Karen Russo’s Films Explore the Manipulative Power of Nazi Imagery

Myths of the Near Future, Karen Russo’s current exhibition at the Tel Aviv Museum of Art, shares Norman Mailer’s view of Nazism as depraved poetry. Speaking of his ongoing fascination with the Third Reich, Mailer remarked that unlike other tyrants, Hitler killed “according to metaphor.” Nazism did not operate according to a logic of political ruthlessness or even a Nietzschean will-to-power. Jews, as well as Poles, Romani, and others, were “viruses” whose existence put civilization in jeopardy. This assault against the real, in Mailer’s and now Russo’s reading, is what positions Nazism in the realm of poetics rather than merely ideology. But where Mailer concluded that Hitler and Nazism were “a reigning mystery” that violated all explanations of human nature, Russo attempts her own poetic chartering of German nationalism.

 

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