Oskar Fiala and the Principle of the Smallest Effect

Suhrkamp | Insel

Oskar Fiala and the Principle of the Smallest Effect / Oskar Fiala und das Prinzip der kleinsten Wirkung
The new book by the Büchner Prize laureate
When Oskar Fiala, a forgotten, unknown left-wing social-democrat author, died penniless and nameless on the outskirts of Leipzig in 1948, his death certificate listed his occupation as »worker, mining«. The young journalist and writer led a restless and aimless life, wandering peripatetically across Europe, until the Second World War put an end to his movement. Time and again, he suffered episodes of dissociative disorders and created new identities in whose names he carried out the most...
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When Oskar Fiala, a forgotten, unknown left-wing social-democrat author, died penniless and nameless on the outskirts of Leipzig in 1948, his death certificate listed his occupation as »worker, mining«. The young journalist and writer led a restless and aimless life, wandering peripatetically across Europe, until the Second World War put an end to his movement. Time and again, he suffered episodes of dissociative disorders and created new identities in whose names he carried out the most foolhardy of deeds. He collected experiences that he saw as a world within the world, within whose limitations he was able to envision his escapades.

Oskar Fiala looks about in his worlds within the world, wove together the unbearable, but in such a way that an unconcealed thread weaves itself into it, allowing the core of everything to appear as a vibrant unity, entangled with itself.

Oswald Eggers’s book Oskar Fiala and the Principle of the Smallest Effect focuses on the shaping and intermixing of the masses and incommensurabilities of the content of experience: as in a textile, interlocking threads alternatingly undo one another, hold and bind one another, no thought emerges in isolation, divorced from all the others, rather they are so entangled that everything seems to consist of just one piece.
2025, 200 pages
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Born in Lana, South Tyrol, in 1963, Egger now lives in Vienna. He has been awarded several literary prizes, including the Peter Huchel Prize in 2007.

Born in Lana, South Tyrol, in 1963, Egger now lives in Vienna. He has been awarded several literary prizes, including the Peter Huchel Prize in...


OTHER PUBLICATIONS

Either I Only Dreamt the Journey Along the Mississippi Or I’m Dreaming Now
Year of Publication: 2021
Oswald EggerYear of Publication: 2021

Does everything flow? Like a progressively osculating billowing jumble in the form of words and forms without words, swirlings, dispersions and clusters of waves of reveries breaking in on themselves, flowing past the riverbanks of an internal landscape.


As though they were relational lines in the »stream of consciousness«, lines that touch, liaise, intersect, overlap only to lose...

Val di Non
Year of Publication: 2017
Oswald EggerYear of Publication: 2017

Can you imagine a mountain without its corresponding valley? If you can imagine both God and the world, can you manage to imagine, for example, God without the world? That which hovers before your mind’s eye, from A to Z, often appears more real than what’s confusingly in front of you.

Once upon a time mountains were mountains and valleys were valleys....
Discreet Continuity
Year of Publication: 2008
Oswald EggerYear of Publication: 2008
»A mathematician who is not also to some extent a poet will never be a perfect mathematician.« (Karl Weierstraß, mathematician)

Conversely, lyric poet Oswald Egger conducts basic research into the interaction between mathematics and poetry:


He grasps both as related manners of thinking, darts in his short articles »with cheerful seriousness« between...

Heard Herds
Year of Publication: 2003
Oswald EggerYear of Publication: 2003
»The world – hardly imaginable – is the interieur of speech.« And the hearths of speech aggregate in »preliminary stages of the fusion of processions of images that pass by before the resting eye« a poem of more than 1,000 nine-line stanzas, »stanzas of discreet continuity«. There sleeps Poemander, shepherd of the Hermetica, stoking the fire and...