Günther Anders

Günther Anders (; born Günther Siegmund Stern, 12 July 1902 – 17 December 1992) was a German-born philosopher, journalist and critical theorist.

Trained as a philosopher in the phenomenological tradition, he obtained his doctorate under Edmund Husserl in 1923 and worked then as a journalist at the Berliner Börsen-Courier. At that time, he changed his name from Stern to Anders. He unsuccessfully tried to get a university tenure in the early 1930s and ultimately fled Nazism to the United States. Back in Europe in the 1950s, he published his major book, The Obsolescence of Man, in 1956.

An important part of Gunther Anders' work focuses on the self-destruction of mankind, through a meditation on the Holocaust and the nuclear threat. Anders developed a philosophical anthropology for the age of technology, dealing with such other themes as the effects of mass media on our emotional and ethical existence, the illogic of religion, and the question of being a thinker. He was awarded the Sigmund Freud Prize shortly before his death, in 1992.

Biography

Early life Günther Anders (then Stern) was born on 12 July 1902, in Breslau (now Wrocław in Poland), the son of Jewish heritage founders of child developmental psychology Clara and William Stern and cousin to philosopher Walter Benjamin. His parents kept a diary of Gunther and his two sisters and from April 1900, the birth of their first child Hilde, until August 1912. This record-keeping would span a combined 18 years in total. While the diaries were mainly an academic exercise in developmental child psychology, they were also a larger glimpse into the lives of the children growing up. His other sister Eva would go on to be a part of Youth Aliyah and later worked for people with mental disabilities. However Anders' own parents, arguably his father, was the most significant intellectual influence in his life.

Anders was an atheist, and although he never officially became a member of the Frankfurt School, he did influence the thinking of some of its members.

In the late 1920s Anders studied with the philosopher Martin Heidegger at the University of Freiburg. In 1923, Anders obtained a PhD in philosophy; Edmund Husserl was his dissertation advisor. While Anders was working as a journalist in Berlin (Berliner Börsen-Courier ) he changed his nom-de-plume to "Anders" (meaning other or different) which would go on to become his official name. There is more than one reason given in literature as to why he changed his name- one reason is that an editor did not want so many Jewish-sounding bylines in his paper, They married in Nowawes and at the time lived on Babelsberg's Merkurstraße 3 in Potsdam.

In 1930–31 he unsuccessfully attempted a habilitation under Paul Tillich in sociomusicology, and was advised by Max Wertheimer and Karl Mannheim to be patient. Anders worked on the novel from 1931 to 1933, and his friend Bertolt Brecht submitted it with his entrée or endorsement to the publishing Kipenhauer shortly before the Nazis took power. Anders fled the country shortly after Hitler was appointed chancellor on 30 January 1933, believing the false rumor that Brecht's diary, in which he was often mentioned, had been seized by the Gestapo. Hannah Arendt remained behind in Germany helping to smuggle refugees out of the Reich. She was arrested for eight days,

Exile (1933–1950) In 1933, Anders fled Nazi Germany, first to France (where he and Arendt divorced amicably in 1937), and in 1936 to the United States. In 1934 he gave a lecture on Kafka in Paris at the Institut d'Etudes Germaniques; he would go on to engage with Kafka in the coming years.

In the United States, he spent time in New York and California. He spent his time in a multitude of activities, hired in the United States Office of War Information, as a writer for Aufbau (journal), as a reviewer for a philosophical journal, as a tutor in the house of a famous composer and songwriter, as a worker in a factory, as a costume and theatrical property boy in Hollywood, as a tour guide at Metropolitan Museum of Art,

Anders married a second time, in 1945, to the Austrian writer Elisabeth Freundlich, whom he had met in New York.

1950s: return to Europe Anders returned to Europe in 1950 with his wife to live in her native Vienna.

There, Anders wrote his main philosophical work, whose title translates as The Obsolescence of Humankind (1956). He became a leading figure in the anti-nuclear movement and published numerous essays and expanded versions of his diaries, including one of a trip to Breslau and Auschwitz with his wife. Anders' papers are held by the University of Vienna, and his literary executor is former FORVM editor Gerhard Oberschlick. He and his second wife divorced in 1955.

In 1957, Anders married a third time, to American pianist Charlotte Lois Zelka. Gunther knew how to play the piano and violin.

Philosophy Günther Anders has called his philosophy "occasional philosophy" and "impressionistic philosophy". He never held an academic rank in Europe. Anders is well known in Europe and has been published and researched to a considerable extent in the German language. Some of his work has been translated into other languages such as French and Spanish. In it he details how the televisual experience substitutes images for experience, leading people to eschew first-hand experiences in the world and instead become "voyeurs". His dominant metaphor in this essay centers on how television interposes itself between family members "at the dinner table".

The Obsolescence of Humankind

His major work, of which only a few essays have been translated into English, is acknowledged to beEfn|Christopher John Müller writes "Anders' philosophical anthropology of the technological world, which he developed mainly in The Obsolescence of Human Beings Vol. 1 (1956) and Vol. 2 (1980)". Christian Fuchs writes that Die Antiquiertheit des Menschen is "principal work". This wide readership dwarfed scholarly interactions. Anders utilizes the story of Prometheus and draws parallels to modern technology.

Open Letter to Klaus Eichmann Just as Arendt in her Eichmann in Jerusalem elucidated the Banality of Evil by pointing out that most heinous crimes can be committed by quite ordinary people, Anders explores the moral and ethical ramifications of the facts brought to light in the 1960–61 trial of Adolf Eichmann in We Sons of Eichmann: Open Letter to Klaus Eichmann (the son of the noted Nazi bureaucrat and genocidaire). He suggests that the appellation "Eichmann" properly designates any person who actively participated in, ignored or failed to learn about, or even knew about, but took no action against the Nazis' mass murder campaigns against Jews and others. He explained to his audience in Austria and Germany, among them young writers searching for ways to empathize with their parents' generation, that "there was but one viable alternative not only for Eichmann's son Klaus but all 'Eichmann sons', namely to repudiate their fathers since mourning them was not an option."

Mensch ohne Welt In Mensch ohne Welt, Anders engages in a critique of the contemporary western commodity-society which he deems a society unfit for human beings. He views this perspective as negative-ontological. This world is a world for capital, not human beings, especially not for those who don't have the "great honor" to participate in labour. One is deemed adequate when one sells labour, the human being very far from being viewed as an end in herself, due to a kind of non laboro ergo non sum type of logic.

Honors 1962: Premio Omegna della Resistenza Italiana (Omegna Award of the Italian Resistance) 1967: Deutscher Kritikerpreis (German critics prize) 1978: Großer Literaturpreis der Bayerischen Akademie der Schönen Künste (Grand Literature Prize of the Bavarian Academy of Fine Arts) 1983: Theodor W. Adorno Award 1979: (Austrian State Prize for Cultural Journalism) 1985: Andreas Gryphius Prize (rejected) Constituted in 2018, winners include Joseph Vogl, Corine Pelluchon and Dietmar Dath.

Works

Bibliographies

List of selected works The View from the Tower. Tales. 1932 Der Hungermarsch (The Hunger March). 1935 Kafka Pro und Contra: Die Prozessunterlagen (Kafka, pro and contra. The Trial Records). 1951, 1985 Die Antiquiertheit des Menschen (The Outdatedness of Human Beings). vol I: Über die Seele im Zeitalter der zweiten industriellen Revolution (On the Soul in the Era of the Second Industrial Revolution). 1956 vol. II: Über die Zerstörung des Lebens im Zeitalter der dritten industriellen Revolution. (On the Destruction of Life in the Era of the Third Industrial Revolution). 1980 Der Mann auf der Brücke: Tagebuch aus Hiroshima und Nagasaki (The Man on the Bridge: Diary from Hiroshima and Nagasaki). 1959 Hiroshima ist überall. (Hiroshima is Everywhere). 1982 George Grosz. 1961 The Dead. Speech on three world wars. 1966 Visit to Hades. Auschwitz and Breslau. 1966 The Writing on the Wall. 1967 Visit Beautiful Vietnam: ABC of Today's Aggression. 1968 Nuernberg and Vietnam. Synoptical Mosaic. 1968 The Final Hours and the End of All Time. Thoughts on the Nuclear Situation. [Endzeit und Zeitenende]. 1972 My Jewishness. 1978 The Atomic Threat. Radical Considerations [conferences]. 1958-1981 Narratives. Gay Philosophy. 1983 Man Without World. 1984 Love Yesterday. Notes on the History of Feelings. 1986. The World as Phantom and Matrix. 1990 On Philosophical Diction and the Problem of Popularization. 1992 Homeless Sculpture, On Rodin. 1994 View from the Moon. Reflections on Space Flights. 1994 Heresies. 1996 On Heidegger. 2001 Philosophical Notes in Shorthand. 2002 Daily Notes: Records 1941–1992. 2006

Correspondence and conversations

Prose

Anthologies