Olivia Wenzel
​Where are you now?

What’s it like for a black woman growing up in Thuringia, living in Berlin or experiencing Donald Trump's election first-hand in the USA? Olivia Wenzel’s “autofictional” debut portrays such a woman, who enlists humour and reflection to come to grips with her grief, her personal relationships and her identity.

By Natascha Holstein

© S. Fischer Where are you now? is a question that can be answered in different ways: by stating your present physical whereabouts or describing your present state of mind. In 1000 Serpentinen Angst (A Thousand Zigzags of Anxiety), Olivia Wenzel’s debut novel, people are always asking the protagonist this question. Physically speaking, she’s in a train station somewhere in Berlin, at a lake in Brandenburg, or on the go somewhere in Vietnam or the US. And in her head, she’s in Poland, Morocco, Angola, even inside a candy machine. The novel’s nameless first-person narrator tells her life story by jumping backwards and forwards from one episode to another – not chronologically, but depending on which story she feels like telling.

A web of close relationships

The narrator is a black woman who was born in the state of Thuringia in what was then the German Democratic Republic. The novel is about the people in her life. About her difficult relationship to her mother, a former East German punk who often couldn’t cope with the responsibility of childrearing. About her twin brother, whom she lost ten years ago: he committed suicide, she was very nearby at the time. Her father came to East Germany from Angola – to which he returned after splitting up with her mother. Her relationship to him is, admittedly, hardly worth noting. The book is also about her grandmother, who always took care of her and her brother when they were small – and how, a few decades later, she had to talk her out of voting for a “right-wing party” in the Bundestag elections. And about her best friend, a man who’s always there for her when she hits rock bottom. About an ex-girlfriend she just can't let go of, and about various (often nameless) love affairs with men. 1000 Serpentinen Angst is about a whole web of interpersonal relationships, their interconnections and their effects on the woman at the centre of that web. 

Dialogues about racism

A dialogue leads us through the narrator’s life in the first and last sections of the book, though it’s not clear who she’s talking to. The unnamed interlocutor asks her questions, often sceptical, sometimes intrusive or cynical, rendered on the printed page in all caps: “Where are you now?” “Where are you from?” “Do you ever imagine what you'll look like when you die?” “Are you aware that close to forty per cent of all inmates in US prisons are black?” etc.

Racism is a leitmotif running through this work of “autofiction”, as Olivia Wenzel calls it: the author works her own experiences of discrimination into the narrative, though the story itself is the protagonist’s. She sees neo-Nazis at a Brandenburg lake and wants to get away undetected; on a camping trip in Poland, the only thing that saves her from the rage of the local bigots is apparently her German passport; and when Donald Trump is elected president during her stay in New York, she’s not just shocked, but feels personally outraged.

“You’re simply a minority in our country”

The narrator often can’t cope with her own life, relationships and identity. So she goes to see three different therapists. One of them says he usually helps people grapple with their past, but her problems are in the present. He can’t help her with that: “You’re simply a minority in our country.” She can’t get her head around an apparent paradox: “I have more privileges than anyone in my family ever had. And yet I’m still fucked up.”

Olivia Wenzel's debut is not exactly light reading. It’s depressing and brooding, but also – intentionally and sometimes unintentionally – funny. This story of a young black woman in Germany shows what everyday experiences of racism are like for her and other racialized people in Germany. The narrative does jump around: from her childhood to holidays a few years ago, then back to the present – sometimes so abruptly it’s hard to follow her thousand zigzags. She doesn’t lecture the reader, but shows us various manifestations of omnipresent discrimination through the prism of her own experiences. Meanwhile, with the prodding of her interlocutor’s incessant questions, she comes to grips with her own inner conflict: should she really dredge all that up again? “Everyone always wants to talk to me about racism. That is not my mission in life,” she says. “Well, you started it,” retorts the questioner. Then again, maybe it’s the others who start it, nonverbally, time and time again: with their gestures, with the look in their eyes and on their faces.