J.Dawsey- Günther Anders dissertation proposal.pdf

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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 (1902-1992).

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 andrepresentation 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

Dawsey: Gnther Anders dissertation proposal http://www.history.ucsb.edu/faculty/marcuse/projects/anders/Daws...

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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. In1917, 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 1920sbegan 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


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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 culturalcriticism with the Vossische Zeitungand 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 aHabilitationschrifton 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 Kampfand he worked out his own theory of anti-fascism 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


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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


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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 ofDie Antiquiertheit des Menschenwere 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 Warblocs 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


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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 menaceremained 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-Gayraid 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


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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 ofDie Antiquiertheit des Menschenthat 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


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"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 hisAnthropology 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.


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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

Technikwas 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 left-wing 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


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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 ofthe 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 ofthe 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


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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


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"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 Daseinand 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 culturehuman beings

had no innate nature and lived in a godless world ruled by contingency.

[47]

The "freedom" ofhuman 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


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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 thathuman 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

pre-Hiroshima 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.


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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 Germanistiksought 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,


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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 ideastechnological

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 ahistorical 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 purposeis 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


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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

ofMeisterdenker. 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 willinclude 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

Nachlassin 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.

[2] Barry K!tz,Herbert Marcuse and the Art of Liberation: An Intellectual Biography (London: Verso, 1982), 12.

[3] Since there is no real biography of Anders in any language, a good place to begin is the collection of


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interviews contained in Gnther Anders antwortet: Interviews & Erklrungen, ed. Elke Schubert (Berlin: EditionTiamat, 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 konntemich 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 andPaul 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," inMein Judentum, editedby Hans Jrgen Schultz (Stuttgart: Kreuz, 1978).

[5] Anders' dissertation was, by his own account, critical of his teacher Husserl. See "Die Rolle derSituationskategorie 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 "GntherAnders und die philosophische Tradition," Text + Kritik115 (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 hisMensch ohne Welt: Schriften zurKunst 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 molussischeKatakombe: Roman (Munich: Verlag C.H. Beck, 1992).

[10] This story was originally published in the German exile journal,Die Sammlung, in 1936 and was republishedwith much of Anders' other fiction inErzhlungen: 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 GntherAnders 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 PaulLiessmann'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 drittenindustriellen Revolution (Munich: Verlag C.H. Beck, 1980).

[16]Die Antiquiertheit, Vol. 1, 7.


[18] For two good anthologies of Central European anti-nuclear thought from this period, see Bernward Vesper-

Triangel, ed., Gegen den Tod: Stimmen deutscher Schriftsteller gegn die Atombombe (Stuttgart: Studio NeueLiteratur, 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 unddie Zukunft des Menschen (Munich: R. Piper and Co., 1958).


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[19] This phrase is taken from the powerful essay on the atomic threat, "ber die Bombe und die Wurzeln unsererApokalypse-Blindheit," inDie 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 inEndzeit und Zeitenende: Gedanken ber die atomareSituation (Munich: Verlag C.H. Beck, 1972). This very important collection of Anders' essays was republishedwith a new foreword asDie atomare Drohung: Radikale berlegungen (Munich: Verlag C.H. Beck, 1981).

[21] Anders' account of his trip to Japan appeared asDer Mann auf der Brcke: Tagebuch aus Hiroshima undNagasaki (Munich: Verlag C.H. Beck, 1959). For his correspondence with Eatherly, seeBurning Conscience: TheCase of the Hiroshima Pilot(New York: Monthly Review Press, 1962). A German translation of thecorrespondence 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 anKlaus Eichmann (Munich: Verlag C.H. Beck, 1964).

[23] Among Anders' extensive writings about the Vietnam conflict, see hisNrnberg und Vietnam: SynoptischesMosaik (Berlin: Voltaire, 1967) and Visit Beautiful Vietnam: ABC der Aggressionen heute (Cologne:Pahl-Rugenstein Verlag, 1968). The stunning transcript of the tribunal's hearings is recorded inAgainst the Crime

of Silence: Proceedings of the Russell International War Crimes Tribunal, ed. John Duffet (London: O' HareBooks, 1968).

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

[25]Die Antiquiertheit, Vol. 2, 10-14.

[26]Gewalt-ja oder nein: Eine notwendige Diskussion, ed. Manfred Bissinger (Munich: Knaur, 1987).

[27] Ibid, 24.

[28]Ketzereien, 5.

[29] For a full citation, see no.3.

[30] There is no Gesamtausgabe of Anders' works. The most complete bibliography of his published writings wasput together for a special issue ofText + Kritik115 (July 1992): 89-101.

[31] This description is found inDie 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 theexcellent 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 DavidJ. Levy,Hans Jonas: The Integrity of Thinking(Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2002). For Marcuse, seeK!tz,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 Philosophyand Technology 5 (1982): 223-248. Some major works on the general socio-psychological anxiety abouttechnology are Langdon Winner'sAutonomous Technology: Technics-out-of-control as a Theme in PoliticalThought(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: TheHolocaust, Industrial Killing, and Representation (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996); idem, Mirrors of


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Destruction: War, Genocide, and Modern Identity (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000); Dan Diner,DasJahrhundert verstehen: Eine Universalhistorische Deutung(Munich: Luchterhand, 1999); Michael Geyer,"Germany or: The Twentieth Century as History," South Atlantic Quarterly 96:4 (1997): 663-702; JonathanGlover,Humanity: A Moral History of the Twentieth Century (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2000); EricHobsbawm, The Age of Extremes: A History of the World 1914-1991 (New York: Vintage Books, 1994); PaulGordon Lauren, The Evolution of International Human Rights: Visions Seen (Philadelphia: University ofPennsylvania Press, 1998); Mark Mazower,Dark Continent: Europe's Twentieth Century (New York: VintageBooks, 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 twentieth-

century developments is Raymond Aron, The Century of Total War, 1st Edition (Garden City, N.J.: DoubledayPress, 1954). Charles Maier has argued quite forcefully that this approach to the twentieth century, orientedaround narratives of "moral atrocity" and "moral struggle", really does not capture different " structuralnarratives" 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, ImperialGermany, 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 ofVergangenheitsbewltigung, see his WirEichmannshne, 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 inBesuch im Hades. For one exampleof his conceptualization of the problems of conscience and responsibility, see his 1964 speech, "Die Toten: Redeber die drei Weltkriege," inHiroshima ist berall(Munich: Verlag C.H. Beck, 1982). On Anders' concept of the"Promethean gap" (Das Prometheische Geflle), seeDie Antiquiertheit, Vol.1, 17-18. The Mitscherlichs'arguments are contained in theirDie 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 theirThe German Left: Red, Green andBeyond(New York: Oxford University Press, 1993), 133, 135.

[37]Die Antiquiertheit, Vol. 1, 242-243. In these remarkable passages, Anders contrasted the prospects of speciesdestruction 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 ofDie Antiquiertheit des Menschen.

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

[40] For Adorno's discussion of cultural practices "after Auschwitz," see his "Cultural Criticism and Society" inPrisms, trans. Samuel and Shierry Weber (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1981), 34 andNegative Dialectics,trans. E.B. Ashton (New York: Continuum, 1973), 361-365. My characterization of Anders' reading ofcontemporary 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 verzweifeltbin", 22.


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[42] See his very important essays, "Nihilismus und Existenz,"Die Neue Rundschau 5 (1946): 48-76 and "On thePseudo-Concreteness of Heidegger's Philosophy,"Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 8 (September1947-June 1948): 337-371. Anders' published and unpublished writings on Heidegger have been collected in thevolume ber Heidegger, ed. Gerhard Oberschlick in combination with Werner Reimann as translator (Munich:Verlag C.H. Beck, 2001).

[43] Richard Wolin'sHeidegger'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 thesame problems in Heidegger's legacy that troubled Anders. The most serious student of the Anders-Heideggerrelationship is Helmut Hildebrandt. See his Weltzustand Technik: Ein Vergleich der Technikphilosophien vonGnther Anders und Martin Heidegger(Berlin: Metropol, 1990) and "Anders und Heidegger" in Gnther Anderskontrovers, 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 theolder 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 AndersNachlass. I have altered Paulvan Dijk's translation of the title of the lecture here. See hisAnthropology, 29.

[47] Anders published two major essays in exile in France during the 1930s where he delineated the argumentsmade in the lecture. See his "Une interpretation de l'a posteriori,"Recherches Philosophiques 4 (1934-1935):65-80 and "Pathologie de la libert: Essai sur la nonidentification,"Recherches Philosophiques 4 (1936-1937):22-54.

[48] Anders did not back away from pointing out his originality concerning these questions. See his comments onphilosophical anthropology inDie AntiquiertheitVol.2, 128-130. For an example of Gehlen's work, see hisDerMensch, seine Natur und seine Stellung in der Welt(Bonn: Athenum, 1940).

[49] "Die Wurzeln der Apokalypse-Blindheit," inDie atomare Drohung, 106.

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

[51] To really appreciate the richness of Anders' discussion of how modern technology has restructured humansubjectivity, one should begin withDie Antiquiertheit, Vol. 1.


[53] See Micha Brumlik, "Gnther Anders: Zur Existenzialontologie der Emigration" inZivilisationsbruch:Denken nach Auschwitz, ed. Dan Diner (Frankfurt am Main: Fischer Taschenbuch Verlag, 1988); JrgenLangenbach, 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, seeAustriaca 35 (1992);Zeitschrift fr Didaktik der Philosphie 3(1992); the special July 1992 issue ofText + 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 vonGnther Anders (Vienna: Passagen, 1990); Konrad Paul Liessmann, Gunther Anders zur Einfhrung; LudgerLtkehaus,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: ZurGegenwartsanalyse von Gnther Anders (Munich: Fink, 1996); Wolfgang Kramer, Technokratie als


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Entmaterialisierung der Welt: Zur Aktualitt der Philosophien von Gnther Anders und Jean Baudrillard(Mnster: Waxmann, 1998); Volker Kempf, Gnther Anders: Anschlusstheoretiker an Georg Simmel? (Frankfurtam Main: Lang, 2000). The comparative approach to Anders' work is indebted to Werner Jung and HelmutHildebrandt. For Jung, see his "Verantwortung und/oder Widerstand: Aspekte der Technikkritik und Momenteeiner neuen Ethik bei Gnther Anders, Hans Jonas, und Ulrich Beck" in Verantwortung in Wissenschaft undTechnik, ed. Matthias Gatzemeier (Mannheim: Bibliographisches Institut: 1989). For Hildebrandt, see his "Andersund Heidegger" and Weltzustand Technik.

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

[57] See Ltkehaus,Philosophieren nach Hiroshima. For Liessmann, see three of his writings: "'Das PrinzipAuschwitz'"; "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 withMoishe 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 tobe very stimulating in thinking about questions of the methodology of intellectual history. See Martin Jay, "The

Textual Approach to Intellectual History" inForce Fields: Between Intellectual History and Cultural Critique(New York: Routledge, 1993); Donald R. Kelley, "What is Happening to the History of Ideas?"Journal of theHistory 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: CornellUniversity Press, 1989); Allan Megill, "Recounting the Past: 'Description,' Explanation, and Narrative inHistoriography,"American Historical Review 94 (1989): 627-653.

[59] On Popper, Malachi Haim Hacohen,Karl PopperThe Formative Years, 1902-1945: Politics andPhilosophy in Interwar Vienna (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000; for Jaspers, see SuzanneKirkbright,Karl Jaspers: A Biography: Navigations in Truth (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2004); forJonas, see Levy'sHans 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


Documents

J.Dawsey- Günther Anders dissertation proposal.pdf