“That's How It Is”: Quotidian Violence and Resistance in Olivia Wenzel's 1000 Coils of Fear

Abstract

Abstract Black Germans occupy a unique position of simultaneous invisibility and hypervisibility. Since their country did away with the category of race due to its associations with the Nazis, on paper Black Germans are read as just “German” and de facto white. But they are also hypervisible, because in public their appearance makes them the target of discrimination and racist violence. Due to Black Germans’ structural invisibility, white Germans often fail to recognize the structural racism that affects their daily lives. In fact, white Germans commonly claim that racism is an American problem and not really an issue in Germany. Black German author Olivia Wenzel, in her recent autofictional novel 1000 Coils of Fear (2020), rejects this spectacle of racism that Germans commonly associate with America to instead expose the “quotidian violence” (Kara Keeling) in German society that allows the white majority to give its silent approval of racism. Arguably, 1000 Coils of Fear is not just about the terror of everyday Black life but also about Black life's endurance: the narrator's ability to survive despite the ever-present terror of white supremacy, her ability to create new life, vis-à-vis her pregnancy, and the endless possibilities her future self and her future child can take. By using a narrative form—autofiction—that embodies the relational, fluid self of a queer, diasporic, Black subject, Wenzel's novel best captures Black Lives Matter's desire to center those folx who are often excluded.