Noah draws comics because another world is easier to enter on a page than in the life around him. In Olivia Wenzel’s Mais in Deutschland und anderen Galaxien, the Black German character moves through family conflict and the afterlife of East Germany while inventing a story that can carry him beyond the conditions he has inherited. His comic does not make those conditions disappear. It gives them another scale. A quarrel with his mother can turn into a journey toward the moon, and a childhood in a country where he feels unwanted can open onto more than one galaxy.
Wenzel’s 2015 play and the 2016 collective performance We are the Universe put outer space to different uses. In the first, the fantastic belongs partly to a character’s drawing hand. In the second, performers place Black science fiction and contemporary dreams of a Mars expedition in the same theatrical field. Both works ask who is expected to feel at home on Earth and who is invited to imagine elsewhere. Their answers are not interchangeable. One stays close to a mother and son; the other is made by a group whose shared stage becomes a testing ground for possible worlds.
The writer grew up as a Black person in the former East Germany and built a practice in Berlin across theatre, prose and music. She has spoken in interviews about the danger of being asked to explain racism as though it were her sole subject or personal responsibility. That resistance helps explain the range of these plays. Racism shapes Noah’s world, but Mais is also about hunger for love and the distance between a parent and child. We are the Universe reaches for cosmic freedom, while asking what happens when an image of space repeats a colonial desire to occupy and command.
The universe drawn by Noah
Mais in Deutschland und anderen Galaxien premiered at Ballhaus Naunynstraße in February 2015. Its title, roughly Corn in Germany and Other Galaxies, holds together an ordinary crop and an immeasurably large setting. That combination fits a play in which the pressures of family life refuse to stay small. Noah’s mother Susanne once imagined taking him to his father in Angola after he was born. Instead, motherhood and the constraints of her life in the German Democratic Republic became part of the world from which she wanted to escape. Noah grows up feeling the absence of the love he needs from her.
Ballhaus’s account places their relationship at the centre. Susanne rebels against the structures around her; Noah tries not to draw further attention to himself. Their gestures point in different directions, yet both carry a wish for recognition. That tension is more precise than a story in which a mother represents a country and a son represents an identity. Susanne has her own disappointment and restlessness. Noah has his own ways of seeking an image large enough to hold him. The difficulty is that their needs do not automatically meet simply because they are family.
The play gives Susanne’s wish to leave the DDR a particular cost. In the Ballhaus synopsis, Noah’s birth binds her more tightly to the place and relationships she had wanted to escape. The son experiences that history as a failure of welcome, although he did not choose the circumstances of his arrival. His attempt to remain unnoticed can be understood in that light. He cannot make himself the child his mother imagined before he existed, and he cannot make her disappointment harmless by being easier for strangers to accept. The comic gives him a different kind of agency: he can arrange a world, even while he cannot rearrange the fact of being born into this one.
The theatre’s production description says Noah makes comics and creates a story that no one else seems to need. In his drawings, he would like to launch his mother to the moon. The fantasy has a comic edge, but it also expresses what ordinary speech cannot solve. A person can love a parent and want distance from her at the same time. A trip to the moon gives a shape to that impossible combination. The gesture is extravagant enough to be funny and painful enough to reveal what remains unresolved at home.
Literary scholar Priscilla Layne reads the play’s fantastic characters, space travel and non-linear form as Afrofuturist elements. Her analysis identifies a comic book story within the play in which Noah’s fictional self and his mother are transformed by speculative action. At the end of the comic and play, Noah’s fictional self grows wings and flies into space. The wings are an image of departure, but they are also a formal event. For a moment, the rules governing the character’s body change. A child who has been made to feel like an unwelcome presence can picture a body able to move beyond the places that kept measuring him.
Layne argues that the play refuses a single, homogeneous Black German subject. This matters because Noah’s childhood and family cannot be treated as a template for every Black person in Germany. His mother’s life in East Germany, his relation to a father associated with Angola, his drawings and the ordinary passage into adulthood make up one imagined person’s set of circumstances. The galaxies in the title suggest that a self need not settle into a single account of where it belongs. A comic can multiply the versions of a life without declaring the lived one unreal.
The structure of the play supports that multiplicity. Its scenes do not trace Noah’s life along one unbroken narrative line. Childhood, memory, comic invention and adult experience interrupt one another. A reader or audience member has to assemble a relation among them. That assembly resembles the work of remembering a family: the past returns in fragments, sometimes with more force than its chronological position would suggest. The play’s space travel is most compelling beside that broken time. The stars do not replace memory. They offer a field in which its parts might be rearranged.
Wenzel’s text does not belong to her alone onstage. The 2015 Ballhaus production record credits director Atif Mohammed Nor Hussein and designer Petra Korink, with an ensemble that made the written shifts of time and place performable. Later productions have taken the text into other rooms and ensembles. At Stadttheater Gießen, a production account again places Susanne and Noah’s difficult bond before its science-fiction imagery. The persistence of that relationship across staging choices shows why the comic is part of the drama rather than a decoration laid on top of it.
Noah’s imagined flight can be mistaken for a wish to abandon the world. Yet his need to make a comic is also a way of remaining answerable to it. He draws from a particular household and a particular social atmosphere. The invented galaxy carries their marks. His mother appears there because he cannot simply leave her behind in the ordinary plot. The page lets him stage an encounter that life has not given him the means to resolve.
A stage built by four makers
A year after Mais premiered, Wenzel joined Hieu Hoang, Banafshe Hourmazdi and Rahel Jankowski to make We are the Universe. The Ballhaus Naunynstraße record calls it a collaboratively developed theatrical collage. Its sources include Black science fiction and Black Quantum Futurism, combined with contemporary visions of power that can attach themselves to a Mars expedition. The four artists are jointly credited for the work and its performance. Wenzel’s part belongs to a shared authorship, with rotating responsibilities rather than a fixed division of one writer’s text and three interpreters.
The theatre’s description makes that method central. If a work asks what kinds of spaces people want to inhabit in the future, the way its makers share a stage is already an answer in miniature. Rotation does not guarantee equality, but it resists the picture of one person delivering a completed universe to the others. The stage can be made and remade through negotiation. A theatrical collage can admit fragments that do not fit a single linear plot, including theory, moving bodies and images from other media.
The 2016 production also asks whether current dreams of reaching Mars renew old fantasies of possession. A planet can be imagined as an empty frontier only by ignoring the habits of thought that made earlier frontiers seem empty. The Ballhaus description explicitly links the performance to neo-colonial ideas of mastery and asks how people might emancipate themselves from such fantasies in space. Here, a speculative future is judged by the politics of its invitation. Who travels? Who names the destination? Who gets to declare that a place belongs to nobody yet?
The production takes Sun Ra as one point of reference. Ballhaus evokes his appearance as a visitor from Saturn and the extravagant visual language through which he made alienness into a Black creative position. The collective does not merely reproduce his image. The four artists invent their own universe and alternative stories about themselves in space. Their use of science fiction is therefore an act of selection and change. An inherited cosmic vocabulary becomes material to work with, not a costume that decides the performance in advance.
The theatre’s own account describes We are the Universe as a collage based on texts, films and theories of Black science fiction that addresses the contemporary Mars project. That combination allows different time scales to share the room. Science-fiction writing can picture the future; documentary material can show what people plan now; performance can ask an audience to judge the relation between them in real time. The collage works because it refuses to let any one of these materials be the whole universe.
Its production credits make the collaboration concrete. Ballhaus lists Lea Kissing for stage, Mascha Mihoa Bischoff for costume, Johannes Klever for spatial design and Jean-Paul Bourelly for sound design. The makers’ distinct contributions shape what an audience can see and hear. If the work asks how a future space might be designed, the answer depends in part on the people who design the actual theatrical space. That does not make a stage equal to a planet. It makes the problem of shared construction visible at human scale.
The play’s title can sound like a statement of unity. Its process suggests something more difficult. “We” has to be made. Four artists with different practices and backgrounds can choose to work together, divide responsibilities and allow real and magical material to coexist. Their universe is collective because those decisions remain active within it. A science-fiction future built under one unquestioned authority would contradict the very question the performance asks about living together.
The voice beyond a single subject
Wenzel’s later novel 1000 Serpentinen Angst, published in 2020, brought her wider recognition as a prose writer. In an ORF interview, she described wanting room to examine what it meant to be Black in the former East Germany without turning the book into a lesson delivered on demand. She also resisted an interviewer’s framing that could make her personal experience a test case for whether racism exists. The distinction speaks back to her earlier theatre. Noah is a character with needs and contradictions, not a diagram whose job is to prove a social fact. The four makers of We are the Universe use the cosmic scale without offering a single instruction manual for Black futurity.
Wenzel’s father came from Zambia, as she explained in a 2020 interview with Der Standard. In that conversation she described the exhausting double awareness of acting as oneself while knowing that others may read one’s actions as representative of an entire group. Noah’s imagined galaxies are one response to a similar narrowing. There may be room to be more than the figure a stranger expects, even if no actual spaceship can carry him beyond that expectation.
The two theatre works also show different ways of refusing that burden. In Mais, a Black character draws himself into a fictional world whose freedom is inseparable from a strained relationship with his mother. In We are the Universe, several makers share a stage and ask how a future can be imagined without recycling colonial power. The first gives a person a comic page; the second gives a group a theatrical room. Both forms make space for more than one story to be true at once.
At the close of Noah’s comic, wings change what his body can do. The image is not a guarantee that he will be free of the social world to which the play returns. It is a moment when the story refuses to let that world have the final word about his possible movement. Wenzel’s universe begins at that point of refusal, when a character made small by the terms of belonging can draw a different horizon and then ask what it would take to live there.