WO BIST DU JETZT? Trauma, travel, and the subversion of narrative structure in Olivia Wenzel’s 1000 Serpentinen Angst
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The debut novel 1000 Serpentinen Angst (1000 Coils of Fear, 2020), by German playwright Olivia Wenzel, addresses the reality of living as a Black and Queer woman in Germany, a country where privilege and discrimination lie ever so close together. While the narrative is formally marked by an unconventional structure, a dialogic narrative voice and the movement through the narrative in switchbacks, the protagonist learns to navigate and come to terms with her positionality in German society. Through travel, the protagonist flees not only her traumatizing past but also the discriminatory structures which ostracize her as a non-German Other. While the narrative structure provides the incommensurable topic of trauma with a language to make its complex nature accessible to an outside reader, the travel experiences substantiate great emancipatory potential: on the one hand as a liberatory moment for the individual, on the other hand as a means of reflecting on and confronting discriminatory structures in society. Here the travel narrative, traditionally a predominantly male and imperial genre, is reimagined as a radical instrument to explore issues of race and gender while providing a basis for acts of self-assertion within the woman-narrator. My analysis situates the novel in the chronology of the development of Afro-German literature by taking into consideration activists and writers who have shaped the diasporic movement and community and reconstructs the development thereof in the context of Germany’s failed dealings with the impacts of colonialism and National Socialist racial ideology. The novel contributes to a blossoming African diasporic culture in Germany that actively works to fight against the racist structures that affect the lives of many until this day. The thesis is an attempt to further decolonize the (German) literary canon by redirecting the focus to marginalized voices within the realms of literature and beyond.
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M.A.