Book Review: Amos Morris-Reich, “Nazi Fantasy”: Vilém Flusser and History as Site of Experiment
The Czech writer Vilém Flusser (1920-1991) is slowly becoming better known among English-speakers, emerging from a constricting isolation as a “theorist of new media,” particularly in Germany in the 1990s, into more diverse exchanges in science — physics, biology, mathematics — history, language, literature, philosophy, as well as photography, video, games and “alternative realities,” — all within the scope of his long pursuit of human communication.
Perhaps this book could be seen as symptomatic of Flusser’s current “legibility” to Anglophone readers: It does not address a general audience, since there have been very good introductions to Flusser available in English for some time. It makes no assumptions about readers’ probable concern with “media studies,” the field of Flusser’s initial celebrity some twenty years ago. Rather, it takes Flusser to be an established as a writer whose position on a contemporary issue will reward close scrutiny. Amos Morris-Reich, a professor of Modern Jewish History with a strong interest in the history of science, has studied Flusser in the interests of developing a richer understanding of Jewish history including, in fact quite closely focussed on the history of the National Socialists’ effort to exterminate the race. Flusser presented a promising study subject, as a Jew forced to flee his native Prague at 19, whose family was murdered in the extermination camps, who survived in Brazilian exile and produced a body of writing that includes direct observations about Naziism as well as potential allusions to it in many other contexts, including fiction.
Reading details of Flusser biography in conjunction with his writing about Judaism at many varied points and in many contexts in the course of his career, developing methods for examining the career of a writer through the “lens” of a professional historian, Morris-Reich has come to a number of surprising conclusions, both about Flusser and about views of National Socialism that prevail in many parts of the world. The single insight for which I am most grateful at the moment concerns the resolution of an apparent conflict within Flusser’s thinking, namely a contention that Naziism was not irrational, but rather an effort at extermination grounded in biological science and conducted by professionals in a framework of experimentation. He also refers repeatedly to the stupidity of Naziism. Can it be both rational and stupid, Morris-Reich asks, for “the rational is not usually stupid and the stupid is not usually rational.” (100). Morris-Reich resolves the apparent conflict in a way that seemed to me generous — he credits Flusser’s originality in both — and sensitive to the way a human mind, notably the mind of a creative writer, might position itself with respect to a grim, hideous past act and those who perpetrated it. For it would be possible to consider National Socialism from the inside, that is, as a participant, or from the outside, as a victim, and depending on the subject’s position, to see in ways that do not in fact conflict, but rather complement one another.
This book is, somewhat remarkably, the first monograph on Flusser to be published in English. He sometimes wrote in English, and there are English translations of almost all his books, mainly from the languages he used most often, German or Portuguese. It is clear, concise, inventive — particularly in its engagement with “fantasy,” both as a literary project and as the background of a historical reality.
