History after Hiroshima: Gnther Anders and the Twentieth Century

Dissertation Proposal by Jason Dawsey September 2004 In the foreword to his 1982 Ketzereien (Heresies), Gnther Anders insisted that he be understood as an "advocate of militant theses (Vertreter von Kampfthesen) that at least deserve to be attacked."[1] This honor, he claimed, had yet to be bestowed on his earlier works. He urged his readers to view his heresies as antipodal to the overwhelming tendencies of the day toward conformism and orthodoxy, tendencies shared across the Cold War divide. Taking seriously Anders' request, I see this study as an attempt to grasp the contours of his most unorthodox life and thought. The project I am proposing is an intellectual biography of Gnther Anders (19021992). Though receiving little sustained attention among American scholars, Anders' work has frequently been a catalyst for debate among European, especially German and Austrian, intellectuals and academics about how best to conceptualize central issues in twentieth-century European and world history: the impact of technology on all spheres of life; the psychological and political implications of mass culture; the concept and reality of totalitarianism; Auschwitz and Hiroshima and their legacy for history and memory; ecological devastation; and new forms of internationalism and collective political action. It is my hope to introduce Anders into American discussions on these topics and evaluate how his ideas might contribute to a critical history of the twentieth century that foregrounds issues such as the technologies and practices of mass annihilation, utopianism, the capacity of the human faculties of imagination and representation to match the speed and ferocity of the century's key developments and events,

questions of existing and possible forms of global solidarity and relations to our world of products and apparatuses and to non-human nature. Within the scope of this approach to the examination of the last century, Anders and his philosophy, I would argue, should be central points of reference on this side of the Atlantic as well.

A Twentieth-Century Life (back to top)

Barry Katz, in his study of Herbert Marcuse, noted how the "practical imperatives" of his social theory were "imposed by the events of the twentieth century."[2] The same could be said of Gnther Anders. With a life that encompassed almost the entire century, Anders lived through or witnessed from afar most of its crucial moments. In later years, he would emphasize that his philosophical writings were essentially efforts to catch up to the century's events. I will provide here a biographical sketch of Anders.[3] Born Gnther Stern, he was the son of the eminent child psychologists William and Clara SternWilliam Stern was a central figure in the development of the concept of the Intelligence Quotient (IQ). Living first in Breslau and then Hamburg, Anders' childhood, according to his own description, was stereotypical for that of a comfortable, assimilated German-Jewish family (quite similar to that of his distant cousin Walter Benjamin). His attachment to his parents' world was ruptured, however, with the onset of the Great War. In 1917, Anders was mobilized, along with thousands of other students to aid in the German war effort on the Western Front. Only fifteen, he served in a paramilitary organization that harvested crops for the army in France. According to Anders' own account, two traumatic events during wartime fundamentally changed him: the sight of German soldiers who had lost limbs or had been terribly maimed at the front and the harassment and torment he suffered from comrades because of a secret friendship he struck up with the son of a partisan killed by the Germans. These experiences not only shaped his sense of self but influenced deeply the direction of his interests. Anders' persistent attention to the phenomenon of mass death and his specifically areligious sense of Jewishness stemmed, at least partially, from his memories of

horror and persecution during the First World War.[4] The standard descriptions of Anders' life give little insight into his attitudes toward Imperial Germany's defeat in 1918, the German Revolution and the founding of the Weimar Republic, and the imposition of the Treaty of Versailles. What is well known is that the 1920s began as a decade of immense promise for him. After completing his high-school education, he studied philosophy at Hamburg with the famed neo-Kantian Ernst Cassirer, and art history with Erwin Panofsky. His interests carried him to universities in Munich, where he continued his art studies with Heinrich Wlfflin, and Berlin, where he took courses with some of the most important figures in the field of psychology such as Eduard Spranger, Wolfgang Khler, and Max Wertheimer. Most notably, Anders was among the remarkable group of students who gathered around Edmund Husserl and Martin Heidegger at the universities of Marburg and Freiburg during the Weimar years. His circle of friends and acquaintances included his future wife, Hannah Arendt (they were married from 1929 to 1937) and Hans Jonas, who dated his sister. Anders completed his doctorate in 1924 under the direction of Husserl, did post-graduate work with Heidegger at Marburg and was an assistant to Max Scheler in 1926.[5] These philosophers had an immeasurable impact on his thinkingHusserlian phenomenology, Heidegger's system of fundamental ontology, and the late Scheler's philosophical anthropology were central features of Anders' philosophy.[6] Despite his cosmopolitanism and his long experience of exile from Germany both during and after the Nazi years, Anders' philosophical positions remained firmly rooted in the German intellectual traditions he worked through in the 1920s. During the late 1920s and early '30s, Anders began what was to be a lifelong commitment to the ideal of the "engaged" intellectual. He published art history and cultural criticism with the Vossische Zeitung and the Berliner Brsen-Courier (with the latter he first began to use the pseudonym Anders-"different") and moved, along with Arendt, among a circle of Weimar Germany's left-wing intellectuals and artists that included Bertolt Brecht,

George Grosz and John Heartfield.[7] His interest in this kind of work increased as the prospects for an academic career diminished. His attempt to submit a Habilitationschrift on the philosophy of music with Paul Tillich at the University of Frankfurt ran aground when the project was strongly criticized by an ambitious young philosopher named Theodor Wiesengrund-Adorno. Although Anders had already published a work in phenomenological philosophy, ber das Haben (On Having), he decided to delay work on his second thesis and concentrate on his political and aesthetic writing outside the academy.[8] Political circumstances then traumatically changed Anders' life. With the ascendancy of Adolf Hitler and the National Socialists in the years after 1930, Anders desperately tried to persuade many of his leftist colleagues to take seriously the Nazi threat. He organized discussion groups to study Hitler's Mein Kampf and he worked out his own theory of antifascism in his dystopian novel, Die molussische Katakombe (The Molussian Catacombs).[9] Anders remained in Germany until March 1933, two months after Hitler became chancellor, when Bertolt Brecht's address book was confiscated by the Gestapo. Fearing arrest in the aftermath of the Reichstag fire and the persecution of Communists and fellow travelers, he fled to Paris where he stayed until 1936. Anders' flight to Paris produced an irreversible strain on his marriage to Arendt. While she worked with the Zionist movement in Germany, he attempted to make a living as an independent writer. He elaborated on the philosophical anthropology he had begun in the late 1920s and published a prize-winning short story about a radical Mexican priest's efforts on behalf of the poor, "Der Hungermarsch"(The Hunger March).[10] Like many other German migrs, Anders decided to leave France in 1936 for what seemed to be a much more hospitable environment in the United States. A few years later, he succeeded in bringing his parents over to the U.S. as well. Anders was to spend fourteen years in the U.S. The image of American social and cultural life permeated his later writings on technology and civilization. This image coalesced

from a wide variety of experiences he had and jobs he held during those years. He wrote screenplays for movies with little success, lectured at the New School for Social Research, and tutored. Spending time on both coasts, Anders credited much of his critique of mass culture to his brief tenure at a costume factory, the Hollywood Custom Palace, in the early '40s. In his journals, he described it as a "museum of the collective costume past of humanity" where the garments, helmets, and weapons from radically different eras were grouped together for use by film companies.[11] Building from the day-to-day reflections on his work at this costume factory, he developed his own theory of the impact of the technologies of mass production and reproduction, a theory that intersected with many of the harsh criticisms of mass culture made by Theodor W. Adorno and Max Horkheimer. Anders, in fact, had a great deal of contact with the members of the Frankfurt School of Critical Theory during those years. He reviewed books for the Institute of Social Research's journal and participated in a seminar on the theory of needs with Horkheimer, Adorno, Herbert Marcuse, and Friedrich Pollock. He even briefly lived with Marcuse in southern California during the early '40s. Besides their common status as German-Jewish refugees from the Third Reich, they shared a number of philosophical concernscapitalism as a form of domination, the confrontation with new cultural forms like film, radio and television, and the problem of how to adequately theorize the emergence of fascism. The parallels between Marcuse and Anders are especially striking, since they both had been students of Heidegger, yet both deployed many of his concepts for a political agenda their former teacher found repellent.[12] The final years of the Second World War changed irreversibly Anders' thinking and self-conception. Despite the growing certainty of Allied victory over the Axis powers, reports of mass killings of Jews reached him in 1943 and were confirmed the following year. When he heard of the obliteration of Hiroshima in August, 1945, Anders claimed that the news left him speechless. These events forced a "turn" to a more explicitly historical line of theorizing. In his post-1945 works, Auschwitz and Hiroshima emerged as nodal points for a new historical

consciousness. For those who survived the war and those who would come after, a fundamental dilemma, Anders claimed, was how best to respond to these horrendous examples of technologically-mediated mass annihilation.[13] Subsequently, he struggled in his theoretical and political efforts to meet this challenge. Anders returned to Europe in 1950 with his second wife, the Austrian writer Elisabeth Freundlich. Unimpressed with the prospects of living in either Konrad Adenauer's Federal Republic of Germany or Walter Ulbricht's German Democratic Republic, he and Freundlich settled in her hometown, Vienna (years later, he would marry the American-Jewish musician, Charlotte Lois Zelka) . Anders would spend the rest of his life and would do his most important work there. He quickly rejected any thoughts of a university teaching career and fully embraced the ideal of the independent writer who made his living by writing and public speaking. The interest garnered by his book on Kafka strengthened this conviction.[14] He concentrated his energies for much of the decade on his magnum opus, Die Antiquiertheit des Menschen (The Antiquatedness of Humanity). Anders published the first volume in 1956 and immediately began organizing notes and essays for a second which was not released until 1980.[15] In these two works, Anders elaborated his mature philosophy of technology. Most of his later writings were variations on the arguments put forward in Die Antiquiertheit des Menschen. Both volumes of Die Antiquiertheit des Menschen were organized around a central contention: the modern age was a technological one where human beings had been reduced to outdated, "antiquated" beings. Anders claimed that technology's predominance reduced class differences within advanced industrial societies and political-ideological differences between the Cold War blocs to secondary importance. Human beings everywhere, humanity as such, faced a technological world, whose products transformed, even threatened their creators. Anders asserted in the face of accusations of hyperbole that "in no different sense than Napoleon had maintained it 150 years ago of politics, and Marx a 100 years ago of the

economy, technology is now our fate."[16] In the second volume, he expanded this line of argument, insisting "technology has now become the Subject of history, with which we are only still 'co-historical'("mitgeschichtlich")."[17] Anders referred to several contemporary developments as evidence for his arguments: the increasing role of automation in the workplace, modern entertainment industries and the prominence of radio and television, and advances in genetics and biotechnology. Most important, however, was the invention of nuclear weapons. August 6, 1945 had truly changed everything. Anders was one of a disparate group of largely independent intellectuals, political journalists, scientists, artists, and theologians in West Germany and Austria who understood the Bomb to be a fundamentally new menace. An abbreviated list of them would include Anders, Karl Jaspers, Robert Jungk, Hans Magnus Enzensberger, Walter Jens, Ingeborg Bachmann, Hans Henny Jahnn, Hans Werner Richter, Reinhold Schneider, Helmut Gollwitzer, Ulrike Meinhof, Gudrun Ensslin (the last two were later members of the Red Army Faction), and Carl Friedrich Weizscker.[18] While Anders often found common ground with many of these thinkers and activists, he differed from most of them in his sustained commitment, even obsession, with the nuclear threat and his determination to create a philosophy of the Atomic Age that would not only guide praxis and protest but would expose "the roots of our blindness to apocalypse" (Apokalypse-Blindheit).[19] The invention of atomic and hydrogen bombs and Intercontinental Ballistic Missiles (ICBMs) were, he thought, the purest expressions of technological terror. Technological development had already enveloped the planet; the destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki signaled a new historical eraAnders called it the "Endtime" (Endzeit)where our products might very well destroy us completely.[20] Human beings, he insisted, could either commit to the massive labors required to resist such a prospect or disappear altogether. From the mid-1950s onward, Anders became well known in Europe as a militant opponent of the atomic bomb. His theoretical writing and his activism fused as he sought a

popular language to convey his critiques of technological civilization, Hiroshima, Auschwitz, and contemporary imperialism. Among these (interrelated for him) issues, the nuclear menace remained predominant until the late 1960s. He worked closely with the anti-nuclear and peace movements in West Germany and Austria, and traveled to Japan in 1958, where he attended an international congress of anti-nuclear activists and observed for himself the legacy of atomic warfare in Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Anders also conducted a lengthy correspondence with Claude Eatherly, the American pilot involved in scouting missions over Hiroshima before the Enola-Gay raid who later suffered tremendous psychological problems for his role in the attacks.[21] Even his failed attempt to communicate with Adolf Eichmann's son, Klaus, in Wir Eichmannshne (We Sons of Eichmann) about his father's role in Nazi Germany's industrial killing apparatus included an appeal to Klaus to join the anti-nuclear cause as a spokesperson.
[22]

The Vietnam War proved to be something of an exception to his concentration on the nuclear question. Anders supported the New Left's condemnation of American involvement in Vietnam and he served in 1967 as a juror on the Bertrand Russell Peace Foundation's War Crimes Tribunal which indicted the United States for mass atrocities in Southeast Asia.[23] Anders always regarded U.S. military policy in Vietnam as indisputably genocidal. The American prosecution of war against the National Liberation Front and Ho Chi Minh's regime in North Vietnam, coupled with past U.S. willingness to use atomic bombs, convinced him that the United States was the most dangerous country in the post-1945 world. The 1970s and 1980s were, for Anders, decades of declining health on the one hand and increasing acclaim on the other. His productivity never wavered in either. Anders began the '70s with a book on space travel and closed the decade with his deeply compelling reflections on the Shoah, Besuch im Hades (Visit into Hades).[24] Long overdue recognition of his writings and activism followed with an Austrian state award in 1979 and, ironically, the Theodor W. Adorno Award of Frankfurt in 1983. The renewal of the arms race between the U.S. and the Soviet Union consumed him though and left him little time to appreciate this

attention. Although he conceded in the preface to the second volume of Die Antiquiertheit des Menschen that he was too old for praxis, Anders insisted that his theory of technology was inherently political and was as relevant to the 1980s as to the '50s.[25] He would not go quietly. The '80s were years when Anders, an octogenarian, attained his greatest fame or, perhaps better, infamy. In 1987, he published Gewalt-ja oder nein (Violence-yes or no), a volume which contained an interview with and essays by Anders as well as responses to his arguments from a host of figures in West German and Austrian public life.[26] Assembled in response to NATO's deployment of U.S. missiles in the Federal Republic in the early 1980s and the Chernobyl disaster in the Soviet Union in 1986, the book generated a bitter controversy on all sides of the political spectrum. Anders shocked readers there with his repudiation of nonviolence as an inadequate, indeed irresponsible, response to the perils posed by the Bomb and the use of nuclear energy. Violence, he insisted, should be considered an appropriate, legitimate form of defense by human beings against Cold War governments of both East and West that endangered not only their own populations but humanity as a whole. His dismissal of "merely theoretical" forms of protest and his talk of rendering certain politicians "ineffective" evoked the militant rhetoric of the Red Army Faction and Revolutionary Cells.[27] As his health continued to erode, Anders found a growing audience. The controversy over his support for left-wing violence pushed many to study his writings, while others came to his work through interest in academic study of philosophy and literature. When Anders died in 1992 in Vienna, he had lived long enough to see the reunification of Germany, the collapse of the Soviet Union, and the cessation of the Cold War. The century that he devoted his life to analyzing had ended quite surprisingly. Also surprising was a burgeoning interest in his philosophy by university-trained scholars, professionals of whom he had long held, to be kind, very mixed opinions. Academics finally caught up to Anders' remarkable body of work and found challenging and always surprising those "observations and theses" he offered

"independent of all orthodoxies."[28]

Goals for the Dissertation (back to top)

My dissertation has three major goals. First, I want to provide a thorough account of the life and ideas of Gnther Anders for a North American audience, a task already begun by Paul van Dijk in his Anthropology in the Age of Technology: The Philosophical Contribution of Gnther Anders.[29] Anders never found an audience in the U.S. during his lifetime, although he lived here for fourteen years. Many of his teachers and mentors (Ernst Cassirer, Edmund Husserl, Martin Heidegger, and Max Scheler) either published works in English or were readily translated and studied exhaustively by American scholarsin Heidegger's case, the scholarship has burgeoned into a veritable subfield in Continental philosophy. Anders' cousin, Walter Benjamin, and several of his Marxist associates (Bertolt Brecht, Theodor W. Adorno, Herbert Marcuse, and Ernst Bloch) have earned a secure place in the American academy. The immense prestige garnered by his first wife, Hannah Arendt requires no comment. Anders certainly contributed to this disregard for his work in the United States by his sometimes ambivalent, sometimes stridently hostile comments about the nature of American social, cultural and political life and by his reticence to approve translation of his works into English. I have undertaken this study to overcome this omission and to spur an interest in Anders' radical critique of technology and modern history mindful of his consistent suspicion of the academy. Anders' theoretical, political, and literary works (the boundaries between these categories often blur with him) repay careful study. An intellectual biography of Anders faces problems from the outset. Aside from his unpublished writings, he published journals, poetry, essays, and monographs in German, but also in French and English, over a span of some seventy years.[30] The sheer longevity of his career casts doubt on the possibility of a comprehensive, one-volume intellectual biography. To surmount these difficulties, I will focus on a central theme in his writings: the unfolding domination of technology over human beings, a development that did not begin in, but

assumed totalitarian dimensions in the twentieth century. I will argue that Anders' thesis of the emergence and then acceleration of humanity's "antiquatedness" in the face of our technological creations marks him as one of the most suggestive, if not controversial, theorists of twentieth- century history. His philosophy of technology, or as he described it, a "philosophical anthropology in the age of technocracy," deserves sustained attention by historians, I contend, because his theory proposed bold arguments about how to grasp the character of the twentieth century.[31] Anders' writings about technology should be understood within a larger debate among German intellectuals about the nature and trajectory of modern technology. Emerging during the tumultuous years of the Weimar Republic (1919-1933), this line of theorizing concerning Technik was frequently associated with right-wing, if not fascist, politics. Ernst Jnger, Oswald Spengler, Carl Schmitt, Hans Freyer, and, of course, Martin Heidegger were the key figures here and have been treated very effectively by Jeffrey Herf in his Reactionary Modernism.[32] Anders, along with Herbert Marcuse and perhaps Hans Jonas, represented a leftwing counterpoint to the proto-fascist perspective. Few of these thinkers feared broad generalizations or theoretical excess, and they elaborated very sophisticated theories of technological development and rationality. I will read Anders against this larger German debate but I also hope to show how his claims about the specificity of the twentieth century, though drawn from theoretical frameworks alien to many in the Anglo-American historical profession, intersect quite remarkably with the concerns of much contemporary historiography. My approach to this project has been influenced by the huge historiographical literature engaged in various forms of "taking stock" of the twentieth century. The strongly normative character of this work and the forbidding subject matter that it confronts have significantly advanced debate on how the past century compares to previous eras and what sort of legacy it leaves to future generations. Inspired largely, though not exclusively, by the history of Europe, these works foreshadow a more fully global history, a world history where the issues of human

rights, the establishment of international institutions, and the shared consciousness of participation in "humanity" assume paramount importance.[33] While it is far too soon to speak of this literature as if its energies were already spent, I think it is fair to describe much of this new work as an attempt to document, describe, and explain the history of the twentieth century in terms of total war and man-made mass death, where the enhanced ability to wage war and kill with perpetually increasing magnitude and efficiency took on gargantuan proportions. Within this framework, the two world wars and the Holocaust become the "ur-events" in a century marked by industrial killing, ethnic cleansing and exterminanionist racism and the often brutal utopias of revolutionary social transformation of both the political Left and Right.
[34]

Anders' ideas, I believe, contribute powerfully to these debates. His critique of technology purported to explain, in Kantian fashion, the technologically-facilitated possibilities for many of these horrific events and his philosophical anthropology offered a rich account of the frailness of human abilities to come to terms with them. For example, his contention that a massive gap had grown between our ability to produce and our faculties of representation, imagination, and feeling demanded a different understanding of the aftermath of the Shoah. What Alexander and Margarete Mitscherlich had diagnosed as the Germans' "inability to mourn" was not limited to the Germans. While demanding a specific German commitment to memory and mourning for the murdered, Anders constantly reiterated his call for a universal politics of conscience where the labors of overcoming this discrepancy, this "Promethean gap" between our faculties were given disproportionate attention.[35] I will argue that Anders' search for the frameworks of possibility for the Holocaust (and other genocides) and his interrogation of concepts like responsibility, collective guilt, and victimhood generate a creative tension with more conventional historical accounts, opening new lines of thinking about the history of the twentieth century and about the relationship between history and social theory. Anders' reflections on the significance of the advent of nuclear weapons and his theory

of the Atomic Age are also immensely valuable for historians. To the outrage of some, he explained both Hiroshima and Auschwitz as technologically-mediated mass annihilation. They had to be comprehended together, though never equated.[36] Hiroshima, especially, became for him the necessary point of departure for any philosophical analysis of the contemporary world. Conceptualizing its destruction as a fundamental rupture in global history, Anders maintained that the dropping of the atomic bombs initiated a new era where "Humanity as a whole is exterminable."[37] In the dissertation, I will focus on how Anders interpreted the Atomic Age as the Third Industrial Revolution. The previous industrial revolutions, he claimed had encompassed the technological breakthroughs and new forms of production of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and the introduction of television and radio in the twentieth centuries. The third was, like its predecessors, irreversible, but much more significantly, it portended the eradication of human and perhaps all life.[38] These propositions about the nature of nuclear terror and the post-Hiroshima era as a distinctive, revolutionary historical epoch provoke a number of questions for students of modern history. Some of these include: how are we to think of the scientific discovery of the splitting of the atom and the construction of the first nuclear and thermonuclear weapons within our histories of the twentieth century? To rephrase, where do Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the hydrogen bomb, the development of intermediate and intercontinental ballistic missiles and the Cold War's nuclear confrontations involving the United States, the Soviet Union and their respective allies like the Suez Crisis of 1956 and the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962 fit into current discussions of total war, revolution and genocide? It hardly requires emphasizing that these questions are not only salient for historical inquiry but resonate, sadly, all too much with our post-Cold War era where nuclear arms and technology and the requisite scientific knowledge proliferate in an international order that no longer operates along bipolar lines.[39] Anders' theses on the Bomb, I hope to show, still have great relevance even with the passing away of the logic of Mutually Assured Destruction. Anders should be recognized as the most rigorous theorist of omnicide and his claims about the nuclear peril point to its persistence as a

species problem. In contrast to Theodor W. Adorno, who spoke of the seemingly intractable difficulties haunting poetry and philosophy "after Auschwitz," Anders' body suggests that post-1945 history should be defined definitively as "after Hiroshima".[40] I will thematize his claims about "history after Hiroshima" (the title of my dissertation) and draw out their implications for a historical-theoretical understanding of the twentieth century. Second, I want the dissertation to contribute to the study of modern German intellectual history. Anders' theory rests on the fault lines of several different German philosophical traditions. By his own admission Edmund Husserl, Martin Heidegger, and Max Scheler exerted the greatest influence on him. My project will include a detailed examination of the impact of these thinkers on Anders and how he appropriated their ideas for his own purposes. Of these three, Heidegger and Scheler had the most profound impact on his subsequent thinking. Heidegger's attempt, begun in the Weimar years, to make philosophy "concrete" again stunned the young Anders as it did many of his colleagues. In later interviews, he spoke of the "demonic 'spell'" of Heidegger's thought, which he, like many other aspiring German intellectuals, fell under.[41] Unlike Hannah Arendt, Anders broke completely with Heidegger over the latter's Nazism and he published some of the first systematic critiques of Heidegger's philosophical project.[42] Despite the rift, Heidegger's influence persisted throughout all of his later workto use the language of his former teacher, Heidegger's radical approach to the history of philosophy and to modernity opened a way of questioning for Anders. In the dissertation, I will emphasize how Anders' trenchant reconfiguration of Heideggerian themes like the relationship between Dasein and temporality, the problem of nihilism and, of course, the confrontation with technology make him a salient, yet often neglected, figure in the history of Heideggerianism.[43] I shall also demonstrate the equally important imprint Max Scheler's writings left on Anders. Scheler (1874-1928) began in his final years work on a philosophical anthropology, a subfield of philosophy still obscure to many Anglo-American students and scholars.[44] The

subfield has had a long and distinguished lineage in Germany. Some of the earliest proponents of philosophical anthropology were Immanuel Kant and Johann Gottfried Herder in the late eighteenth century. Hegel, Feuerbach, and Marx extended this tradition in the nineteenth century. Scheler and, later, Helmuth Plessner (1892-1985) reinvigorated it in the Weimar years.[45] Anders was an assistant to Scheler in 1926 and quickly took up many of the latter's theoretical concerns. He emerged along with Arnold Gehlen (1904-1976) as one of the gifted heirs to philosophical-anthropological thinking. Philosophical anthropology, or at least its German variant, had always taken up themes of humanity's location within the web of organic life. The distinction between human beings and animals, the very faculties and abilities that rendered us human, our modes of interaction with our environments, and potential direction of human evolution were its leitmotifs. Anders shared many of these concerns. In the late 1920s, he planned for an academic career and sketched his interpretation of philosophical anthropology in a lecture entitled "Die Weltfremdheit des Menschen" (The Unworldliness of Humanity).[46] Given to Kant societies in Hamburg and Frankfurt, this lecture offered strong arguments against concepts of a fixed human nature. Anders there and in two subsequent essays touted a stark view of human culture human beings had no innate nature and lived in a godless world ruled by contingency.[47] The "freedom" of human beings to create their own world and grapple with this contingency preoccupied Anders for the remainder of his life. His thinking anticipated Jean-Paul Sartre's idea of humankind as a life-form "condemned to freedom" and encouraged comparison with the rightist approach to these questions propounded by Gehlen.[48] I hope to make this tradition of philosophical anthropology more familiar to American readers and to show how its apparently ahistorical bent is revamped in Anders' hands into a fully historical theory of the transformation of human life. Its centrality to his theoretical project is difficult to overestimate. Anders' vociferous repudiation of our technological civilization and his theory of the Atomic Age are incomprehensible without an extended treatment of these

philosophies of human nature. My third and final goal for the dissertation is to make a case for the importance of Anders as a serious political thinker. He never exerted the influence on radical social movements like his friend and sometime rival, Herbert Marcuse, yet he secured for himself a place as a formidable public intellectual. As I noted in the previous section, Anders was fervently dedicated to the ideal of the engaged writer from the 1920s until his death in 1992. In the dissertation, I will show how Anders aligned himself with a series of struggles and causes, but I want to stress how he is much more compelling as a political theorist. After his return to Europe in 1950, Anders began to theorize new forms of opposition and internationalism. Faced with the nightmare of nuclear annihilation, he contended that human beings must forge a new solidarity that would meet the global threat on global terms. I will argue that Anders developed a kind of post-Marxist radicalism adequate to the new social movements of the second half of the Cold War. For Anders, an unforeseen consequence of the Atomic Age was the obsolescence of the most progressive form of solidarity of the preHiroshima age, that of Marxist internationalism. Marxist categories of class struggle, he claimed, failed before a menace from which "no land, no population, no class, no generation" could escape.[49] Anders replaced Marx and Engels' exhortation for workers of the world to unite with this slogan: "Imperiled of all lands unite!" (Gefhrdete aller Lnder, vereinigt euch!) and called for an "International of Generations" to supplant the older socialist and communist Internationals.[50] He also insisted that many staples of modern ethicsresponsibility, empathy, action, obligationhad to be thoroughly reevaluated in the wake of Hiroshima and Auschwitz. Determined to influence the anti-nuclear, peace, and ecology movements, Anders wrote extensively about political praxis and the frameworks of effective resistance to the nuclear threat. His understanding of the struggle against possible omnicide and repetition of past genocide as simultaneously a struggle for a moral subjectivity equal to these challenges makes

fascinating reading and the later chapters of my dissertation will include protracted discussions of these ideas and consideration of their relevance for our times.[51]

Methodology and Outline of the Dissertation (back to top)

My project has been greatly influenced by the remarkable new literature on Gnther Anders' life and ideas that has emerged in the last twenty years. As late as 1980, Anders told readers that he did not place the "slightest value" in how "professional philosophers" regarded him or how "they would classify his doings."[52] His alienation from contemporary academic philosophy had been persistent, but he was stunned by the explosion of interest in his works that began in the 1980s. In light of his outspoken support for the anti-nuclear movement and the public scandal concerning his comments on violence, many German and Austrian students in philosophy, psychology and Germanistik sought him and his books out. This academic interest in Anders concurred with a number of awards he received for his writings and activism. Scholars such as Micha Brumlik, Jrgen Langenbach, Gabriele Althaus and Eckhard Wittulski issued a number of pathbreaking works on Anders' theories of technology, mass culture and radical politics in the late 1980s.[53] In the early 1990s, the purview of this literature expanded tremendously with special colloquia about and exclusive issues on Anders by academic journals. 1992, the year of Anders' ninetieth birthday and that of his death was a landmark year in the "discovery" of his philosophy.[54] During the last decade, this fascination with Anders' ideas has not abated. Several new works, many of them comparative in nature, have appeared.[55] For students of Anders, what is especially ironic is how he, the perpetual outsider, has become institutionalized posthumously. Thanks largely to the efforts of Dirk Rpcke and Raimund Bahr, a Gnther Anders Forum, with a corresponding website, has been created along with an International Gnther Anders Academy.[56] Annual seminars, workshops, and colloquia on Anders in Vienna have elicited much attention and a community of scholars concerned with the legacy of Anders and the questions he raised is taking shape. With the publication of Paul van Dijk's book on Anders in

2000, the first of its kind in English, the discussion is moving, albeit gradually, across the Atlantic. I look forward to being a part of it. My own project, while influenced by much of this German and Austrian literature, differs from these works in a few crucial ways. First, my dissertation is a work in intellectual history not a work of philosophy and that gives my research a distinct slant. Most of the previous literature has been engaged in a serious exposition of Anders' key ideas technological supremacy, the antiquatedness of human beings, the discrepancy between our faculties of imagination and those of production. These works are invaluable for their close analyses of his texts, but the absence of context in so many of them is a glaring weakness. The explicitly historical-biographical aspects of his theory are often relegated to a separate biographical excursus or chapter. I want to provide a thicker historical dimension to his intellectual biography and offer a narrative where the evolution of his critical theory of technology is shown chronologically. Such an approach, I contend, betters an exclusively internal exposition of Anders' philosophy at least in this case, because the leitmotifs of his work are so overtly historical. Indeed, I understand Anders' theory of technology as a bold attempt to grasp a historical context, which he described as the succession of the Three Industrial Revolutions. Ludger Ltkehaus and Konrad Paul Liessmann have advocated the most consciously historical approach, as far as I can tell, within the larger body of Anders scholarship.[57] Although my dissertation bears affinities to the writings of these authors, I will push for a greater integration of biography and theory. A second difference with my project is that I will build on the greatest strength of the previous scholarship on Andersthe careful exegesis of his writingswhile shifting this method onto different subjects. My focus, to reiterate, will be on his critique of technology. I will engage his texts seriously and will reconstruct their arguments, drawing out their implications and pointing to problems arising from his claims. I will not remain at this level of analysis, but instead I hope to draw out tensions between Anders' theory and the context he

theorizes, the dynamic of technology's growing autonomy in the twentieth century. The relation between critical theories of modern life and more conventional historical accounts is a central interest of mine. My purpose is not to "disprove" or merely correct certain of Anders' theses, but to concentrate on how ambitious theories of modernity (or postmodernity for that matter) confront contemporary historiography. Intellectual history can mediate these two approaches and fully bring out points of conflict between them. In short, I want to look at not only the internal consistency and coherence of his arguments but their adequacy and actuality.
[58]

Additionally, I see this dissertation on Anders as part of a series of reassessments of important figures in Central European thought whose ideas had dropped out of scholarly debate. The new studies of Karl Popper, Karl Jaspers, and Hans Jonas testify, I hope, to the continued vitality of their philosophies as well as to intellectual history itself.[59] The study of compelling thinkers like these should not necessarily lead to an uncritical adoration of a canon of Meisterdenker. Beyond the intrinsic interest contained in the life of an individual, intellectual or not, serious analyses of major theorists and critics recover lost insights about particular eras, subvert existing parameters for what is considered historical knowledge, and bring forth new questions as much as they answer old ones. That is intellectual history at its best. It is in that spirit of inquiry that I submit this project on Anders. Finally, I want to briefly mention the outline of the dissertation. There are two parts to it and five chapters. The schema for the two sections "Mensch ohne Welt" (Man without a World) and "Welt ohne Mensch" (World without Man), I take from Anders himself.[60] The first part will encompass Anders' life from 1902-1950, the second the years 1950-1992. Part One will include a chapter covering his childhood and early years through his studies with Heidegger and Scheler. Chapter Two will take up his time in exile. Part Two, the lengthier of the two sections, will have three chapters. Chapter One will be concerned primarily with Die Antiquiertheit des Menschen. The emphasis on Chapter Two will be his political involvement in the 1960s and '70s and concomitant political writings. In Chapter Three, I will look at the

debate over his views on violent resistance and pacifism and his legacy. The research for the dissertation will be based, of course, mainly on printed sources, the number of which are enormous in Anders' case. Aside from the published writings, I will make use of materialscorrespondence, unfinished manuscripts, and diariesheld in the Anders Nachlass in Vienna under the supervision of Gerhard Oberschlick. There is also correspondence between Anders and Herbert Marcuse and Alexander Mitscherlich in their respective archives in Frankfurt and between Anders and Arendt at the Library of Congress that I will have to examine. Third, there are materials related to Anders at the Deutsches Literaturarchiv at Marbach am Neckar. I plan also to make use of materials on anti-nuclear, peace, and New Left organizations located at the International Institute for Social History in Amsterdam and the Institut fr Sozialforschung in Hamburg.

(back to top)
[1]

Gnther Anders, Ketzereien (Munich: Verlag C.H. Beck, 1982), 5. Barry Ktz, Herbert Marcuse and the Art of Liberation: An Intellectual Biography (London: Verso, 1982), 12.

[2]

[3]

Since there is no real biography of Anders in any language, a good place to begin is the collection of interviews contained in Gnther Anders antwortet: Interviews & Erklrungen, ed. Elke Schubert (Berlin: Edition Tiamat, 1987). For this brief overview of Anders' life, I will draw on his 1979 interview with Matthias Greffrath, "Wenn ich verzweifelt bin, was geht's mich an?" and his 1985 conversation with Fritz J. Raddatz, "Brecht konnte mich nicht riechen," both from Gnther Anders antwortet. Concise descriptions of his life can also be found in Konrad Paul Liessmann, Gnther Anders zur Einfhrung, 2nd Edition (Hamburg: Junius Verlag, 1993), Ch.1 and Paul van Dijk, Anthropology in the Age of Technology: The Philosophical Contribution of GntherAnders (Atlanta: Rodopi, 2000), Ch.2.
[4]

On Anders' understanding of his own Jewishness, see his essay "Mein Judentum," in Mein Judentum, edited by Hans Jrgen Schultz (Stuttgart: Kreuz, 1978).
[5]

Anders' dissertation was, by his own account, critical of his teacher Husserl. See "Die Rolle der Situationskategorie bei den Logischen Stzen," Ph.D. diss., University of Freiburg-im-Breisgau, 1924.
[6]

An excellent place to start with Anders' connection to German philosophy is Helmut Hildebrandt's "Gnther Anders und die philosophische Tradition," Text + Kritik 115 (July 1992): 58-63.
[7]

For a thorough discussion of Anders' relationship with Arendt, see Elisabeth Young-Bruehl, Hannah Arendt: For Love of the World (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1982). Anders published a series of essays on the leftist intelligentsia of the Weimar Republic. Many of them can be found his Mensch ohne Welt: Schriften zur Kunst und Literatur (Munich: Verlag C.H. Beck, 1984).

[8]

Published under Gnther Stern, ber das Haben: Sieben Kapitel zur Ontologie der Erkenntnis (Bonn: Cohen, 1928), is perhaps his most neglected book.
[9]

The novel, completed in the late 1930s, was not published until the year of Anders' death-Die molussische Katakombe: Roman (Munich: Verlag C.H. Beck, 1992).
[10]

This story was originally published in the German exile journal, Die Sammlung, in 1936 and was republished with much of Anders' other fiction in Erzhlungen: Frhliche Philosophie (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1978).
[11]

See his Tagebcher und Gedichte (Munich: Verlag C.H. Beck, 1985), 1.

[12]

For a comparison , see Christian Fuchs, "Zu einigen Parallelen und Differenzen im Denken von Gnther Anders und Herbert Marcuse" in Geheimagent der Masseneremiten: Gnther Anders, ed. Dirk Rpcke and Raimund Bahr, 2nd Edition (Vienna: Edition Art and Science/Gnther Anders Forum, 2003).
[13]

For an excellent analysis of Anders' understanding of Auschwitz and Hiroshima, see Konrad Paul Liessmann's "'Das Prinzip Auschwitz': Reflexionen zur Leichenproduktion im 20. Jahrhundert." Forum XLII Nr. 796-798 (June 9, 1995): 92-95.
[14]

Kafka-Pro und Contra: Die Prozessunterlagen (Munich: Verlag C.H. Beck, 1951).

[15]

Die Antiquiertheit des Menschen, Vol. 1, ber die Seele im Zeitalter der zweiten industriellen Revolution (Munich: Verlag C.H. Beck, 1956) and Vol. 2, ber die Zerstrung des Lebens im Zeitalter der dritten industriellen Revolution (Munich: Verlag C.H. Beck, 1980).
[16]

Die Antiquiertheit, Vol. 1, 7. Die Antiquiertheit, Vol. 2, 9.

[17]

[18]

For two good anthologies of Central European anti-nuclear thought from this period, see Bernward VesperTriangel, ed., Gegen den Tod: Stimmen deutscher Schriftsteller gegn die Atombombe (Stuttgart: Studio Neue Literatur, 1964) and Gnther Heipp, ed., Es geht ums Leben! Der Kampf gegen die Bombe 1945-1965: Eine Dokumentation (Hamburg: Reich, 1965). See also the very important book by Karl Jaspers, Die Atombombe und die Zukunft des Menschen (Munich: R. Piper and Co., 1958).
[19]

This phrase is taken from the powerful essay on the atomic threat, "ber die Bombe und die Wurzeln unserer Apokalypse-Blindheit," in Die Antiquiertheit, Vol. 1.
[20]

Anders uses this phrase from apocalyptic religious language in his 1959 piece, "Thesen zum Atomzeitalter," which he issued along with other essays on the Bomb in Endzeit und Zeitenende: Gedanken ber die atomare Situation (Munich: Verlag C.H. Beck, 1972). This very important collection of Anders' essays was republished with a new foreword as Die atomare Drohung: Radikale berlegungen (Munich: Verlag C.H. Beck, 1981).
[21]

Anders' account of his trip to Japan appeared as Der Mann auf der Brcke: Tagebuch aus Hiroshima und Nagasaki (Munich: Verlag C.H. Beck, 1959). For his correspondence with Eatherly, see Burning Conscience: The Case of the Hiroshima Pilot (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1962). A German translation of the correspondence had appeared a year earlierOff Limits fr das Gewissen (Hamburg: Rowohlt Verlag, 1961).
[22]

This ultra-provocative "open letter" deserves immediate translationWir Eichmannshne: Offener Brief an Klaus Eichmann (Munich: Verlag C.H. Beck, 1964).
[23]

Among Anders' extensive writings about the Vietnam conflict, see his Nrnberg und Vietnam: Synoptisches Mosaik (Berlin: Voltaire, 1967) and Visit Beautiful Vietnam: ABC der Aggressionen heute (Cologne: PahlRugenstein Verlag, 1968). The stunning transcript of the tribunal's hearings is recorded in Against the Crime of Silence: Proceedings of the Russell International War Crimes Tribunal, ed. John Duffet (London: O' Hare Books,

1968).
[24]

For his theory of the space age, see Der Blick vom Mond: Reflexionen ber Weltraumflge (Munich: Verlag C.H. Beck, 1970). His work on the Holocaust blended older published writings with new pieces about representation and memoryBesuch im Hades: Auschwitz und Breslau 1966. Nach "Holocaust" 1979 (Munich: Verlag C.H. Beck, 1979).
[25]

Die Antiquiertheit, Vol. 2, 10-14. Gewalt-ja oder nein: Eine notwendige Diskussion, ed. Manfred Bissinger (Munich: Knaur, 1987). Ibid, 24. Ketzereien, 5. For a full citation, see no.3.

[26]

[27]

[28]

[29]

[30]

There is no Gesamtausgabe of Anders' works. The most complete bibliography of his published writings was put together for a special issue of Text + Kritik 115 (July 1992): 89-101.
[31]

This description is found in Die Antiquiertheit, Vol. 2, 9.

[32]

Jeffrey Herf, Reactionary Modernism: Technology, Culture, and Politics in Weimar and the Third Reich (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984). Heidegger's distinctive place in this debate is covered in the excellent book by Michael Zimmerman, Heidegger's Confrontation with Modernity: Technology, Politics, and Art (Indianopolis: Indiana University Press, 1990). On Jonas, see Eric Jakob, Martin Heidegger und Hans Jonas: Die Metaphysik der Subjektivitt und die Krise der technologischen Zivilisation (Tbingen: Francke, 1996) and David J. Levy, Hans Jonas: The Integrity of Thinking (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2002). For Marcuse, see Ktz, Marcuse and the Art of Liberation, Douglas Kellner, Herbert Marcuse and the Crisis of Marxism (London: Macmillan, 1984), and Patrick Murray, "The Frankfurt School Critique of Technology," Research in Philosophy and Technology 5 (1982): 223-248. Some major works on the general sociopsychological anxiety about technology are Langdon Winner's Autonomous Technology: Technics-out-of-control as a Theme in Political Thought (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1977 and Otto Ulrich, Technik und Herrschaft (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1977).
[33]

I have listed here the works that I found the most insightful: Omer Bartov, Murder in Our Midst: The Holocaust, Industrial Killing, and Representation (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996); idem, Mirrors of Destruction: War, Genocide, and Modern Identity (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000); Dan Diner, Das Jahrhundert verstehen: Eine Universalhistorische Deutung (Munich: Luchterhand, 1999); Michael Geyer, "Germany or: The Twentieth Century as History," South Atlantic Quarterly 96:4 (1997): 663-702; Jonathan Glover, Humanity: A Moral History of the Twentieth Century (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2000); Eric Hobsbawm, The Age of Extremes: A History of the World 1914-1991 (New York: Vintage Books, 1994); Paul Gordon Lauren, The Evolution of International Human Rights: Visions Seen (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1998); Mark Mazower, Dark Continent: Europe's Twentieth Century (New York: Vintage Books, 2000); idem, "Violence and the State in the Twentieth Cenury," American Historical Review 107:4 (October 2002): 1158-1178; Norman Naimark, Fires of Hatred: Ethnic Cleansing in Twentieth-Century Europe (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2001); Eric D. Weitz, A Century of Genocide: Utopias of Race and Nation (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2003). Still crucial for understanding this angle on twentiethcentury developments is Raymond Aron, The Century of Total War, 1st Edition (Garden City, N.J.: Doubleday Press, 1954). Charles Maier has argued quite forcefully that this approach to the twentieth century, oriented around narratives of "moral atrocity" and "moral struggle", really does not capture different " structural narratives" of socio-political and economic transformation. See his "Consigning the Twentieth Century to History: Alternatives for the Modern Era," American Historical Review 105 (June 2000): 807-831.
[34]

I borrow the term "ur-events" from Alon Confino, The Nation as Local Metaphor: Wrrtemberg, Imperial Germany, and National Memory, 1871-1918 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1997), xiii. For a philosophical analysis of the category of man-made mass death, see Edith Wyschogrod, Spirit in Ashes: Hegel,

Heidegger, and Man-Made Mass Death (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1985).
[35]

For Anders' approach to the Holocaust and to the tasks of Vergangenheitsbewltigung, see his Wir Eichmannshne, his journals of his visit to Auschwitz, and his essay on the American television series "Holocaust," "Nach 'Holocaust' 1979". The latter two pieces can be found in Besuch im Hades. For one example of his conceptualization of the problems of conscience and responsibility, see his 1964 speech, "Die Toten: Rede ber die drei Weltkriege," in Hiroshima ist berall (Munich: Verlag C.H. Beck, 1982). On Anders' concept of the "Promethean gap" (Das Prometheische Geflle), see Die Antiquiertheit, Vol.1, 17-18. The Mitscherlichs' arguments are contained in their Die Unfhigkeit zu trauern: Grundlagen kollektiven Verhaltens (Munich: Piper, 1967).
[36]

Andrei S. Markovits and Philip S. Gorski claim, falsely I think, that Anders relativizes the Holocaust when he compares it with the atomic threat. See their comments on Anders in their The German Left: Red, Green and Beyond (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993), 133, 135.
[37]

Die Antiquiertheit, Vol. 1, 242-243. In these remarkable passages, Anders contrasted the prospects of species destruction with the meaning of Auschwitzthat "All people are exterminable."
[38]

Anders elaborated his theory of the Three Industrial Revolutions at considerable length in both volumes of Die Antiquiertheit des Menschen.
[39]

There is much in Anders' writings that anticipates later attempts to theorize these questions in the 1980s and beyond after a new arms race and reciprocal anti-nuclear movement emerged worldwide. Anders'schen themes appear in all of these. E.P. Thompson, "Notes on Exterminism: The Last Stage of Civilization," in Exterminism and Cold War, edited by New Left Review (London: Verso, 1982); Jonathan Schell, The Fate of the Earth (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1982); Robert Jay Lifton and Eric Markusen, The Genocidal Mentality: Nazi Holocaust and Nuclear Threat (New York: Basic Books, 1990); Berel Lang, "Genocide and Omnicide: Technology and the Limits of Ethics," in The Future of the Holocaust: Between History and Memory (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1999).
[40]

For Adorno's discussion of cultural practices "after Auschwitz," see his "Cultural Criticism and Society" in Prisms, trans. Samuel and Shierry Weber (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1981), 34 and Negative Dialectics, trans. E.B. Ashton (New York: Continuum, 1973), 361-365. My characterization of Anders' reading of contemporary history is inspired by the title of Ludger Ltkehaus' excellent book on Anders, Philosophieren nach Hiroshima: ber Gnther Anders (Frankfurt am Main: Fischer Taschenbuch Verlag, 1992).
[41]

Anders' very interesting comments about his studies with Heidegger can be found in "Wenn ich verzweifelt bin", 22.
[42]

See his very important essays, "Nihilismus und Existenz," Die Neue Rundschau 5 (1946): 48-76 and "On the Pseudo-Concreteness of Heidegger's Philosophy," Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 8 (September 1947-June 1948): 337-371. Anders' published and unpublished writings on Heidegger have been collected in the volume ber Heidegger, ed. Gerhard Oberschlick in combination with Werner Reimann as translator (Munich: Verlag C.H. Beck, 2001).
[43]

Richard Wolin's Heidegger's Children: Hannah Arendt, Karl Lwith, Hans Jonas, and Herbert Marcuse (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001) barely mentions Anders, even though he focuses on many of the same problems in Heidegger's legacy that troubled Anders. The most serious student of the Anders-Heidegger relationship is Helmut Hildebrandt. See his Weltzustand Technik: Ein Vergleich der Technikphilosophien von Gnther Anders und Martin Heidegger (Berlin: Metropol, 1990) and "Anders und Heidegger" in Gnther Anders kontrovers, ed. Konrad Paul Liessmann (Munich: Verlag C.H. Beck, 1992).
[44]

On Scheler, the literature is growing as are the translations of his works. For a good introduction, see the older work by John Raphael Staude, Max Scheler, 1874-1928: An Intellectual Portrait (New York: Free Press, 1967).
[45]

A fine survey of the German tradition of philosophical anthropology is Gerhard Arlt, Philosophische

Anthropologie (Stuttgart: Metzler, 2001).

[46]

The unpublished manuscript for this presentation is contained in the Anders Nachlass. I have altered Paul van Dijk's translation of the title of the lecture here. See his Anthropology, 29.
[47]

Anders published two major essays in exile in France during the 1930s where he delineated the arguments made in the lecture. See his "Une interpretation de l'a posteriori," Recherches Philosophiques 4 (1934-1935): 6580 and "Pathologie de la libert: Essai sur la nonidentification," Recherches Philosophiques 4 (1936-1937): 2254.
[48]

Anders did not back away from pointing out his originality concerning these questions. See his comments on philosophical anthropology in Die Antiquiertheit Vol.2, 128-130. For an example of Gehlen's work, see his Der Mensch, seine Natur und seine Stellung in der Welt (Bonn: Athenum, 1940).
[49]

"Die Wurzeln der Apokalypse-Blindheit," in Die atomare Drohung, 106.

[50]

On this slogan, see his "Die Toten," 381. Anders' discussion of an "International of Generations" is found in his "Thesen zum Atomzeitalter," 95.
[51]

To really appreciate the richness of Anders' discussion of how modern technology has restructured human subjectivity, one should begin with Die Antiquiertheit, Vol. 1.
[52]

Die Antiquiertheit, Vol. 2, 418.

[53]

See Micha Brumlik, "Gnther Anders: Zur Existenzialontologie der Emigration" in Zivilisationsbruch: Denken nach Auschwitz, ed. Dan Diner (Frankfurt am Main: Fischer Taschenbuch Verlag, 1988); Jrgen Langenbach, Gnther Anders: Eine Monographie (Munich: Raben, 1988); Eckhard Wittulski, Kein Ort, Nirgends-Zur Gesellschaftskritik Gnther Anders' (Frankfurt am Main: Herchen, 1989).
[54]

For the special journals on his works, see Austriaca 35 (1992); Zeitschrift fr Didaktik der Philosphie 3 (1992); the special July 1992 issue of Text + Kritik. See also the volume of essays Gnther Anders kontrovers. Other works about Anders from the early 1990s include Oliver G'schrey, Gnther Anders: "Endzeit" Diskurs und Pessimismus (Cuxhaven: Junghans, 1991); Werner Reimann, Verweigerte Vershnung: Zur Philosophie von Gnther Anders (Vienna: Passagen, 1990); Konrad Paul Liessmann, Gunther Anders zur Einfhrung; Ludger Ltkehaus, Philosophieren nach Hiroshima; Elke Schubert, Gnther Anders (Reinbek: Rowohlt, 1992).
[55]

See for example Detlef Clemens, Gnther Anders: Eine Studie ber die Ursprnge seiner Philosophie (Frankfurt am Main: Haag + Herchen, 1996); Margret Lohmann, Philosophieren in der Endzeit: Zur Gegenwartsanalyse von Gnther Anders (Munich: Fink, 1996); Wolfgang Kramer, Technokratie als Entmaterialisierung der Welt: Zur Aktualitt der Philosophien von Gnther Anders und Jean Baudrillard (Mnster: Waxmann, 1998); Volker Kempf, Gnther Anders: Anschlusstheoretiker an Georg Simmel? (Frankfurt am Main: Lang, 2000). The comparative approach to Anders' work is indebted to Werner Jung and Helmut Hildebrandt. For Jung, see his "Verantwortung und/oder Widerstand: Aspekte der Technikkritik und Momente einer neuen Ethik bei Gnther Anders, Hans Jonas, und Ulrich Beck" in Verantwortung in Wissenschaft und Technik, ed. Matthias Gatzemeier (Mannheim: Bibliographisches Institut: 1989). For Hildebrandt, see his "Anders und Heidegger" and Weltzustand Technik.
[56]

The Gnther Anders Forum is also a source for new publications on Anders. See for example Geheimagent der Masseneremiten which it published with Edition Art & Science.
[57]

See Ltkehaus, Philosophieren nach Hiroshima. For Liessmann, see three of his writings: "'Das Prinzip Auschwitz'"; "Wiedersehen und vergessen: Zur Biographie"in Geheimagent der Masseneremiten; Gnther Anders: Philosophieren im Zeitalter der technologischen Revolutionen (Munich: Verlag C.H. Beck, 1992).
[58]

My views of intellectual history and social theory have been influenced considerably by my work with Moishe Postone at the University of Chicago. See his Time, Labor, and Social Domination: A Reinterpretation of Marx's

Critical Theory (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993). I have also found the following works to be very stimulating in thinking about questions of the methodology of intellectual history. See Martin Jay, "The Textual Approach to Intellectual History" in Force Fields: Between Intellectual History and Cultural Critique (New York: Routledge, 1993); Donald R. Kelley, "What is Happening to the History of Ideas?" Journal of the History of Ideas 51 (Jan-March 1990): 3-25; Dominick LaCapra, Rethinking Intellectual History: Texts, Contexts, Language (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1983); idem, Soundings in Critical Theory (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1989); Allan Megill, "Recounting the Past: 'Description,' Explanation, and Narrative in Historiography," American Historical Review 94 (1989): 627-653.
[59]

On Popper, Malachi Haim Hacohen, Karl PopperThe Formative Years, 1902-1945: Politics and Philosophy in Interwar Vienna (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000; for Jaspers, see Suzanne Kirkbright, Karl Jaspers: A Biography: Navigations in Truth (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2004); for Jonas, see Levy's Hans Jonas: The Integrity of Thinking.
[60]

Mensch ohne Welt, xi.

prospectus by Jason Dawsey, January 2004, revised September 2004; prepared for web by H. Marcuse, 9/20/04 back to top, to H. Marcuse's Gnther Anders' webpage

Histria depois de Hiroshima: Gnther Anders eo Sculo XX

Dissertao Proposta por Jason Dawsey setembro 2004 No prefcio do seu 1982 Ketzereien (Heresias), Gnther Anders insistiu que ser entendido como um "defensor de teses militantes ( Vertreter von Kampfthesen ) que pelo menos merece ser atacado ". [1] Esta homenagem, segundo ele, ainda no tinha para ser agraciado com suas obras anteriores. Ele pediu aos seus leitores para ver suas heresias como antpoda s tendncias avassaladoras do dia para o conformismo e da ortodoxia, tendncias compartilhados entre a diviso da Guerra Fria. Levar a srio pedido de Anders, eu vejo este estudo como uma tentativa de compreender os contornos da sua vida e do pensamento mais heterodoxo. O projeto que estou propondo uma biografia intelectual de Gnther Anders (1902-

1992). Embora recebendo pouca ateno sustentada entre os estudiosos americanos, o trabalho de Anders "freqentemente tem sido um catalisador para o debate entre europeia, sobretudo alem e austraca, intelectuais e acadmicos sobre a melhor forma de conceituar questes centrais na histria europeia e mundial do sculo XX: o impacto da tecnologia em todas as esferas da vida, as implicaes psicolgicas e polticas da cultura de massa, o conceito ea realidade do totalitarismo; Auschwitz e Hiroshima e seu legado para a histria e memria; devastao ecolgica, e as novas formas de internacionalismo e ao poltica coletiva. A minha esperana a introduo de Anders em discusses americanos sobre estes temas e avaliar como suas idias podem contribuir para uma histria crtica do sculo XX, que coloca em primeiro plano questes como as tecnologias e as prticas de extermnio em massa, a utopia, a capacidade das faculdades humanas de imaginao e representao para combinar a velocidade ea ferocidade dos principais desenvolvimentos e acontecimentos do sculo, as questes de formas de solidariedade global e as relaes com o nosso mundo de produtos e aparelhos e de natureza no-humana existentes e possveis. No mbito desta abordagem para o exame do sculo passado, Anders e sua filosofia, eu diria, devem ser pontos de referncia central deste lado do Atlntico tambm.

A vida do sculo XX ( voltar ao topo )

Barry Katz, em seu estudo de Herbert Marcuse, notar como os "imperativos prticos" de sua teoria social foram "impostas pelos acontecimentos do sculo XX". [2] O mesmo poderia ser dito de Gnther Anders. Com uma vida que abrangia quase todo o sculo, Anders viveu ou testemunhou de longe a maior parte de seus momentos cruciais. Nos anos posteriores, ele salienta que seus escritos filosficos foram essencialmente os esforos para apanhar a eventos do sculo. Vou dar aqui um esboo biogrfico de Anders. [3] Nascido Gnther Stern, ele era o filho do eminente criana psiclogos William e Clara Stern-William Stern era uma figura central no desenvolvimento do conceito de Quociente de Inteligncia (QI). Vivendo pela primeira vez em Breslau e depois Hamburgo, Anders 'infncia,

de acordo com sua prpria descrio, era estereotipada de que de um ambiente confortvel, assimilada famlia judaica alem (muito semelhante ao do seu primo distante Walter Benjamin). Seu apego ao mundo de seus pais foi rompido, no entanto, com o incio da Grande Guerra. Em 1917, Anders foi mobilizada, juntamente com milhares de outros estudantes para ajudar no esforo de guerra alemo na frente ocidental. Apenas quinze anos, ele atuou em uma organizao paramilitar que as colheitas para o exrcito em Frana. De acordo com o relato do prprio Anders ', dois eventos traumticos durante a guerra mudou fundamentalmente a ele: a viso de soldados alemes que perderam membros ou foram terrivelmente mutilados na frente eo assdio e atormentar ele sofria de companheiros por causa de uma amizade secreta ele iniciou com o filho de um guerrilheiro morto pelos alemes. Essas experincias no s forma o seu sentido de auto, mas influenciou profundamente a direo de seus interesses. Ateno persistente Anders 'para o fenmeno da morte em massa e seu senso especificamente laico do judasmo surgiu, pelo menos parcialmente, a partir de suas memrias de terror e perseguio durante a Primeira Guerra Mundial. [4] As descries padro de vida Anders 'dar pequeno insight sobre suas atitudes em relao derrota da Alemanha Imperial, em 1918, a Revoluo Alem e da fundao da Repblica de Weimar, ea imposio do Tratado de Versalhes. O que sabido que a dcada de 1920 comeou como uma dcada de grande promessa para ele. Depois de completar seu ensino mdio, estudou filosofia em Hamburgo com o famoso neo-kantiana Ernst Cassirer, e histria da arte com Erwin Panofsky. Seus interesses levou-o para as universidades em Munique, onde continuou seus estudos de arte com Heinrich Wlfflin, e Berlim, onde fez cursos com algumas das figuras mais importantes no campo da psicologia, como Eduard Spranger, Wolfgang Khler e Max Wertheimer. Mais notavelmente, Anders estava entre o grupo notvel de estudantes que se reuniram em torno de Edmund Husserl e Martin Heidegger nas universidades de Marburg e Freiburg durante os anos de Weimar. Seu crculo de amigos e conhecidos inclua sua futura esposa,

Hannah Arendt (eles se casaram 1929-1937) e Hans Jonas, que namorou sua irm. Anders completou seu doutorado em 1924, sob a direo de Husserl, fez um trabalho de psgraduao com Heidegger em Marburg e foi assistente de Max Scheler em 1926. [5] Estes filsofos teve um impacto imensurvel no seu pensamento, a fenomenologia husserliana, o sistema de Heidegger ontologia fundamental e antropologia filosfica do falecido Scheler foram caractersticas centrais de Anders 'filosofia. [6] Apesar de seu cosmopolitismo e sua longa experincia do exlio da Alemanha durante e aps os anos do nazismo, Anders 'posies filosficas permaneceu firmemente enraizada no intelectual alemo tradies, ele trabalhou por em 1920. Durante os anos 1920 e incio dos anos 30, Anders comeou o que era para ser um compromisso de vida com o ideal do intelectual "engajado". Ele publicou a histria da arte e da crtica cultural com o Vossische Zeitung e do Berliner Brsen-Courier (com o ltimo, ele comeou a usar o pseudnimo de Anders, "diferente") e mudou-se, junto com Arendt, entre um crculo de esquerda da Alemanha de Weimar intelectuais e artistas, que incluiu Bertolt Brecht, George Grosz e John Heartfield. [7] Seu interesse por este tipo de trabalho aumentou medida que as perspectivas de uma carreira acadmica diminuda. Sua tentativa de enviar uma Habilitationschrift sobre a filosofia da msica com Paul Tillich da Universidade de Frankfurt encalhou quando o projeto foi fortemente criticada por um jovem filsofo ambicioso chamado Theodor Wiesengrund-Adorno. Embora Anders j havia publicado um trabalho em filosofia fenomenolgica, ber das Haben (On Ter), decidiu adiar o trabalho em sua segunda tese e se concentrar na sua escrita poltica e esttica fora da academia. [8] Circunstncias polticas ento traumaticamente mudou a vida de Anders. Com a ascenso de Adolf Hitler e os nacional-socialistas nos anos aps 1930, Anders tentou desesperadamente convencer muitos de seus colegas de esquerda a levar a srio a ameaa nazista. Ele organizou grupos de discusso para o estudo de Hitler Mein Kampf e ele elaborou sua prpria teoria do anti-fascismo em seu romance distpico, Die molussische Katakombe (As

Catacumbas Molussian). [9] Anders permaneceu na Alemanha at maro de 1933, dois meses depois que Hitler tornou-se chanceler, quando o livro de endereos do Bertolt Brecht foi confiscada pela Gestapo. Temendo a priso, no rescaldo do incndio do Reichstag e da perseguio dos comunistas e companheiros de viagem, ele fugiu para Paris, onde permaneceu at 1936. Vo Anders 'para Paris produziu uma tenso irreversvel em seu casamento com Arendt. Enquanto ela trabalhava com o movimento sionista na Alemanha, ele tentou ganhar a vida como um escritor independente. Ele discorreu sobre a antropologia filosfica que ele tinha comeado no final de 1920 e publicou um conto premiado sobre os esforos de um padre mexicano radical em favor dos pobres, "Der Hungermarsch" (The Hunger maro). [10] Como muitos outros Alemo emigrados, Anders decidiu deixar a Frana em 1936 para o que parecia ser um ambiente muito mais hospitaleiro, nos Estados Unidos. Alguns anos depois, ele conseguiu trazer seus pais para os EUA tambm. Anders foi passar 14 anos em os EUA A imagem da vida social e cultural americana permeou seus ltimos escritos sobre tecnologia e civilizao. Esta imagem se uniram a partir de uma ampla variedade de experincias que ele teve e empregos que ocupou durante esses anos. Escreveu roteiros para filmes com pouco sucesso, lecionou na New School for Social Research, e tutelados. Passar um tempo em ambas as costas, Anders creditada boa parte de sua crtica da cultura de massa para seu breve mandato em uma fbrica de costume, o Hollywood Personalizado Palace, no incio dos anos 40. Em seus dirios, ele descreveu como um "museu do passado traje coletiva da humanidade", onde as roupas, capacetes e armas de radicalmente diferentes eras foram agrupados para uso por empresas de cinema. [11] Edifcio do dia-areflexes dias sobre o seu trabalho nesta fbrica de costume, ele desenvolveu a sua prpria teoria sobre o impacto das tecnologias de produo em massa e reproduo, uma teoria que se cruzaram com muitas das duras crticas da cultura de massa feitas por Theodor W. Adorno e Max Horkheimer.

Anders, de fato, tinha uma grande quantidade de contato com os membros da Escola de Frankfurt de Teoria Crtica durante esses anos. Ele revisou livros para o Instituto de Pesquisa Social da revista e participou de um seminrio sobre a teoria das necessidades, com Horkheimer, Adorno, Herbert Marcuse, e Friedrich Pollock. Ele mesmo viveu brevemente com Marcuse, no sul da Califrnia durante o incio dos anos 40. Alm de seu status comum como refugiados judeus alemes do Terceiro Reich, que compartilhavam uma srie de preocupaes filosfico-capitalismo como uma forma de dominao, o confronto com novas formas culturais, como cinema, rdio e televiso, e que o problema de como teorizar adequadamente o surgimento do fascismo. Os paralelos entre Marcuse e Anders so especialmente marcante, uma vez que ambos tinham sido estudantes de Heidegger, mas ambos implantados muitos de seus conceitos para uma agenda poltica o seu ex-professor encontrou repelente. [12] Os anos finais da Segunda Guerra Mundial mudou irreversivelmente pensamento Anders 'e auto-concepo. Apesar da crescente certeza da vitria dos Aliados sobre as potncias do Eixo, os relatrios de assassinatos em massa de judeus chegou a ele em 1943 e foi confirmado no ano seguinte. Quando ele ouviu a obliterao de Hiroshima, em agosto de 1945, Anders afirmou que a notcia o deixou sem palavras. Estes acontecimentos foraram uma "virada" para uma linha mais explicitamente histrica da teorizao. Em suas obras ps-1945, Auschwitz e Hiroshima surgiu como pontos nodais para uma nova conscincia histrica. Para aqueles que sobreviveram guerra e aqueles que viriam depois, um dilema fundamental, Anders alegou, era a melhor forma de responder a estes exemplos terrveis de destruio em massa tecnologicamente mediada. [13] Posteriormente, ele se esforou em seus esforos tericos e polticos para enfrentar este desafio. Anders voltou para a Europa em 1950 com sua segunda esposa, a escritora austraca Elisabeth Freundlich. Impressionado com as perspectivas de viver em qualquer Repblica de Konrad Adenauer Federal da Alemanha ou Repblica Democrtica Alem, Walter Ulbricht,

ele e Freundlich se estabeleceu em sua cidade natal, Viena (anos depois, ele se casaria com o msico norte-americano-judeu, Charlotte Lois Zelka). Anders passaria o resto de sua vida e faria sua obra mais importante l. Ele rapidamente rejeitou todos os pensamentos de uma carreira docente universitria e abraou totalmente o ideal de que o escritor independente, que ganhava a vida escrevendo e falar em pblico. O interesse ganhou por seu livro sobre Kafka reforou essa convico. [14] Ele se concentrou suas energias para a maior parte da dcada em sua magnum opus , Die Antiquiertheit des Menschen (The Antiquatedness da Humanidade). Anders publicou o primeiro volume em 1956 e imediatamente comeou a organizar notas e ensaios para uma segunda que no foi liberado at 1980. [15] Nessas duas obras, Anders elaborou sua filosofia madura da tecnologia. A maioria de seus escritos posteriores foram variaes sobre os argumentos apresentados em Die Antiquiertheit des Menschen . Ambos os volumes de Die Antiquiertheit des Menschen foram organizadas em torno de um argumento central: a idade moderna foi um tecnolgico onde os seres humanos foram reduzidos a desatualizados, seres "antiquados". Anders afirmou que predominncia da tecnologia reduziu as diferenas de classe nas sociedades industriais avanadas e as diferenas poltico-ideolgicas entre os blocos da Guerra Fria importncia secundria. Os seres humanos em todos os lugares, a humanidade como tal, enfrentou um mundo tecnolgico, cujos produtos transformados, at ameaou seus criadores. Anders afirmado em face de acusaes de hiprbole que "em nenhum sentido diferente do que Napoleo manteve 150 anos de poltica, e Marx h 100 anos atrs da economia, a tecnologia agora o nosso destino". [16] No segundo volume , ele ampliou essa linha de argumentao, insistindo que "a tecnologia tornou-se o sujeito da histria, com o qual estamos ainda apenas" co-histricos "( "mitgeschichtlich" ) ". [17] Anders referidos vrios desenvolvimentos contemporneos como prova de sua argumentos: o crescente papel da automao no ambiente de trabalho, as indstrias de entretenimento modernos ea proeminncia de rdio e televiso, e os avanos na gentica e biotecnologia. O mais importante, porm, foi a inveno das armas nucleares. 06 de agosto de 1945 tinha realmente mudou tudo.

Anders era um de um grupo dspar de intelectuais, em grande parte independentes, jornalistas polticos, cientistas, artistas e telogos da Alemanha Ocidental e ustria, que compreendeu a bomba para ser fundamentalmente uma nova ameaa. Uma lista abreviada delas seria incluir Anders, Karl Jaspers, Robert Jungk, Hans Magnus Enzensberger, Walter Jens, Ingeborg Bachmann, Hans Henny Jahnn, Hans Werner Richter, Reinhold Schneider, Helmut Gollwitzer, Ulrike Meinhof, Gudrun Ensslin (os dois ltimos foram mais tarde membros da Faco do Exrcito Vermelho), e Carl Friedrich Weizscker. [18] Enquanto Anders freqentemente encontrado um terreno comum com muitos desses pensadores e ativistas, ele diferia da maioria deles em seu compromisso sustentado, mesmo obsesso, com a ameaa nuclear e sua determinao para criar uma filosofia da Era Atmica que no s guiar praxis e protesto, mas exporia "as razes da nossa cegueira para apocalypse" ( Apokalypse-Blindheit ).
[19]

A inveno de bombas atmicas e de hidrognio e msseis balsticos intercontinentais

( ICBMs) eram, pensou, as mais puras expresses de terror tecnolgico. O desenvolvimento tecnolgico j tinha envolvido o planeta, a destruio de Hiroshima e Nagasaki marcou uma nova era histrica, Anders chamou de "Tempo do Fim" ( Endzeit ), onde os nossos produtos poderia muito bem destruir-nos completamente. [20] Os seres humanos, ele insistiu, ou poderia comprometer os trabalhos macios necessrios para resistir a tal perspectiva ou desaparecer completamente. A partir dos anos meados dos anos 1950, Anders tornou-se conhecido na Europa como um oponente militante da bomba atmica. Sua escrita terica e seu ativismo fundidos como ele buscou uma linguagem popular para transmitir suas crticas civilizao tecnolgica, Hiroshima, Auschwitz, e do imperialismo contemporneo. Entre essas questes interrelacionadas (para ele), a ameaa nuclear permaneceu predominante at a dcada de 1960. Ele trabalhou em estreita colaborao com os movimentos anti-nucleares e da paz na Alemanha Ocidental e ustria, e viajou para o Japo em 1958, onde participou de um congresso internacional de ativistas anti-nucleares e observados para si o legado de uma guerra atmica em Hiroshima e Nagasaki. Anders tambm realizou uma longa correspondncia com Claude

Eatherly, o piloto americano envolvido no escotismo misses sobre Hiroshima antes do EnolaGay ataque que mais tarde sofreu enormes problemas psicolgicos por seu papel nos ataques.
[21]

Mesmo sua tentativa fracassada de se comunicar com Adolf Eichmann filho, Klaus, em Wir

Eichmannshne (Ns, os filhos de Eichmann) sobre o papel de seu pai em aparelhos de assassinato industrial da Alemanha nazista inclua um apelo a Klaus a aderir causa antinuclear como um porta-voz. [22] A Guerra do Vietn mostrou-se algo de uma exceo sua concentrao sobre a questo nuclear. Anders apoiado condenao do envolvimento americano no Vietn da Nova Esquerda e atuou em 1967 como jurado em Crimes de Guerra Tribunal Peace Foundation Russell a Bertrand do qual indiciado nos Estados Unidos por atrocidades no Sudeste da sia.
[23]

Anders sempre considerou a poltica militar dos EUA no Vietn como indiscutivelmente

genocida. A acusao americana de guerra contra a Frente de Libertao Nacional eo regime de Ho Chi Minh no Vietn do Norte, juntamente com o passado disposio dos EUA de usar bombas atmicas, convenceu-o de que os Estados Unidos foi o pas mais perigoso do mundo ps-1945. Os anos 1970 e 1980 foram, por Anders, dcadas de declnio da sade por um lado e aumentando a aclamao do outro. Sua produtividade nunca vacilou em qualquer um. Anders comeou nos anos 70 com um livro sobre a viagem espacial e fechou a dcada com suas reflexes profundamente convincentes sobre a Shoah, Besuch im Hades (Visite no Hades). [24] Longo reconhecimento atrasado de seus escritos e ativismo seguiu com um prmio estatal austraca em 1979 e, ironicamente, o Theodor W. Adorno Award de Frankfurt em 1983. A renovao da corrida armamentista entre os EUA ea Unio Sovitica consumiu a ele embora e deixou pouco tempo para apreciar esta ateno. Embora ele admitiu, no prefcio ao segundo volume de Die Antiquiertheit des Menschen que ele era muito velho para a prxis, Anders insistiu que sua teoria da tecnologia era inerentemente poltico e era to relevante para a dcada de 1980 como a dcada de 50. [25] Ele no iria calmamente.

Os anos 80 foram anos em que Anders, um octogenrio, atingiu sua maior fama ou, talvez melhor, infmia. Em 1987, ele publicou Gewalt-ja oder nein (Violncia, sim ou no), um volume que continha uma entrevista com e ensaios de Anders, bem como respostas aos seus argumentos a partir de uma srie de figuras da vida pblica alem e austraca Ocidente. [ 26] Reunidos em resposta instalao de msseis dos EUA na Repblica Federal no incio de 1980 e do desastre de Chernobyl, na Unio Sovitica, em 1986, da OTAN, o livro gerou uma amarga controvrsia sobre todos os lados do espectro poltico. Anders chocou leitores l com o seu repdio da no-violncia como uma resposta inadequada, certamente irresponsvel, para os perigos colocados pela bomba eo uso de energia nuclear. Violncia, insistiu ele, deve ser considerado um caso, forma legtima de defesa dos seres humanos contra os governos da Guerra Fria do Oriente e do Ocidente que ameaadas no s as suas prprias populaes, mas a humanidade como um todo. Sua demisso de formas "meramente tericas" de protesto e seu discurso de prestao de certos polticos "ineficaz" evocou a retrica militante da Faco do Exrcito Vermelho e Clulas Revolucionrias. [27] Como sua sade continuou a corroer, Anders encontrou um pblico cada vez maior. A controvrsia sobre o seu apoio violncia de esquerda levou muitos a estudar seus escritos, enquanto outros vieram para o seu trabalho atravs de interesse em estudo acadmico da filosofia e da literatura. Quando Anders morreu em 1992, em Viena, viveu tempo suficiente para ver a reunificao da Alemanha, o colapso da Unio Sovitica, ea cessao da Guerra Fria. O sculo que dedicou a sua vida a analisar terminou surpreendentemente. Tambm surpreendente foi um interesse crescente em sua filosofia por estudiosos com formao universitria, os profissionais de quem tinha muito detidas, para ser gentil, opinies muito misturadas. Academics finalmente apanhado a Anders 'corpo notvel de trabalho e encontrou um desafio e sempre surpreendendo as "observaes e teses", ele ofereceu "independente de todas as ortodoxias". [28]

Metas para a Dissertao ( voltar ao topo )

Minha dissertao tem trs objetivos principais. Primeiro, eu quero dar um relato minucioso da vida e as idias de Gnther Anders para o pblico norte-americano, uma tarefa j iniciada por Paul van Dijk em sua Antropologia na Era da Tecnologia: A Contribuio Filosfica de Gnther Anders . [29] Anders nunca encontrou uma audincia em os EUA durante a sua vida, apesar de ter vivido aqui por 14 anos. Muitos de seus professores e mentores (Ernst Cassirer, Edmund Husserl, Martin Heidegger, e Max Scheler) ou trabalhos publicados em Ingls ou foram prontamente traduzido e estudado exaustivamente por scholars-no caso de Heidegger americanos, a bolsa tem floresceu em um verdadeiro subcampo no Continental filosofia. Primo Anders ', Walter Benjamin, e vrios de seus associados marxista (Bertolt Brecht, Theodor W. Adorno, Herbert Marcuse e Ernst Bloch) ganharam um lugar seguro na academia norte-americana. O imenso prestgio ganhou por sua primeira esposa, Hannah Arendt no requer nenhum comentrio. Anders certamente contribuiu para esse descaso por seu trabalho nos Estados Unidos por suas vezes ambivalentes, comentrios, por vezes estridente hostis sobre a natureza da vida social, cultural e poltico norte-americano e por sua reticncia em aprovar a traduo de suas obras para o Ingls. Tenho realizado este estudo para superar essa omisso e para estimular o interesse na crtica radical Anders 'da tecnologia e da histria moderna, consciente de sua suspeita consistente da academia. Trabalhos tericos, polticos e literrios Anders '(as fronteiras entre essas categorias muitas vezes confundir com ele) pagar estudo cuidadoso. Uma biografia intelectual de Anders enfrenta problemas desde o incio. Alm de seus escritos no publicados, ele publicou revistas, poesia, ensaios e monografias em alemo, mas tambm em francs e Ingls, em um perodo de cerca de 70 anos. [30] O grande longevidade de sua carreira, lana dvidas sobre a possibilidade de uma , um volume biografia intelectual abrangente. Para superar essas dificuldades, vou me concentrar em um tema central em seus escritos: a dominao desdobramento da tecnologia sobre os seres humanos, um

desenvolvimento que no comeou, mas assumiu dimenses totalitrios no sculo XX. Vou argumentar que a tese Anders 'da emergncia e, em seguida, a acelerao do "antiquatedness" da humanidade em face de nossas criaes tecnolgicas, o caracteriza como um dos mais sugestivos, se no controversa, os tericos da histria do sculo XX. Sua filosofia da tecnologia, ou como ele descreveu, a "antropologia filosfica na era da tecnocracia", merece uma ateno sustentada pelos historiadores, eu defendo, porque a sua teoria proposta argumentos fortes sobre como entender o carter do sculo XX. [31 ] Escritos Anders 'sobre a tecnologia deve ser entendida dentro de um debate maior entre os intelectuais alemes sobre a natureza ea trajetria da tecnologia moderna. Emergentes durante os tumultuosos anos da Repblica de Weimar (1919-1933), esta linha de teorizar sobre Technik foi frequentemente associada a direita, se no fascista, poltica. Ernst Jnger, Oswald Spengler, Carl Schmitt, Hans Freyer, e, claro, Martin Heidegger foram as figuras-chave aqui e ter sido tratado de forma muito eficaz por Jeffrey Herf em seu modernismo reacionrio . [32] Anders, junto com Herbert Marcuse e, talvez, Hans Jonas, representou um contraponto de esquerda perspectiva proto-fascista. Poucos desses pensadores temiam generalizaes ou excesso terico, e eles elaboraram teorias muito sofisticadas de desenvolvimento tecnolgico e racionalidade. Vou ler Anders contra esta maior debate alemo, mas eu tambm espero mostrar como suas afirmaes sobre a especificidade do sculo XX, embora provenientes de quadros tericos estranha a muitos na profisso de historiador anglo-americano, se cruzam muito notavelmente com as preocupaes de muita historiografia contempornea. A minha abordagem a este projecto tem sido influenciada pela enorme literatura historiogrfica envolvido em vrias formas de "fazer um balano" do sculo XX. O carter fortemente normativo deste trabalho eo assunto proibindo que confronta debate tem avanado significativamente na forma como o sculo passado se compara a pocas anteriores e que tipo de legado que deixa para as futuras geraes. Inspirado em grande parte, embora no exclusivamente, pela histria da Europa, estas obras prenunciam uma histria mais completa

global, a histria do mundo em que as questes de direitos humanos, o estabelecimento de instituies internacionais, ea conscincia comum da participao na "humanidade" assumir primordial importncia. [33] Embora seja muito cedo para falar dessa literatura, como se suas energias j foram gastos, eu acho que justo para descrever muito deste novo trabalho como uma tentativa de documentar, descrever e explicar a histria da sculo XX, em termos de guerra total e antrpicos morte em massa, onde a maior capacidade de fazer a guerra e matar com perpetuamente crescente magnitude e eficincia tomou propores gigantescas. Neste quadro, as duas guerras mundiais eo Holocausto se tornar o "ur-eventos" em um sculo marcado por assassinato industrial, a limpeza tnica e exterminanionist racismo e as utopias muitas vezes brutais de transformao social revolucionria de ambos a esquerda poltica e direito. [34 ] Ideias de Anders ', creio eu, contribuir poderosamente para esses debates. Sua crtica da tecnologia pretendia explicar, em kantiana moda, as possibilidades tecnologicamente facilitado para muitos desses terrveis acontecimentos e sua antropologia filosfica ofereceu um relato rico da fragilidade das capacidades humanas para chegar a um acordo com eles. Por exemplo, sua afirmao de que uma lacuna enorme havia crescido entre a nossa capacidade de produzir e nossas faculdades de representao, imaginao e sentimento exigiu uma compreenso diferente da sequncia do Shoah. O que Alexander e Margarete Mitscherlich tinha diagnosticado como "incapacidade para lamentar" os alemes "no se limitou aos alemes. Enquanto exigindo um compromisso alemo especfico para a memria e luto pela assassinado, Anders constantemente reiterou o seu apelo para uma poltica universal de conscincia, onde os trabalhos de superar essa discrepncia, este "gap Promethean" entre nossas faculdades receberam ateno desproporcional. [35] I argumentam que busca Anders 'para os quadros de possibilidade para o Holocausto (e outros genocdios) e seu interrogatrio de conceitos como responsabilidade, culpa coletiva, e de vitimizao gerar uma tenso criativa com relatos histricos mais convencionais, a abertura de novas linhas de pensamento sobre a histria do sculo XX e sobre a relao entre histria e teoria social.

Reflexes Anders 'sobre o significado do advento das armas nucleares e sua teoria da Era Atmica tambm so imensamente valioso para os historiadores. Para a indignao de alguns, ele explicou tanto Hiroshima e Auschwitz como aniquilao em massa tecnologicamente mediada. Eles tiveram que ser compreendido em conjunto, embora nunca igualado. [36] Hiroshima, especialmente, tornou-se para ele o ponto de partida necessrio para qualquer anlise filosfica do mundo contemporneo. Conceituar a sua destruio como uma ruptura fundamental na histria global, Anders sustentou que o lanamento das bombas atmicas iniciou uma nova era em que "a Humanidade como um todo exterminable". [37] Na dissertao, vou me concentrar em como Anders interpretou o Atomic Age como a Terceira Revoluo Industrial. As revolues industriais anteriores, ele alegou ter abrangeu os avanos tecnolgicos e as novas formas de produo dos sculos XVIII e XIX e com a introduo da televiso e do rdio, nos sculos XX. A terceira era, como seus antecessores, irreversvel, mas muito mais importante, que pressagiava a erradicao do ser humano e, talvez, toda a vida. [38] Essas proposies sobre a natureza do terror nuclear e da era ps-Hiroshima como um distintivo, poca histrica revolucionria provocar uma srie de questes para estudantes de histria moderna. Algumas delas incluem: como devemos pensar da descoberta cientfica da diviso do tomo e da construo das primeiras armas nucleares e termonucleares dentro de nossa histria do sculo XX? Para reformular, onde fazer Hiroshima e Nagasaki, a bomba de hidrognio, o desenvolvimento de msseis balsticos de mdio e intercontinental e confrontos nucleares da Guerra Fria envolvendo os Estados Unidos, a Unio Sovitica e seus respectivos aliados, como a Crise de Suez de 1956 e da crise dos msseis de Cuba de 1962 se encaixam em discusses atuais de guerra total, revoluo e genocdio? Dificilmente requer enfatizando que essas questes no so apenas saliente para a investigao histrica, mas ressoam, infelizmente, tudo muito com a nossa era ps-Guerra Fria, onde armas nucleares e tecnologia eo conhecimento cientfico necessrio proliferar em uma ordem internacional que no mais atua junto bipolar linhas. [39] teses Anders 'na bomba, espero mostrar, ainda tem grande relevncia, mesmo com o falecimento da lgica da Destruio Mtua Assegurada. Anders

deve ser reconhecido como o terico mais rigoroso do Omnicide e suas reivindicaes sobre o ponto de perigo nuclear sua persistncia como um problema de espcies. Em contraste com Theodor W. Adorno, que falou das dificuldades aparentemente insolveis poesia assombrando e filosofia ", depois de Auschwitz," corpo Anders sugere que a histria ps-1945 deve ser definido definitivamente como "depois de Hiroshima". [40] eu vou tematizar sua afirmaes sobre a "histria depois de Hiroshima" (o ttulo da minha dissertao) e tirar as suas implicaes para a compreenso histrico-terico do sculo XX. Em segundo lugar, eu quero que a dissertao de contribuir para o estudo da histria intelectual alem moderna. Teoria Anders 'repousa sobre as falhas de vrias tradies filosficas alems diferentes. Por sua prpria admisso Edmund Husserl, Martin Heidegger, Max Scheler e exerceu a maior influncia sobre ele. Meu projeto vai incluir uma anlise detalhada do impacto desses pensadores sobre Anders e como ele se apropriou de suas idias para seus prprios fins. Destes trs, Heidegger e Scheler teve o impacto mais profundo sobre seu pensamento posterior. A tentativa de Heidegger, iniciado nos anos de Weimar, para fazer filosofia "concreto" novamente surpreendeu os jovens Anders como fez muitos de seus colegas. Em entrevistas posteriores, falou de "demonaca" feitio "do pensamento de Heidegger, que ele, como muitos outros intelectuais alemes aspirantes, caiu sob. [41] Ao contrrio de Hannah Arendt, Anders rompeu completamente com Heidegger sobre o nazismo deste ltimo e publicou algumas das primeiras crticas sistemticas de projeto filosfico de Heidegger. [42] Apesar da brecha, a influncia de Heidegger persistiu durante todo o seu trabalho posterior, para usar a linguagem de seu ex-professor, a abordagem radical de Heidegger para a histria da filosofia e modernidade abriu um modo de questionamento por Anders. Na dissertao, eu vou enfatizar como reconfigurao incisiva Anders 'de temas heideggerianos como a relao entre o Dasein e temporalidade, o problema do niilismo e, claro, o confronto com a tecnologia faz dele um saliente, mas muitas vezes negligenciada, figura na histria da heideggerianismo.

[43]

Tambm vou demonstrar a marca igualmente importante escritos de Max Scheler deixou em Anders. Scheler (1874-1928) iniciou-se em seus anos de trabalho final sobre a antropologia filosfica, um ramo da filosofia ainda obscuro para muitos estudantes e estudiosos anglo-americanas. [44] O subcampo teve uma longa e distinta linhagem na Alemanha. Alguns dos primeiros defensores da antropologia filosfica foram Immanuel Kant e Johann Gottfried Herder no final do sculo XVIII. Hegel, Feuerbach e Marx estendeu esta tradio, no sculo XIX. Scheler e, posteriormente, Helmuth Plessner (1892-1985) revigorou-lo nos anos de Weimar. [45] Anders foi assistente de Scheler em 1926 e rapidamente assumiu muitas das preocupaes tericas deste ltimo. Ele surgiu junto com Arnold Gehlen (1904-1976) como um dos herdeiros dotados de pensamento filosfico-antropolgico. Antropologia filosfica, ou pelo menos a sua variante alem, sempre tinha tomado temas da localizao da humanidade dentro da teia da vida orgnica. A distino entre seres humanos e animais, as prprias faculdades e capacidades que prestados nos humanos, os nossos modos de interao com os nossos ambientes, e direo potencial de evoluo humana eram seus leitmotiv. Anders compartilhado muitas dessas preocupaes. No final de 1920, ele planejou para uma carreira acadmica e esboou sua interpretao da antropologia filosfica em uma palestra intitulada "Die Weltfremdheit des Menschen" (O desapego da Humanidade).
[46]

Dada a sociedades Kant em Hamburgo e Frankfurt, esta palestra oferecida fortes

argumentos contra os conceitos de uma natureza humana fixa. Anders l e em dois ensaios subseqentes apresentado uma viso dura de seres humanos cultura humana no tinha natureza inata e vivia em um mundo sem Deus governado por contingncia. [47] A "liberdade" dos seres humanos para criar seu prprio mundo e lidar com esse contingncia preocupado Anders para o resto de sua vida. Seu pensamento antecipou a ideia de Jean-Paul Sartre da humanidade como uma forma de vida "condenado liberdade" e incentivou comparao com a abordagem de direita a estas questes propostas por Gehlen. [48]

Espero fazer esta tradio da antropologia filosfica mais familiar para os leitores americanos e para mostrar como a sua inclinao, aparentemente, a-histrica renovada nas mos Anders 'em uma teoria totalmente histrica da transformao da vida humana. Sua centralidade para o seu projeto terico difcil superestimar. Repdio vociferante Anders 'da nossa civilizao tecnolgica e sua teoria da Era Atmica so incompreensveis sem um tratamento prolongado dessas filosofias da natureza humana. O terceiro e ltimo objetivo para a dissertao fazer um caso para a importncia de Anders como um srio pensador poltico. Ele nunca exerceu influncia sobre os movimentos sociais radicais como o seu amigo e algum rival, Herbert Marcuse, no entanto, ele garantiu para si um lugar como um intelectual pblico formidvel. Como eu disse na seo anterior, Anders foi fervorosamente dedicada ao ideal do escritor engajado da dcada de 1920 at sua morte em 1992. Na dissertao, eu vou mostrar como Anders alinhou-se com uma srie de lutas e causas, mas quero enfatizar o quanto ele muito mais atraente como um terico poltico. Aps seu retorno Europa em 1950, Anders comeou a teorizar novas formas de oposio e do internacionalismo. Confrontado com o pesadelo da aniquilao nuclear, ele afirmou que os seres humanos devem forjar uma nova solidariedade que atendesse a ameaa global em termos globais. Vou argumentar que Anders desenvolveu um tipo de radicalismo ps-marxista adequada aos novos movimentos sociais da segunda metade da Guerra Fria. Para Anders, uma consequncia imprevista da Era Atmica foi a obsolescncia da forma mais gradual da solidariedade da idade pr-Hiroshima, que do internacionalismo marxista. Categorias marxistas da luta de classes, segundo ele, no antes de uma ameaa de que "nenhuma terra, nenhuma populao, sem classe, sem gerao" poderia escapar. [49] Anders substitudo Marx e Engels exortao "para os trabalhadores do mundo a unir-se com esta slogan: "em perigo de todos os pases uni-vos!" ( Gefhrdete aller Lnder, vereinigt euch! ) e pediu uma "Internacional de Geraes" para suplantar as Internacionais socialistas e

comunistas mais velhos. [50] Ele tambm insistiu que muitos grampos da moderna tica, responsabilidade, empatia, ao, obrigao, teve que ser completamente reavaliados na esteira de Hiroshima e Auschwitz. Determinado a influenciar o anti-nuclear, paz e movimentos ecolgicos, Anders escreveu extensivamente sobre a prxis poltica e os quadros de resistncia eficaz ameaa nuclear. Sua compreenso da luta contra o possvel Omnicide e repetio do genocdio passado como, simultaneamente, a luta por uma subjetividade moral igual a estes desafios torna a leitura fascinante e os ltimos captulos da minha dissertao incluem longas discusses dessas idias e considerao de sua relevncia para os nossos tempos . [51]

Metodologia e Esboo da Dissertao ( voltar ao topo )

Meu projeto tem sido grandemente influenciado pela nova literatura notvel sobre a vida e as idias que surgiram nos ltimos 20 anos Gnther Anders. To tarde quanto 1980, Anders disse aos leitores que ele no coloque o "menor valor" na forma como "filsofos profissionais" considerou-o ou como "eles iriam classificar suas obras". [52] Sua alienao da filosofia acadmica contempornea tinha sido persistente, mas ele estava atordoado pela exploso de interesse em suas obras, que comeou na dcada de 1980. luz de seu apoio sincero para o movimento anti-nuclear eo escndalo pblico relacionadas com os seus comentrios sobre a violncia, muitos estudantes alemes e austracos em filosofia, psicologia e Germanistik procurou ele e seus livros para fora. Esse interesse acadmico em Anders concordou com uma srie de prmios que recebeu por seus escritos e ativismo. Estudiosos como Micha Brumlik, Jrgen Langenbach, Gabriele Althaus e Eckhard Wittulski emitiu uma srie de obras pioneiras sobre teorias Anders 'de tecnologia, cultura de massa e da poltica radical no final de 1980. [53] No incio de 1990, o alcance dessa literatura expandiu enormemente com colquios especial sobre questes e exclusivos sobre Anders por revistas acadmicas. 1992, o ano do nonagsimo aniversrio Anders 'e que sua morte foi um ano

marcante na "descoberta" de sua filosofia. [54] Durante a ltima dcada, este fascnio com ideias de Anders no diminuiu. Vrias novas obras, muitas delas de natureza comparativa, apareceram. [55] Para os estudantes de Anders, o que especialmente irnico como ele, o forasteiro perptuo, tornou-se institucionalizado postumamente. Graas em grande parte aos esforos de Dirk Rpcke e Raimund Bahr, um Frum Gnther Anders, com um website correspondente, foi criado juntamente com um Internacional Gnther Anders Academia. [56] seminrios anuais, workshops e colquios sobre Anders em Viena no obtiveram muito ateno e uma comunidade de estudiosos preocupados com o legado de Anders e as questes que ele levantou est tomando forma. Com a publicao do livro de Paul van Dijk sobre Anders em 2000, o primeiro de seu tipo em Ingls, a discusso est se movendo, ainda que de forma gradual, atravs do Atlntico. Estou ansioso para fazer parte dela. O meu prprio projeto, enquanto influenciado por grande parte desta literatura alem e austraca, difere desses trabalhos em alguns aspectos cruciais. Em primeiro lugar, a minha dissertao um trabalho em histria intelectual no um trabalho de filosofia e que d a minha pesquisa uma inclinao diferente. A maior parte da literatura anterior, tem se empenhado em uma exposio sria de idias-chave supremacia tecnolgica Anders ', o antiquatedness dos seres humanos, a discrepncia entre as nossas faculdades da imaginao e as de produo. Estas obras so de valor inestimvel para as suas anlises perto de seus textos, mas a ausncia de contexto em muitos deles uma fraqueza evidente. Os aspectos explicitamente histrico-biogrficos de sua teoria so muitas vezes relegados a um excurso biogrfico separado ou captulo. Eu quero dar uma dimenso histrica mais grossa para a sua biografia intelectual e oferecer uma narrativa onde a evoluo de sua teoria crtica da tecnologia apresentada em ordem cronolgica. Tal abordagem, defendo, melhora uma exposio exclusivamente interno da filosofia Anders ', pelo menos neste caso, porque o leitmotiv de sua obra so to abertamente histrico. Na verdade, eu entendo teoria da

tecnologia Anders 'como uma ousada tentativa de compreender um contexto histrico, que ele descreveu como a sucesso de trs revolues industriais. Ludger Ltkehaus e Konrad Paul Liessmann tm defendido a abordagem mais consciente histrico, tanto quanto eu posso dizer, dentro do corpo maior de Anders bolsa de estudos. [57] Embora a minha dissertao tem afinidades com os escritos desses autores, vou empurrar para um maior integrao da biografia e teoria. A segunda diferena com o meu projeto que eu vou construir a maior fora da bolsa de estudos anteriores sobre Anders-a exegese cuidadosa de seus escritos, enquanto mudando este mtodo para assuntos diferentes. Meu foco, para reiterar, estar em sua crtica da tecnologia. Vou envolver seus textos a srio e reconstruir seus argumentos, tirando as suas implicaes e apontando para os problemas decorrentes de suas reivindicaes. Eu no vou ficar nesse nvel de anlise, mas em vez disso espero tirar as tenses entre teoria Anders 'eo contexto ele teoriza, a dinmica de crescimento da autonomia da tecnologia no sculo XX. A relao entre as teorias crticas da vida moderna e relatos histricos mais convencionais um interesse central da mina. Meu propsito no o de "refutar" ou simplesmente corrigir certas teses de Anders, mas se concentrar em como as teorias ambiciosas da modernidade (ou psmodernidade para que o assunto) confrontar historiografia contempornea. Histria intelectual pode mediar essas duas abordagens e trazer totalmente os pontos de conflito entre eles. Em suma, eu quero olhar no s a consistncia interna e coerncia dos seus argumentos, mas a sua adequao e realidade. [58] Alm disso, eu vejo esta dissertao sobre Anders como parte de uma srie de reavaliaes de figuras importantes no pensamento europeu Central cujas idias caiu de debate acadmico. Os novos estudos de Karl Popper, Karl Jaspers, e Hans Jonas testemunhar, eu espero, para a vitalidade de suas filosofias, bem como a histria intelectual em si. [59] O estudo de pensadores interessantes como estes no deve necessariamente conduzir a uma acrtica adorao de um cnone de Meisterdenker . Alm do interesse intrnseco contido na vida de um

indivduo, intelectual ou no, anlises srias de grandes tericos e crticos recuperar conhecimentos perdidos sobre determinados eras, subverter os parmetros existentes para o que considerado conhecimento histrico, e trazer novas questes, tanto quanto eles respondem antigos. Essa a histria intelectual no seu melhor. nesse esprito de investigao que apresento este projeto de Anders. Finalmente, gostaria de mencionar brevemente o contorno da dissertao. Existem duas partes para isso e cinco captulos. O esquema para as duas partes "Mensch ohne Welt" (O homem sem um Mundial) e "Welt ohne Mensch" (Mundo sem Man), eu tomo de si mesmo Anders. [60] A primeira parte vai abranger vida Anders 1902-1950 , o segundo dos anos 19501992. Part One ir incluir um captulo que abrange a sua infncia e primeiros anos atravs de seus estudos com Heidegger e Scheler. Captulo II vai ocupar o seu tempo no exlio. Part Two, a mais longa das duas sees, ter trs captulos. Captulo Um vai se preocupar principalmente com Die Antiquiertheit des Menschen . A nfase no captulo dois ser o seu envolvimento poltico nos anos 1960 e 70 e escritos polticos concomitantes. No captulo trs, vou olhar para o debate sobre os seus pontos de vista sobre a resistncia violenta e pacifismo e seu legado. A pesquisa para a dissertao ir basear-se, evidentemente, principalmente em fontes impressas, o nmero dos quais so enormes no caso de Anders. Alm dos escritos publicados, vou fazer uso de materiais de correspondncia, manuscritos inacabados, e dirios de capital na Anders Nachlass em Viena, sob a superviso de Gerhard Oberschlick. Tambm h correspondncia entre Anders e Herbert Marcuse e Alexander Mitscherlich em seus respectivos arquivos em Frankfurt e entre Anders e Arendt na Biblioteca do Congresso, que eu vou ter que examinar. Em terceiro lugar, h materiais relacionados com Anders no Deutsches Literaturarchiv em Marbach am Neckar. Pretendo tambm fazer uso dos materiais anti-nuclear, paz e novas organizaes de esquerda localizados no Instituto Internacional de Histria Social, em Amsterd eo Institut fr Sozialforschung, em Hamburgo.

( voltar ao topo )
[1]

Gnther Anders, Ketzereien (Munique: CH Beck Verlag, 1982), 5. Barry Katz, Herbert Marcuse ea Arte da Libertao: Uma biografia intelectual (London: Verso, 1982), 12.

[2]

[3]

Uma vez que no h nenhuma biografia real do Anders em qualquer lngua, um bom lugar para comear a coleo de entrevistas contidas Gnther Anders antwortet: Entrevistas e Erklrungen , ed. Elke Schubert (Berlin: Edio Tiamat, 1987). Por este breve resumo da vida de Anders, vou desenhar em sua entrevista de 1979 com Matthias Greffrath, "Wenn ich bin verzweifelt, foi mich do geht an?" 1985 e sua conversa com Fritz J. Raddatz, "Brecht knnte mich nicht riechen", ambos de Gnther Anders antwortet . descries concisas de sua vida tambm pode ser encontrado em Konrad Paul Liessmann, Gnther Anders zur Einfhrung , 2 Edio (Hamburg: Junius Verlag, 1993), Ch.1 e Paul van Dijk, Antropologia na Era da Tecnologia: A Contribuio Filosfica de GntherAnders (Atlanta: Rodopi, 2000), Ch.2.
[4]

No entendimento Anders 'de seu prprio judasmo, ver seu ensaio "Mein Judentum", em Mein Judentum , editado por Hans Jrgen Schultz (Stuttgart: Kreuz, 1978).
[5]

dissertao Anders 'foi, por sua prpria conta, crtico de sua Husserl professor. Consulte "Die Rolle der Situationskategorie bei den Logischen Stzen", Ph.D. Diss., Universidade de Freiburg-im-Breisgau, 1924.
[6]

Um excelente lugar para comear com conexo Anders 'a filosofia alem de Helmut Hildebrandt "Gnther Anders und die philosophische Tradio," Texto + Kritik 115 (Julho de 1992): 58-63.
[7]

Para uma discusso aprofundada do relacionamento Anders 'com Arendt, ver Elisabeth Young-Bruehl, Hannah Arendt: For Love of the World (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1982). Anders publicou uma srie de ensaios sobre a intelligentsia esquerdista da Repblica de Weimar. Muitos deles podem ser encontrados a Mensch ohne Welt: Schriften zur Kunst und Literatur (Mnchen: Verlag CH Beck, 1984).
[8]

Publicado sob Gnther Stern, ber das Haben: Sieben Kapitel zur Ontologie der Erkenntnis (Bonn: Cohen, 1928), talvez o seu livro mais negligenciado.
[9]

O romance, concludo no final de 1930, no foi publicado at o ano de Anders 'morte Die molussische Katakombe: Roman (Munich: Verlag CH Beck, 1992).
[10]

Este artigo foi originalmente publicado na revista exlio alemo, Die Sammlung , em 1936, e foi republicado com muita outra fico Anders 'em Erzhlungen: Frhliche Philosophie (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1978).
[11]

Ver o Tagebcher und Gedichte (Munich: Verlag CH Beck, 1985), 1.

[12]

Para uma comparao, ver Christian Fuchs, "Zu einigen Parallelen und Differenzen im Denken von Gnther Anders und Herbert Marcuse" em Geheimagent der Masseneremiten: Gnther Anders , ed. Dirk Rpcke e Raimund Bahr, 2 Edio (Viena: Edio de Arte e Cincia / Gnther Anders Forum, 2003).
[13]

Para uma excelente anlise de Anders "compreenso de Auschwitz e Hiroshima, ver de Konrad Paul Liessmann" 'Das Prinzip Auschwitz':.. Reflexionen zur Leichenproduktion im 20 Jahrhundert " Frum XLII Nr. 796-798 (9 de Junho, 1995): 92-95.
[14]

Kafka-Pro und Contra: Die Prozessunterlagen (Mnchen: Verlag CH Beck, 1951).

[15]

Die Antiquiertheit des Menschen , vol. 1, ber die Seele im Zeitalter der zweiten Industriellen Revolution (Munich: Verlag CH Beck, 1956) e Vol. 2, ber die Zerstrung des Lebens im Zeitalter der dritten Industriellen Revolution (Munich: Verlag CH Beck, 1980).

[16]

Die Antiquiertheit , vol. 1, 7. Die Antiquiertheit , vol. 2, 9.

[17]

[18]

Por duas boas antologias do pensamento anti-nuclear Central Europeu a partir deste perodo, ver Bernward Vesper-Triangel, ed,. Gegen den Tod: Stimmen deutscher Schriftsteller gegn die Atombombe (Stuttgart: Estdio Neue Literatur, 1964) e Gnther Heipp, ed., Es geht ums Leben! Der Kampf gegen die Bombe 1945-1965: Dokumentation Eine (Hamburg: Reich, 1965). Veja tambm o livro muito importante por Karl Jaspers, Die Atombombe und die Zukunft des Menschen (Munich: R. Piper and Co., 1958).
[19]

Esta frase retirada do poderoso ensaio sobre a ameaa atmica "ber die Bombe und die Wurzeln unserer Apokalypse-Blindheit", em Die Antiquiertheit , vol. 1.
[20]

Anders usa esta frase da linguagem religiosa apocalptica em sua 1959 pea, "teses zum Atomzeitalter", que ele publicou, juntamente com outros ensaios sobre a bomba em Endzeit und Zeitenende: Gedanken ber die Situao atomare (Mnchen: Verlag CH Beck, 1972 ). Isto muito importante coleo de ensaios Anders foi republicado com um novo prefcio como Die atomare Drohung: Radikale berlegungen (Munich: Verlag CH Beck, 1981).
[21]

conta Anders 'de sua viagem para o Japo apareceu como Der Mann auf der Brcke: Tagebuch aus und Hiroshima Nagasaki (Munich: Verlag CH Beck, 1959). Por sua correspondncia com Eatherly, consulte queima Conscincia: O Caso do piloto Hiroshima (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1962). A traduo alem da correspondncia havia aparecido no ano anterior, fora dos limites fr das Gewissen (Hamburg: Rowohlt Verlag, 1961).
[22]

Esta "carta aberta" ultra-provocantes merece imediata traduo- Wir Eichmannshne: Offener Breve um Klaus Eichmann (Mnchen: Verlag CH Beck, 1964).
[23]

Entre os extensos escritos Anders 'sobre o conflito do Vietn, consulte seu Nrnberg und Vietn: Synoptisches Mosaik (Berlin: Voltaire, 1967) e Visit Beautiful Vietnam: ABC Aggressionen der heute (Colnia: PahlRugenstein Verlag, 1968). O impressionante transcrio de audincias do tribunal est registrado em Against the Crime of Silence: Proceedings of the Russell Tribunal Internacional de Crimes de Guerra , ed. John Duffet (London: Hare Livros O ', 1968).
[24]

Por sua teoria da era espacial, consulte Blick vom Der Mond: Reflexionen ber Weltraumflge (Mnchen: Verlag CH Beck, 1970). Seu trabalho sobre o Holocausto misturado escritos publicados mais velhos com novas peas sobre representao e memria Besuch im Hades:. Auschwitz und Breslau 1966 Nach "Holocausto" 1979 (Munique: Verlag CH Beck, 1979).
[25]

Die Antiquiertheit , vol. 2, 10-14. Gewalt-ja oder nein: Eine notwendige Diskussion , ed. Manfred Bissinger (Munique: Knaur, 1987). Ibidem, 24. Ketzereien , 5. Para uma citao completa, consulte no.3.

[26]

[27]

[28]

[29]

[30]

No h Gesamtausgabe de obras Anders '. A bibliografia mais completa de seus escritos publicados foi reunido para uma edio especial de Texto + Kritik 115 (Julho de 1992): 89-101.
[31]

Esta descrio encontrada em Die Antiquiertheit , vol. 2, 9.

[32]

Jeffrey Herf, Reactionary Modernism: Technology, Culture, and Politics in Weimar and the Third Reich (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984). Heidegger's distinctive place in this debate is covered in the

excellent book by Michael Zimmerman, Heidegger's Confrontation with Modernity: Technology, Politics, and Art (Indianopolis: Indiana University Press, 1990). On Jonas, see Eric Jakob, Martin Heidegger und Hans Jonas: Die Metaphysik der Subjektivitt und die Krise der technologischen Zivilisation (Tbingen: Francke, 1996) and David J. Levy, Hans Jonas: The Integrity of Thinking (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2002). For Marcuse, see Ktz, Marcuse and the Art of Liberation, Douglas Kellner, Herbert Marcuse and the Crisis of Marxism (London: Macmillan, 1984), and Patrick Murray, "The Frankfurt School Critique of Technology," Research in Philosophy and Technology 5 (1982): 223-248. Some major works on the general sociopsychological anxiety about technology are Langdon Winner's Autonomous Technology: Technics-out-of-control as a Theme in Political Thought (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1977 and Otto Ulrich, Technik und Herrschaft (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1977).
[33]

I have listed here the works that I found the most insightful: Omer Bartov, Murder in Our Midst: The Holocaust, Industrial Killing, and Representation (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996); idem, Mirrors of Destruction: War, Genocide, and Modern Identity (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000); Dan Diner, Das Jahrhundert verstehen: Eine Universalhistorische Deutung (Munich: Luchterhand, 1999); Michael Geyer, "Germany or: The Twentieth Century as History," South Atlantic Quarterly 96:4 (1997): 663-702; Jonathan Glover, Humanity: A Moral History of the Twentieth Century (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2000); Eric Hobsbawm, The Age of Extremes: A History of the World 1914-1991 (New York: Vintage Books, 1994); Paul Gordon Lauren, The Evolution of International Human Rights: Visions Seen (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1998); Mark Mazower, Dark Continent: Europe's Twentieth Century (New York: Vintage Books, 2000); idem, "Violence and the State in the Twentieth Cenury," American Historical Review 107:4 (October 2002): 1158-1178; Norman Naimark, Fires of Hatred: Ethnic Cleansing in Twentieth-Century Europe (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2001); Eric D. Weitz, A Century of Genocide: Utopias of Race and Nation (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2003). Still crucial for understanding this angle on twentiethcentury developments is Raymond Aron, The Century of Total War, 1st Edition (Garden City, N.J.: Doubleday Press, 1954). Charles Maier has argued quite forcefully that this approach to the twentieth century, oriented around narratives of "moral atrocity" and "moral struggle", really does not capture different " structural narratives" of socio-political and economic transformation. See his "Consigning the Twentieth Century to History: Alternatives for the Modern Era," American Historical Review 105 (June 2000): 807-831.
[34]

I borrow the term "ur-events" from Alon Confino, The Nation as Local Metaphor: Wrrtemberg, Imperial Germany, and National Memory, 1871-1918 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1997), xiii. For a philosophical analysis of the category of man-made mass death, see Edith Wyschogrod, Spirit in Ashes: Hegel, Heidegger, and Man-Made Mass Death (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1985).
[35]

For Anders' approach to the Holocaust and to the tasks of Vergangenheitsbewltigung, see his Wir Eichmannshne, his journals of his visit to Auschwitz, and his essay on the American television series "Holocaust," "Nach 'Holocaust' 1979". The latter two pieces can be found in Besuch im Hades. For one example of his conceptualization of the problems of conscience and responsibility, see his 1964 speech, "Die Toten: Rede ber die drei Weltkriege," in Hiroshima ist berall (Munich: Verlag C.H. Beck, 1982). On Anders' concept of the "Promethean gap" (Das Prometheische Geflle), see Die Antiquiertheit, Vol.1, 17-18. The Mitscherlichs' arguments are contained in their Die Unfhigkeit zu trauern: Grundlagen kollektiven Verhaltens (Munich: Piper, 1967).
[36]

Andrei S. Markovits and Philip S. Gorski claim, falsely I think, that Anders relativizes the Holocaust when he compares it with the atomic threat. See their comments on Anders in their The German Left: Red, Green and Beyond (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993), 133, 135.
[37]

Die Antiquiertheit, Vol. 1, 242-243. In these remarkable passages, Anders contrasted the prospects of species destruction with the meaning of Auschwitzthat "All people are exterminable."
[38]

Anders elaborated his theory of the Three Industrial Revolutions at considerable length in both volumes of Die Antiquiertheit des Menschen.
[39]

There is much in Anders' writings that anticipates later attempts to theorize these questions in the 1980s and beyond after a new arms race and reciprocal anti-nuclear movement emerged worldwide. Anders'schen themes appear in all of these. E.P. Thompson, "Notes on Exterminism: The Last Stage of Civilization," in Exterminism

and Cold War, edited by New Left Review (London: Verso, 1982); Jonathan Schell, The Fate of the Earth (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1982); Robert Jay Lifton and Eric Markusen, The Genocidal Mentality: Nazi Holocaust and Nuclear Threat (New York: Basic Books, 1990); Berel Lang, "Genocide and Omnicide: Technology and the Limits of Ethics," in The Future of the Holocaust: Between History and Memory (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1999).
[40]

For Adorno's discussion of cultural practices "after Auschwitz," see his "Cultural Criticism and Society" in Prisms, trans. Samuel and Shierry Weber (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1981), 34 and Negative Dialectics, trans. E.B. Ashton (New York: Continuum, 1973), 361-365. My characterization of Anders' reading of contemporary history is inspired by the title of Ludger Ltkehaus' excellent book on Anders, Philosophieren nach Hiroshima: ber Gnther Anders (Frankfurt am Main: Fischer Taschenbuch Verlag, 1992).
[41]

Anders' very interesting comments about his studies with Heidegger can be found in "Wenn ich verzweifelt bin", 22.
[42]

See his very important essays, "Nihilismus und Existenz," Die Neue Rundschau 5 (1946): 48-76 and "On the Pseudo-Concreteness of Heidegger's Philosophy," Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 8 (September 1947-June 1948): 337-371. Anders' published and unpublished writings on Heidegger have been collected in the volume ber Heidegger, ed. Gerhard Oberschlick in combination with Werner Reimann as translator (Munich: Verlag C.H. Beck, 2001).
[43]

Richard Wolin's Heidegger's Children: Hannah Arendt, Karl Lwith, Hans Jonas, and Herbert Marcuse (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001) barely mentions Anders, even though he focuses on many of the same problems in Heidegger's legacy that troubled Anders. The most serious student of the Anders-Heidegger relationship is Helmut Hildebrandt. See his Weltzustand Technik: Ein Vergleich der Technikphilosophien von Gnther Anders und Martin Heidegger (Berlin: Metropol, 1990) and "Anders und Heidegger" in Gnther Anders kontrovers, ed. Konrad Paul Liessmann (Munich: Verlag C.H. Beck, 1992).
[44]

On Scheler, the literature is growing as are the translations of his works. For a good introduction, see the older work by John Raphael Staude, Max Scheler, 1874-1928: An Intellectual Portrait (New York: Free Press, 1967).
[45]

A fine survey of the German tradition of philosophical anthropology is Gerhard Arlt, Philosophische Anthropologie (Stuttgart: Metzler, 2001).
[46]

The unpublished manuscript for this presentation is contained in the Anders Nachlass. I have altered Paul van Dijk's translation of the title of the lecture here. See his Anthropology, 29.
[47]

Anders published two major essays in exile in France during the 1930s where he delineated the arguments made in the lecture. See his "Une interpretation de l'a posteriori," Recherches Philosophiques 4 (1934-1935): 6580 and "Pathologie de la libert: Essai sur la nonidentification," Recherches Philosophiques 4 (1936-1937): 2254.
[48]

Anders did not back away from pointing out his originality concerning these questions. See his comments on philosophical anthropology in Die Antiquiertheit Vol.2, 128-130. For an example of Gehlen's work, see his Der Mensch, seine Natur und seine Stellung in der Welt (Bonn: Athenum, 1940).
[49]

"Die Wurzeln der Apokalypse-Blindheit," in Die atomare Drohung, 106.

[50]

On this slogan, see his "Die Toten," 381. Anders' discussion of an "International of Generations" is found in his "Thesen zum Atomzeitalter," 95.
[51]

To really appreciate the richness of Anders' discussion of how modern technology has restructured human subjectivity, one should begin with Die Antiquiertheit, Vol. 1.
[52]

Die Antiquiertheit, Vol. 2, 418.

[53]

See Micha Brumlik, "Gnther Anders: Zur Existenzialontologie der Emigration" in Zivilisationsbruch: Denken nach Auschwitz, ed. Dan Diner (Frankfurt am Main: Fischer Taschenbuch Verlag, 1988); Jrgen Langenbach, Gnther Anders: Eine Monographie (Munich: Raben, 1988); Eckhard Wittulski, Kein Ort, Nirgends-Zur Gesellschaftskritik Gnther Anders' (Frankfurt am Main: Herchen, 1989).
[54]

For the special journals on his works, see Austriaca 35 (1992); Zeitschrift fr Didaktik der Philosphie 3 (1992); the special July 1992 issue of Text + Kritik. See also the volume of essays Gnther Anders kontrovers. Other works about Anders from the early 1990s include Oliver G'schrey, Gnther Anders: "Endzeit" Diskurs und Pessimismus (Cuxhaven: Junghans, 1991); Werner Reimann, Verweigerte Vershnung: Zur Philosophie von Gnther Anders (Vienna: Passagen, 1990); Konrad Paul Liessmann, Gunther Anders zur Einfhrung; Ludger Ltkehaus, Philosophieren nach Hiroshima; Elke Schubert, Gnther Anders (Reinbek: Rowohlt, 1992).
[55]

See for example Detlef Clemens, Gnther Anders: Eine Studie ber die Ursprnge seiner Philosophie (Frankfurt am Main: Haag + Herchen, 1996); Margret Lohmann, Philosophieren in der Endzeit: Zur Gegenwartsanalyse von Gnther Anders (Munich: Fink, 1996); Wolfgang Kramer, Technokratie als Entmaterialisierung der Welt: Zur Aktualitt der Philosophien von Gnther Anders und Jean Baudrillard (Mnster: Waxmann, 1998); Volker Kempf, Gnther Anders: Anschlusstheoretiker an Georg Simmel? (Frankfurt am Main: Lang, 2000). The comparative approach to Anders' work is indebted to Werner Jung and Helmut Hildebrandt. For Jung, see his "Verantwortung und/oder Widerstand: Aspekte der Technikkritik und Momente einer neuen Ethik bei Gnther Anders, Hans Jonas, und Ulrich Beck" in Verantwortung in Wissenschaft und Technik, ed. Matthias Gatzemeier (Mannheim: Bibliographisches Institut: 1989). For Hildebrandt, see his "Anders und Heidegger" and Weltzustand Technik.
[56]

The Gnther Anders Forum is also a source for new publications on Anders. See for example Geheimagent der Masseneremiten which it published with Edition Art & Science.
[57]

See Ltkehaus, Philosophieren nach Hiroshima. For Liessmann, see three of his writings: "'Das Prinzip Auschwitz'"; "Wiedersehen und vergessen: Zur Biographie"in Geheimagent der Masseneremiten; Gnther Anders: Philosophieren im Zeitalter der technologischen Revolutionen (Munich: Verlag C.H. Beck, 1992).
[58]

My views of intellectual history and social theory have been influenced considerably by my work with Moishe Postone at the University of Chicago. See his Time, Labor, and Social Domination: A Reinterpretation of Marx's Critical Theory (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993). I have also found the following works to be very stimulating in thinking about questions of the methodology of intellectual history. See Martin Jay, "The Textual Approach to Intellectual History" in Force Fields: Between Intellectual History and Cultural Critique (New York: Routledge, 1993); Donald R. Kelley, "What is Happening to the History of Ideas?" Journal of the History of Ideas 51 (Jan-March 1990): 3-25; Dominick LaCapra, Rethinking Intellectual History: Texts, Contexts, Language (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1983); idem, Soundings in Critical Theory (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1989); Allan Megill, "Recounting the Past: 'Description,' Explanation, and Narrative in Historiography," American Historical Review 94 (1989): 627-653.
[59]

On Popper, Malachi Haim Hacohen, Karl PopperThe Formative Years, 1902-1945: Politics and Philosophy in Interwar Vienna (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000; for Jaspers, see Suzanne Kirkbright, Karl Jaspers: A Biography: Navigations in Truth (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2004); for Jonas, see Levy's Hans Jonas: The Integrity of Thinking.
[60]

Mensch ohne Welt, xi.

prospectus by Jason Dawsey, January 2004, revised September 2004; prepared for web by H. Marcuse, 9/20/04 back to top, to H. Marcuse's Gnther Anders' webpage
Texto original In the foreword to his 1982 Ketzereien (Heresies), Gnther Anders insisted that he be understood as an "advocate of militant theses ( Vertreter von Kampfthesen ) that at least deserve to be attacked." [1] This honor, he claimed, had yet to be bestowed on his earlier works.

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