1000 Serpentinen Angst

»What I wouldn’t give to meet my grandmother and my mother at an impossible point in time when we would all be 15 years old.«

Olivia Wenzel’s novel 1000 Serpentinen Angst (1,000 Coils of Fear) circles around the life of a young Black woman born in the GDR. Her trips take her – in leaps between times, places and generations – to Vietnam, Berlin, Morocco, the USA, Poland and Thuringia. How much actually fits into a single life? And how can all that constitutes and shapes a person be told – while the person is still in the middle of it themselves? From a grandmother loyal to the party line in the GDR, through a punk mother rebelling against the system, to life in today’s Berlin, we travel through a family’s stories and jump from place to place, from story to story, from image to image, like leafing through an old photo album – only that the language of the pictures is used in an entirely different way and the pictures are never trusted completely. Or as the novel quotes John Berger: »All photographs are a form of transport and an expression of absence.« Adapting a novel for the stage for the first time following her Black copy of the Mittelreich production, as well as her staging of Die Kränkungen der Menschheit, director Anta Helena Recke makes experiences visible in her work that cannot be achieved through language alone. She creates images that communicate what a life is when it isn’t defined by CVs or official data, rather when it draws on the exchange between people who know each other well, with one’s own family, one’s self and one’s history. 


Premiere on 27/August 2021

Funded by Hauptstadtkulturfonds

Photo: Esra Rotthoff
Stage photos: Ute Langkafel