WO BIST DU JETZT? – Dislocation in Olivia Wenzel’s 1000 Serpentinen Angst

Underground Station Clock (Photo: R~P~M, CC BY-NC-ND 2.0, via Flickr)

CN - mentions of suicide, the Holocaust, mental health 

Olivia Wenzel’s novelistic debut 1000 Serpentinen Angst is strikingly theatrical. As might be expected from an established playwright and performer, Wenzel’s tale of a 30-something-year-old woman of colour navigating a distinctly modern life has the feel of a text written for both the page and the stage. Much of the novel reads like a script, dominated as it is by a conversation between the unnamed protagonist and an undefinable interlocutor. At times this slippery dialogic exchange reads like an interview, at others it evokes an interrogation, and sometimes it has the air of a therapy session. One question, though, emerges as particularly pressing: ‘WO BIST DU JETZT?’ (Where are you now?). Ironically, the focus of the novel refuses to settle anywhere for too long, necessitating an almost angry repetition of this question as the narrative jumps from place to place, time to time. In this way, Wenzel’s novel unearths a need to be located and defined in time and space, whilst also refusing to fully satisfy that desire. The hybrid form of 1000 Serpentinen Angst – its penchant for the sort of dialogue that feels more at home in a playscript than a book – offers a generic mirroring for this obsession with displacement. Much like the central character, the form of the novel is itself difficult to place.

Wenzel’s novel exhibits a globally and temporally ambitious scope. We see the protagonist not just in East and West Germany, but also in North Carolina, Vietnam, and North Africa. Yet more dizzying, the novel exhibits a propensity for flashbacks, submerging us not just in the earlier life of the protagonist but also that of her mother and grandmother. Unlike a more conventional novel, the text doesn’t progress neatly through each region, dividing itself into sections named after each location, but rather allows them to collapse upon each other. The protagonist’s answer to the recurring question ‘WO BIST DU JETZT?’ is ever-changing and never predictable, disorienting the reader and establishing rootlessness as essential to the text. Since the question contains the time marker ‘JETZT’ (now) the temporality of the novel is also afforded malleability. The passages of time that such journeys would necessitate are flattened and warped by the novel’s breathless pace, rendering time, as well as space, dislocated.

Through the focus on East and West Germany, Wenzel deliberately foregrounds a region rich with the collision of time and space. The intensely changing spatial reality of Germany, once divided and now united, is deeply linked to its temporality (one need only think of the fall of the Berlin wall in 1989). Focussing on a woman who grew up in the spatially complex ferment of East Germany, then, means the novel already invokes complex questions of space and time. Indeed, the rootlessness exhibited elsewhere in the novel could reflect the protagonist’s East German identity and the complexity of self-location and belonging that it entails.

Wenzel’s preference for dislocating space and time is echoed most keenly in the centrality of non-spaces in the text. Most notable amongst them is the train station platform with which the novel opens and to which it regularly returns with a zealous surreal clarity. Wenzel’s first few lines are arrestingly abstract:

Mein Herz ist ein Automat aus Blech. Dieser Automat steht an irgendeinem Bahnsteig, in irgendeiner Stadt. // My heart is a vending machine made of tin. This machine stands on some train platform, in some city. (my translation)

This setting is deliberately hard to locate. Priscilla Lane’s translation stresses this, rendering ‘irgendeinem Bahnsteig’ as ‘some random train platform’. With the addition of ‘random’, Lane emphasises the unspecified, slippery nature of the location. Wenzel does not evoke any particular railway station but rather simply its emblematic nature as a culturally resonant and recognisable place. Wenzel employs this setting for its liminality, as a juncture on a journey but neither home nor destination, and its fluctuating nature, as passengers rush and flow through it. Train stations are normally saturated with mechanisms of time – most boast a large clock at their centre, echoed by countless buzzing digital matrices singing of arrivals and departures. The lack of any such device at this ‘random’ train station is therefore keenly felt. There is an uncanny timelessness to a train station without a single clock. Stripped of any markers that might help us orient ourselves, whether spatially or temporally, this setting is simultaneously out of place and out of time.

Train stations often figure as important sites in literature, not least in a German context where the railway, connected to events of the holocaust, is culturally loaded and connected to notions of guilt, memory, and trauma. This setting allows the novel to establish its interest not only in naturalistic notions of time and space, but also in more poetic understandings of how the two become subjective when bound up in different realities. How are time and space experienced differently for someone who has experienced trauma, whether collective (as a nation engaging with Vergangenheitsbewältigung, or a history of racism) or individual (the death of a twin brother)? The protagonist’s twin brother, we learn, killed himself when they were in their late teens by throwing himself in front of a train. The novel explores, through its dislocation of time and space, how such trauma (both personal and collective) can render such ‘universal’ and ‘human’ concepts as time and space feel keenly different, even alienating. Especially through the site of the train station, where time and place are slippery and hard to grasp, and history, present, and future are simultaneously present and entirely missing.

More than that, though, Wenzel disorients the reader so that she can instill in us a keen desire for re-orientation. Each time the question rings out, with its deliberately provocative direct address, we yearn for the safety of knowing not just where and when the protagonist is, but also where and when we find ourselves. However, Wenzel deliberately deprives the reader of normative methods of orientation – the platform offers no signage, no clocks, no soothing list of departure and arrival times. Instead, the reader must orient themselves with alternative knowledge. Where time and space represent absolute notions of truth when it comes to history and memory, Wenzel invites the reader to embrace their slipperiness, their dislocation. Instead, she offers us less easily grasped points of orientation - poetic descriptions of her experience, metaphors, emotions - that might allow the reader to understand some aspects of the protagonist’s life – the racist microaggressions they experience, their relationship to East German identity, their bereavement – through an alternative, perhaps less definable avenue. In this way, the reader must rely on less conventional modes of testimony, more poetic and surreal understandings of truth.

The abstract train station offers a puncture in time against which the events of the rest of the novel take place. Great swathes of Wenzel’s prose meander, exploring the cleft between the desire for narrative thrust and the need to take time. At several points the capitalised interlocutor begs her to stay on task, with ‘BITTE BLEIB DER SACHE’ (please stay on topic) and ‘STOPP, STOPP, STOPP, DAS IST EIN ANDERES THEMA. KONZENTRIER DICH.’ (Stop, stop, stop, that’s another topic. Concentrate.) but the narrative voice always struggles to do so. This resistance to efficiency might not be the tangential distraction that the capitalised voice condemns it as. Instead, it could be the very topic upon which Wenzel wants to concentrate. The project of Wenzel’s novel might not be a traditional cogent retelling of the protagonist’s life story, but rather a formally experimental investigation of life and memory, especially under duress of trauma, prejudice, and mental health. Rather ironically, despite capitalised protestations, the novel’s inability to ‘stay on topic’ becomes the focus itself.

The dislocation of time and space in the novel along with its deliberate inability to stay on task destabilise the reader’s normal recourse for orientation and understanding. Instead, we engage with the events of the book in a state of disorientation, dizziness, perhaps even confusion. Could this allow for a more productive, more unexpected reading experience? When the reader comes to answer the iterative question ‘WO BIST DU JETZT?’ for themselves, the novel asks us not to locate ourselves in time and space but rather to dis-locate ourselves and to see what emerges.