 Anders accepting the Adorno Prize, 1987 |
Günther
Anders
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Anders accepting the Adorno Prize, 1987 |
Günther
Anders
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Page Introduction Personal Note |
biography |
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Anders Page Introduction (back to top) No philosopher has concerned him- or herself with the nuclear age in all of its ramifications as has the late Günther Anders. A Jewish journalist and intellectual who fled Nazi Germany with his wife Hannah Arendt in 1933, Anders returned to Europe in 1950 to become one of the founders of the anti-nuclear movement there. In 1956 he published his magnum opus The Outdatedness of Humankind (my translation, Die Antiquiertheit des Menschen has not yet been translated into English), more than half of which is devoted to "The Bomb and the Roots of Our Blindness toward the Apocalypse." After participating in the "Fourth International Congress against A- and H-Bombs and for Disarmament" in Tokyo in 1958, Anders published his philosophically oriented personal journal as The Man on the Bridge: A Diary from Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1959. Anders published his correspondence with Claude Eatherly, the US pilot who gave the drop command on the Hiroshima mission, in 1961 as Burning Conscience: The Case of the Hiroshima Pilot Claude Eatherly, told in his Letters to Günther Anders. It has been republished several times and translated into 18 languages. After that Anders' published several books of reflections on morality in the atomic age. There has been some criticism of Anders because he openly advocated violence to combat regimes that flagrantly disregard human rights. (See his 1987 texts, below) |
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A personal note by Harold Marcuse, the author of this page (back to top) My grandfather Herbert Marcuse (my website about Herbert) and Anders both studied with Martin Heidegger in Freiburg in the late 1920s. As Jews, both fled from Germany to the US in the 1930s. Anders lived in my grandparents' home in the US for a time in the early 1940s. While doing research on the immediate post-1945 period I came across Anders' published diaries during those years (Die Schrift an der Wand, published 1966), which I found fascinating. After learning about Anders' connection with my family I corresponded with Anders told me that much of what Herbert wrote was contained in his own Antiquiertheit (1956)[Christian
Fuchs' essay compares their work], but Anders was barely known by
the broader public until the 1980s. In any case,
when I went to Vienna in April 1983, I visited Anders at his flat in the
Lackierergasse. In the 1980s I was a U.S. student working towards an M.A. in History of Art in Germany. In 1992, after finishing my dissertation about the post-1945 history of Dachau, I became a professor of German history at UC Santa Barbara. In the late 1990s Routledge was looking for someone to write an article about Anders for its Encyclopedia of Contemporary German Culture (1999, amazon.com page), and I volunteered. My unedited draft of encyclopedia entry (which had to be shortened for publication) forms the core of the biographical text below. In those early days of the web there was almost nothing about Anders available on the internet, so I created this page, and have been updating it at irregular intervals since. |
| Günther
Anders (12 July 1902,
Breslau-17 December 1992, Vienna) print
version (back to top) best known as a philosopher and essayist of the anti-nuclear movement
Anders, born Günther Stern, attained notoriety since the early 1960s as an activist and philosopher of the antinuclear movement. An assimilated German Jew, he studied under Martin Heidegger and Edmund Husserl, completing his dissertation in 1923. After Theodor Adorno at the University of Frankfurt rejected his habilitation, he began work as a cultural critic. When a Berlin editor with too many writers named Stern on his staff suggested he name himself "something different," he responded "then call me 'different'" ("anders"). The name is characteristic of Anders' unsparing bluntness. He emigrated to Paris in 1933 and the United States in 1936, divorcing Hannah Arendt, who found his pessimism "hard to bear," as he later put it. [They were married from 1929 to 1937. The photo is from the Hannah Arendt Trust, and is displayed on the Library of Congress website.][An aside on Arendt, whose 1951 book The Origins of Totalitarianism, and coining of the phrase "the banality of evil" in her 1962 New Yorker reports on the Eichmann trial catapulted her to lasting name recognition: Ron Rosenbaum has this interesting analysis of her closeness to Nazi ideologues like Heidegger: "The Evil of Banality" (Slate, Oct. 30, 2009)]
Anders won numerous awards and honors for his work from 1936 (Novella Prize of the Emigration, for "The Hunger March") to 1978 (Literature Prize of the Bavarian Academy of Fine Arts), to 1979 (Austrian State Prize for Cultural Writing) to 1983 (Adorno Prize of the City of Frankfurt) to 1992 (Sigmund-Freud-Prize); others he rejected for political reasons. His unsparingly critical pessimism may explain why his pathbreaking works have seldom sparked sustained public discussion, with the major exception of his Theses on Violence (scans on this site) during the peace movement of the 1980s. The renaissance of interest in his works in the 1990s indicates that his uncompromising moralism may have been ahead of its time. |
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Other Anders Biographies (see also "books about section", below) (back to top)
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In
the United States Anders worked at menial jobs, but also wrote for the
German-language newspaper Der Aufbau, and later lectured at the
New School for Social Research in New York City. His first book of philosophical
reflexions, Die Schrift an der Wand: Tagebücher 1941-1966
(The Writing on the Wall: Diaries 1941-1966) (1967), begins with his musings
as a laborer in a Hollywood warehouse of historical costumes. Auschwitz
and Hiroshima mark turning points in his consciousness. He returned to
Europe in 1950 and began work on Die Antiquiertheit des Menschen (The
Outdatedness of Human Beings, 1956). In addition to analyzing human feelings
of inadequacy in comparison with machines, and to settling
scores philosophically with Heidegger, Anders lays out the principles of 'blindness
to the apocalypse,' the focus of his later work. Pressured to categorize
his ideas, he later coined the term Diskrepanzphilosophie (philosophy
of discrepancy) to describe his focus on the increasing divergence between
what has become technically feasible (e.g. the nuclear holocaust of the
entire globe), and what a human mind is capable of imagining. 
From
1945 to 1955 Anders was married to the Austrian writer Elizabeth Freundlich;
in 1957 he married the Jewish-American pianist Charlotte Lois Zelka. (Charlotte
died in 2001; see this page of correspondence with her sister Betty and
colleague Al R. Rice: 
Die
Antiquiertheit des Menschen
translated
by Harold Marcuse, for use in the 
the concept of repressive tolerance, translated by Harold Marcuse
Die
Antiquiertheit des Menschen, vol. II: Über die Zerstörung des
Lebens im Zeitalter der dritten industriellen Revolution.
Schwarze Ontologie. Über Günther Anders
Günther
Anders: De la désuétude de l'homme (Paris: Éditions
du Jasmin, 2004)