung, taz, Deutsche Welle, Radio Liberty). Since 2011, she has been a columnist for the Frankfurter Allgemeine Sonntagzeitung. Her literary debut, Maybe Esther (2014), has been translated into more than 30 languages and has won numerous awards. In 2022, she published the essay collection The Photo Looked at Me, followed in 2025 by the essay collection As If It Were Over. Texts from the War. She lives in Berlin.

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