Günther Anders (born Günther Siegmund Stern, 12 July 1902 – 17 December 1992) was a German-born philosopher, journalist and critical theorist. Trained as a philosopher in the phenomenological tradition, he obtained his doctorate under Edmund Husserl in 1923 and worked then as a journalist at the Berliner Börsen-Courier. At that time, he changed his name Stern to Anders. He unsuccessfully tried to get a university tenure in the early 1930s and ultimately fled Nazism to the United States. Back to Europe in the 1950s, he published his major book, The Obsolescence of Man, in 1956. The title of this work has also been translated as The Obsolescence of Humanity. An important part of Gunther Anders' work focuses on the self-destruction of mankind, through a meditation on the Holocaust and the nuclear threat. Anders developed a philosophical anthropology for the age of technology, dealing with such other themes as the effects of mass media on our emotional and ethical existence, the illogic of religion, and the question of being a thinker. He was awarded the Sigmund Freud Prize shortly before his death, in 1992.

Biography

Early life

Günther Anders (then Stern) was born on 12 July 1902, in Breslau (now Wrocław in Poland), the son of Jewish heritage founders of child developmental psychology Clara and William Stern and cousin to philosopher Walter Benjamin. His parents kept a diary of Gunther and his two sisters and from April 1900, the birth of their first child Hilde, until August 1912. This record-keeping would span a combined 18 years in total. The diaries were mainly an academic exercise in developmental child psychology however they were also a larger glimpse into the lives of the children growing up. The diaries were published in 1914. Anders' sister Hilde was at one time married to the German philosopher Rudolf Schottlaender, who was also a student of Edmund Husserl, and later Hans Marchwitza, his other sister Eva would go on to be a part of Youth Aliyah and later worked for people with mental disabilities. However Anders' own parents, arguably his father, was the most significant intellectual influence in his life. Anders was an atheist, and although he never officially become a member of the Frankfurt School, he did influence the thinking of some of its members. In the late 1920s Anders studied with the philosopher Martin Heidegger at the University of Freiburg. In 1923, Anders obtained a PhD in philosophy; Edmund Husserl was his dissertation advisor. While Anders was working as a journalist in Berlin (Berliner Börsen-Courier ) he changed his nom-de-plume to "Anders" (meaning other or different) which would go on to become his official name. There is more than one reason given in literature as to why he changed his name- one reason is that an editor did not want so many Jewish-sounding bylines in his paper, another reason for changing his surname was that his name would connect him to his popular parents. He married, in 1929, a fellow student whom he'd met in Heidegger's seminar: Hannah Arendt. Arendt had previously engaged in an affair with their common mentor. They married in Nowawes and at the time lived on Babelsberg's Merkurstraße 3 in Potsdam. In 1930–31 he unsuccessfully attempted a habilitation under Paul Tillich in sociomusicology, and was advised by Max Wertheimer and Karl Mannheim to be patient. In 1931 he started writing a novel under the title Die Molussische Katakombe (The Molussian Catacomb), a novel about totalitarian techniques of brainwashing taking place within an underground prison. Anders worked on the novel from 1931-1933, and his friend Bertolt Brecht submitted it with his entrée or endorsement to the publishing Kipenhauer shortly before the Nazis took power. Anders fled the country shortly after Hitler was appointed chancellor on 30 January 1933, in the wake of the Gestapo's seizure of Brecht's diary, a document where his name was frequently mentioned. He was not the only person to flee Berlin after Brecht's diary was seized--his cousin, Walter Benjamin also fled at right around that time and their mutual friend Ernst Schoen was arrested. (Anders, like Benjamin, frequently enjoyed playing chess with Brecht.) Hannah Arendt remained behind in Germany helping to smuggle refugees out of the Reich. She was arrested for eight days, having been reported by a librarian for the work that she was doing in scanning German newspapers for antisemitic propaganda and sending her findings to the World Zionist Congress on behalf of her friend Kurt Blumenfeld's localized (and now exiled) organization, the Zionist Federation of Germany.

Exile (1933–1950)

In 1933, Anders fled Nazi Germany, first to France (where he and Arendt divorced amicably in 1937), and in 1936 to the United States. In 1934 he gave a lecture on Kafka in Paris at the Institut d'Etudes Germaniques; he would go on to engage with Kafka in the coming years. In the United States, he spent time in New York and California. He spent his time in a multitude of activities, hired in the United States Office of War Information, as a writer for Aufbau (journal), as a reviewer for a philosophical journal, as a tutor in the house of a famous composer and songwriter, as a worker in a factory, as a costume and theatrical property boy in Hollywood, as a tour guide at Metropolitan Museum of Art, as a failed scriptwriter, among others. He was a lecturer in The New School for Social Research. Anders married a second time, in 1945, to the Austrian writer Elisabeth Freundlich, whom he had met in New York.

1950s: return to Europe

Anders returned to Europe in 1950 with his wife to live in her native Vienna. While Germany had been the first choice, the political situation was not appropriate and an academic post in Halle no longer a choice. He often wrote for Merkur. There Anders wrote his main philosophical work, whose title translates as The Obsolescence of Humankind (1956). He became a leading figure in the anti-nuclear movement and published numerous essays and expanded versions of his diaries, including one of a trip to Breslau and Auschwitz with his wife. Anders' papers are held by the University of Vienna, and his literary executor is former FORVM editor Gerhard Oberschlick. He and his second wife divorced in 1955. In 1957, Anders married a third time, to American pianist Charlotte Lois Zelka. Gunther knew how to play the piano and violin.

Philosophy

Günther Anders has called his philosophy "occasional philosophy" (Gelegenheitsphilosophie); and "impressionistic philosophy". He never held an academic rank in Europe. A professorship from Free University of Berlin was declined. A lack of academic rank influenced his work, causing it to deviate from the usual academic style. Anders has also called himself a "critical theorist of technology". He also used Diskrepanzphilosophie (philosophy of discrepancy) in an attempt to classify himself. Anders is well known in Europe and has been published and researched to a considerable extent in the German language. Some of his work has been translated into other languages such as French and Spanish. As compared to his presence in Europe, his presence in the English language has been minimal. Gunther wrote mostly in German. Anders was an early critic of the role of technology in modern life and in this context was a trenchant critic of the role of television. His essay "The Phantom World of TV", written in the late 1950s, was published in an edition of Bernard Rosenberg and David Manning White's influential anthology Mass Culture. In it he details how the televisual experience substitutes images for experience, leading people to eschew first-hand experiences in the world and instead become "voyeurs". His dominant metaphor in this essay centers on how television interposes itself between family members "at the dinner table".

The Obsolescence of Humankind

His major work, of which only a few essays have been translated into English, is acknowledged to be Die Antiquiertheit des Menschen (literally "The Antiquatedness of the Human Being"; while "obsolescence" was a typical translation early on, "antiquatedness" is considered more suitable). By the end of the 20th century, both volumes had sold about 140,000 copies. This wide readership dwarfed scholarly interactions. The essay argues that a gap has developed between humanity's technologically enhanced capacity to create and destroy, and our ability to imagine that destruction. Anders devoted a great deal of attention to the nuclear threat, making him an early critic of this technology as well. The two-volume work is made up of a string of philosophical essays that start with an observation often found in Anders' diary entries dating back to his exile in the US in the 1940s. To provide an example from the first chapter of volume one: "First Encounter with Promethean Shame – Today's Prometheus asks: 'Who am I anyway?'"; "Shame about the 'embarrassingly' high quality of manufactured goods." What are we embarrassed about? Anders' answer to this question is simply "that we were born and not manufactured." Don Ihde suppressed an English translation of the two volumes.

Prometheanism

In 1942, Anders wrote of having found signs of a new form of shame which he provisionally called Promethean shame, that is "the shame when confronted by the humiliatingly high quality of fabricated things". He would later go on to express doubts about the existence of this kind of shame. Another iteration of the shame was "the incapacity of our imagination to grasp the enormity of what we can produce and set in motion". Promethean shame can be seen in posthumanism, in the comparisons we make with our creations. Anders utilizes the story of Prometheus and draws parallels to modern technology. For him, Prometheus means "he who thinks ahead". The variations of the Promethean disjunction Anders referred to included the gap between the maximum that we can produce and imagine as compared to the maximum we use and need, which are in comparison "shamefully small". It is a disproportion between the capacities for destruction and construction where "we can construct much more than we are capable of destroying; that it is easy to build but very difficult to destroy". The Promethean gap refers to the incapacity to imagine the consequences of our creations.

Open Letter to Klaus Eichmann

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

Mensch ohne Welt

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

Honors

Günther Anders Prize for critical thinking

Günther Anders Prize for critical thinking (Preis für kritisches denken) is a biannual award given by the International Günther Anders Society and sponsored by Verlag C. H. Beck. Constituted in 2018, winners include Joseph Vogl, Corine Pelluchon and Dietmar Dath.

Works

Bibliographies

List of selected works

Correspondence and conversations

Prose

Anthologies

Citations

Secondary literature

Biography

In English

Other languages