Oskar Fiala and the Principle of the Smallest Effect

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.