“Picture This”: Attributive Vision and Ekphrasis in Olivia Wenzel’s 1000 Serpentinen Angst [„Picture This“. Attributive Sehkraft und Ekphrasisin Olivia Wenzels 1000 Serpentinen Angst]

Abstract

Olivia Wenzel’s novel 1000 Serpentinen Angst (2020) employs a mode of ekphrastic writing that draws distorted images of the East German past into question while challenging patterns of ‘attributive vision’ operative in racializing perceptual habits. Though most of the novel traces the narrator’s struggles to carve out spaces of community, acceptance, and safety in today’s Federal Republic, its central section orbits around descriptions of photographs representing herself and her family members living in the GDR. These textual reproductions of private photographs, which the article treats as instances of literary “ekphrasis,” work to salvage purportedly divergent communities and lifestyles suppressed both by the GDR and by the FRG’s official memory of the former state. At the same time, they also deconstruct and counteract violent regimes of racializing vision that ascribe particular traits to groups of people based on appearance—a vision with which the narrator must contend in her daily life.