Olivia Wenzel

from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Olivia Wenzel (* 1985 in Weimar ) is a German writer , dramaturge , musician and performer .

Life

Olivia Wenzel was born to a white mother from East Germany and a black father from Zambia . She grew up near her hometown Weimar. As a child she already “played theater, [...] thought up songs, wrote little stories”. “Being creative is my refuge, a kind of home where I can be absolutely with myself and at the same time forget myself,” says Wenzel. From 2004 to 2010 she studied cultural studies and aesthetic practice at the University of Hildesheim . In 2017 she took part in the Klagenfurt literature course.

Wenzel lives and works in Berlin . In addition to her work as a writer, she also devotes herself to music. She worked as a singer and songwriter with the band ANKA and in the electronica duo OTiS FOULiE . In the past, she also organized workshops, worked in text workshops with children and young people and was part of the cobratheater.cobra network .

plant

As an author, Wenzel wrote theater texts and prose. Her texts for spoken theater have been performed at the Münchner Kammerspiele , the Hamburg Thalia Theater and in Berlin at the Deutsches Theater and Ballhaus Naunynstraße . According to his own statements, Wenzel's first plays were dominated by a purely “white” staff without even realizing it. She only became aware of this through a workshop organized by Ballhaus Naunynstrasse. Then she began to incorporate this aspect into her following pieces. Wenzel counts the play Die Invention der Gertraud Stock (2017), in which she was also active as a performer, among her most important theater works . The work, which was developed together with the collective suggestion: hammer , was inspired by 80 interviews by 14 women, whose biographies were then fragmentarily entangled into a large biography. "In the play we stand on the stage and put on the biographies of the older women as if they were our own, bringing in our own content," says Wenzel. The invention of the Gertraud Stock was invited to the Impulse theater festival in 2017 .

Although Wenzel prefers to work in a collective, she presented her debut novel in 2020 with 1000 Serpentinen Angst , which was published by S. Fischer Verlag . The story is about a young black woman who, like the author, was born in East Germany in the late 1980s, grew up with everyday racism and is confronted with a dead twin brother, an overwhelmed mother and an absent father. According to his own statements, Wenzel unconsciously resorted to the work pattern from the previously edited play The Invention of Gertraud Stock . But she also frequently used autobiographical material. Wenzel himself categorizes the novel as “ autofiction ” and as “ coming out of not being white”. She contradicted that the anonymous voice that questions everything and herself, intangible between monologue and dialogue, was herself. “That woman in the book, I'm not. But I can understand what she describes and how she speaks. We have seen many similar things. I would say it's a darker version of myself that I couldn't stand to be in everyday life, ”said Wenzel.

The novel was highly praised by the German feature pages and made it onto the longlist of the German Book Prize in 2020 . In the same year, Wenzel and Nadine Schneider (three kilometers) received the literary prize of the city of Fulda for the best German-language debut novel. According to the jury, 1000 serpentines fear “deal with the consequences of persistent discrimination in a way that has never existed in contemporary German-language literature”. "Olivia Wenzel works with dialogical forms, communication and discourse fragments and puts historical and personal experiences up for discussion," said the jury.

Single track

Awards

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ a b c Sielmann, Lara: Growing up in East Germany - as black . In: tagesspiegel.de, March 8, 2020 (accessed August 18, 2020).
  2. ↑ a b World premiere: "Mais in Deutschland und other Galaxien" by Olivia Wenzel in Ballhaus Naunynstrasse Berlin . In: theaterkompass.de (accessed on August 18, 2020 via Google Webcache).
  3. ↑ a b c Olivia Wenzel . In: fischer-theater.de (accessed on August 18, 2020).
  4. ↑ Otis Foulie . In: soundcloud.com (accessed August 18, 2020).
  5. ↑ a b c d e “Coming out as non-whites” . In: taz.de, March 5, 2020 (accessed August 18, 2020).
  6. ↑ The invention of Gertraud Stock . In: vorschlag-hammer.de (accessed on August 18, 2020).
  7. ↑ 1000 serpentines fear . In: perlentaucher.de (accessed on August 18, 2020).
  8. ↑ 1000 serpentines fear . In: deutscher-buchpreis.de (accessed on August 18, 2020).
  9. ↑ Literature Prize of the City of Fulda 2020 . In: fulda.de (accessed on August 18, 2020).
personal data
SURNAME Wenceslaus, Olivia
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Foulie, Otis (stage name)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German writer, dramaturge, musician and performer
DATE OF BIRTH 1985
PLACE OF BIRTH Weimar , GDR