The Life of Günther Anders (1902-1992)

Youth and Student Days (1902-1924)

New Edition of the famous Stern diaries (Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics, Nijmegen).

Günther Anders was born Günther Siegmund Stern in Breslau on the 12th of July 1902. He enjoyed a carefree childhood together with his two sisters Hilde (1900-62) and Eva (1904-92). The lives of the Stern children were minutely documented in the service of the pioneering research of their parents, the psychologists William and Clara Stern (née Joseephy). The diary in which William and Clara Stern recorded the development of their children was the basis for The Psychology of Early Childhood, up to the 6th Year of Age, a classic study in developmental psychology (first published in 1914). Thirty-eight years later, whilst writing the Preface to the 7th edition, Günther Stern described how reading his own meticulously recorded childhood expressions was ‘like a private experience of vertigo.’

In the diaries, his mother describes young him as a highly intelligent and sensitive child: ‘Günther is laboring with the unmistakable desire to be “different”. […] He is downright afraid of disappearing in the crowd.’ [‘Anders’, Stern’s nom de plume, means ‘different’.]

Zahlreiche Materialien, unter anderem aus Familienbesitz, befinden sich im Nachlass des Stern-Forschers Werner Deutsch.

The family moved to Hamburg in 1915 after William Stern was appointed a professor at the University of Hamburg. (He would eventually act as the head of the Institute of Psychology and the Institute of Philosophy, the latter together with the university’s co-founder Ernst Cassirer). In Hamburg, the First World War occasioned Günther Stern’s first experience of being treated an outsider: ‘I was 15 and we school children were being deployed to a staging post in France. I was the only Jew in my class, and whilst in France, I was – I can almost say – tortured by my classmates’ (as communicated to Konrad Paul Liessmann).

Holidays with Walter Benjamin’s sister Dora, before 1914.

Upon completing his high-school diploma in 1920, Günther Stern began to study art history and philosophy at the University of Hamburg. His teachers included Erwin Panofsky, Albert Görland, Ernst Cassirer, who was a friend of the Sterns, and his own father. Many decades later, in the first volume of The Obsolescence of Human Beings, Anders would adopt and resolutely defend ‘critical personalism’, the philosophical framework developed by his father. For William Stern, it was no longer ‘the conceptual pairing of mind and matter that is most important in a systemic philosophical worldview, but that of person and thing.’ (William Stern, Grundgedanken der personalistischen Philosophie [the foundational ideas of personalist philosophy], p. 8)

In the autumn of 1921, Günther Stern was drawn to Freiburg and continue his studies there, whilst staying with his father’s friend Jonas Cohn for a year. Stern also studied in Munich (under Heinrich Wölfflin and Moritz Geiger, a student of Husserl’s) and in Berlin, where he was taught by Eduard Spranger, Wolfgang Köhler and Max Wetheimer (the founders of Gestalt Psychology), and the art historian Adolph Goldschmid. In Berlin, he also met his lifelong friend Hans Jonas.

Back in Freiburg, he attended classes by Edmund Husserl and Martin Heidegger. Like so many of his contemporaries, Stern was captured by Heidegger’s ‘demonic spell’, at least, for a while (Günther Anders antwortet, S. 22).

At the age of 22, Stern completed his doctorate under the supervision of Husserl ‘with a doctoral thesis directed against him’ (Brecht konnte mich nicht riechen, p.13), which was nevertheless received favorably by his supervisor. His dissertation Über die Situationskategorie bei den ‚Logischen Sätzen‘. Erster Teil einer Untersuchung über die Rolle der Situationskategorie remains unpublished, but a reworked and condensed version formed the final chapter of his first monograph Über das Haben (On Having), published in 1928.

On the move (1924-1933)

Still, for the first five years of their marriage, the couple lived under the same roof and collaborated closely. They first lived in Heidelberg with Karl Jaspers, Arendt’s dissertation adviser. Then they moved on to Frankfurt, where Günther Anders wanted to complete his habilitation project on the philosophical investigation of the musical situation (Philosphische Untersungen über musikalische Situationen). He was simultaneously also working on a systematic philosophical anthropology building on the foundational work of Max Scheler and Helmuth Plessner (Stern was acquainted with both since the mid 1920s). One of his essays (‘Über Gegenstandstypen. Phänomenologische Bemerkungen anläßlich des Buches: Arnold Metzger, Der Gegenstand der Erkenntnis’) was even published in The Philosophical Gazette(philosophischer Anzeiger), the journal edited by Plessner. When Stern returned from exile after the Second World War, Plessner tried to create a position for him at the Free University of Berlin, but to no avail.

The Human’s Estrangement from the World (Die Weltfremdheit des Menschen), Stern’s study in philosophical anthropology, was very well received in Frankfurt, but his habilitation project did not come to fruition. The rumors, however, that put this was because of Adorno scheming against him – Adorno was working on his own philosophy of music at the time – aren’t true. Stern had been advised to wait until the ‘the Nazi-hype’ had abated (Brecht konnte mich nicht riechen, p. 16). Following this disappointment, Arendt and Stern returned to Berlin, where he worked as staff-writer for the ‘Supplement’ of the Berliner Börsen-Courier, a position that Bertolt Brecht had helped him obtain. In Berlin, Arendt and Stern co-authored an article on Rilke’s Duino Elegies and published a joint review of Karl Mannheim’s Ideology and Utopia. At the Berliner Börsen-Courier, Stern also began to write under his nom de plume ‘Anders’. A widely circulated (but quite implausible) anecdote records that Herbert Ihering, the editor in chief of the Supplement, had asked Stern to ‘call himself something “different” (anders),’ because too many articles were being published under the name Stern.

Shortly after the Reichstag was set alight on the 27th of February 1933, Günther Stern fled to Paris (without his wife). The address book of Walter Benjamin, Stern’s cousin, records a room at the Hôtel Soufflot, 9 Rue Toullier as Stern’s address. In Paris, he completed the manuscript of his substantial antifascist novel The Molussian Catacomb (Die molussische Katakombe). He took part in Alexandre Kojève’s lecture-course on Hegel, but the experience of being forced into exile made Stern turn his back on academic philosophy for the time being: ‘Thus, I did not write the philosophical system I wanted to write.’ (Günther Anders antwortet, p. 27)The Catacomb didn’t find a publisher in 1933 and only appeared in 1992 (and in an extended edition in 2012).

Learsi (an anagram of Israel), Stern’s novella about the situation of European Jews also stems from this time of exile, as does The Hunger March (Der Hungermarsch) - for which Anders did not receive the Emigration Novella-Prize (Novellenpreis der Emigration), as he himself had circulated, but rather a "laudatory mention" by his advocate Heinrich Mann, to whom he owes the publication in Die Sammlung in 1935. Both texts can be found in the now out of print volume of short stories The Cosmological Humoresque (die kosmologische Humoreske).

Together with Emmanuel Levinas, Stern produced a translation of the first part of the Weltfremdheit, the philosophical anthropology dating back to his Frankfurt days. ‘Une interprétation de l’aposteriori’ appeared in 1934 in Recherches Philosophique. The second part was published as ‘Pathologie de la liberté’ in 1936, translated by P.-A. Stéphanopoli (An English translation has been published in Deleuze Studies and in The Life and Work of Günther Anders).

Emigration (1936-1950)

In 1936, Stern travelled on to the United States, having not managed to establish himself as part of the intellectual scene in Paris. His marriage to Arendt had also long failed. The divorce took place by letter in 1937. Irrespective of this, Stern provided the affidavit that Hanna Arendt and her new husband Heinrich Blücher needed to enter the USA. And as the recently published correspondence between Arendt and Stern vividly illustrates, he also helped with money. The first telegram Hannah Arendt sent upon arriving in America in May 1941 was to Günther Stern: ‘WE’RE SAVED.’ (See the recently published correspondence: Hannah Arendt and Günther Anders, Schreib doch mal ‘hard facts’ über Dich: Briefe 1939-1975 [Letters 1939-1975], ed. by Kerstin Putz. Munich: C.H.Beck, 2016, p. 94.)

California, early 40s.

Whilst in the US, Stern’s compatriots primarily viewed him as a poet, even though he reviewed National Socialist concoctions such as Ernst Krieck’s Völkisch-politische Anthropologie, Theodor Haering’s Was ist deutsche Philosophie? and Max Wundt’s Die Ehre als Quelle des sittlichen Lebens in Volk und Staat. He also continued his philosophical disputation of the work of Martin Heidegger, who had long since become ‘gleichgeschaltet’, that is, coordinated. In 2001, the products of his lifelong, abrasive relationship to his former teacher and rival were posthumously published as the substantial volume Über Heidegger (On Heidegger).

Günther Stern would later evoke Heidegger’s famous ‘turn’ (‘Kehre’) to describe the impact of this event on what had been ‘his original preoccupation as a thinker’, that is, his early work in philosophical anthropology. These early contemplations on the existential wordlessness and estrangement of the human from the world were given a new orientation from the 1950’s onwards: the human without world is seen as creating a world without humans. It is this inversion that informed his philosophical, political and activist engagements with the apocalyptic possibility that nuclear war would create ‘a naked desert-planet once called earth’: ‘I have not wrongly been portrayed as someone who for decades has been engaged in the not very cheery pursuit of warning about the impending self-destruction of humanity. The conviction that we are in the process of creating a “World without Humans” (possibly even without life) has indeed been one of my guiding thoughts.’ (Mensch ohne Welt, p. XI)

Before returning to Europe from his American exile, Günther Stern did find an academic post after all. The extensive lecture notes on the philosophy of art, anthropology and culture, which Stern compiled as a lecturer at the New School for Social Research in New York still exist. They can be found in the Literary Archive at the Austrian National Library in Vienna, which houses Stern’s literary estate. The small book Being in Love, Yesterday (Lieben gestern), published in 1986, collects reflections and impressions from the time Stern spent in New York and on how the experience of exile was felt across generational lines.

Return from exile (1950-1992)

Five years after the end of World War II, Günther Stern followed the wishes of his wife Elisabeth Freundlich and returned to war-scarred Europe. The couple settled in Vienna, the city in which Elisabeth Freundlich was born, and in 1951 Stern attained Austrian citizenship.

To make a living, Stern and Freundlich wrote radio reports and worked as translators and publicists. In 1956, the first volume of The Obsolescence of Human Beings (die Antiquiertheit des Menschen) was published by C.H.Beck (Munich). Prior to this, Stern, who by now was exclusively calling himself ‘Anders’, had already been highly successful with his critical essay Kafka pro and contra – The Casefiles (1951). Herbert Marcuse sent him an exuberant, congratulatory letter in response to Kafka: ‘the best thing you have written thus far’. The impact of the book also opened doors to publish in Merkur (Germany’s leading intellectual review). Several parts of The Obsolescence of Human Beings Vols. 1&2 and many other pieces were first printed in this magazine.

On the way to Hiroshima, at Tokyo airport (1958).

In 1959, Anders followed Charlotte Zelka’s cue – Zelka, a pianist, who was 28 years younger than Anders, was his third wife – and got in touch with Claude Eatherly, a former Air Force pilot, who had acquired a criminal record after the war and was temporarily interned in a psychiatric institution. As the pilot of the weather reconnaissance plane sent ahead of Enola Gay, the B-29 bomber that deployed the first atom bomb, Eatherly was afflicted by a retrospective feeling of guilt for triggering the mission against Hiroshima. This, at least, is how Anders interpreted the situation. The exchange of letters with Eatherly, ‘the antitype of Eichmann,’ was published in 1961 and rapidly became a bestseller, translated into many languages (also into English, published under the title Burning Conscience).

„Dreyfus in Waco“ – DER SPIEGEL über Anders und Eatherly (13. September 1961); Quelle: SPIEGEL-Archiv.

In the 1960s, Anders became more heavily involved politically and developed a reputation as a political writer. In 1966/67, he was a member of the International War Crime Tribunal organised by Bertrand Russell, alongside Jean-Paul Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir, Vladimir Dedijer, Peter Weiss and others. Soon after, he was declared a persona non-grata in the USA.

At the height of the student protest, and leading on from his involvement in the Russel-Tribunal, Anders published Visit Beautiful Vietnam, a philosophical reckoning with US propaganda and the way the Vietnam war was being conducted. The 1967 volume The Writing on the Wall (now part of Visiting Hades) works through impressions of a journey to Auschwitz and Breslau (Anders’ place of birth), which Anders undertook in 1966 together with Charlotte Zelka. The volume also collects diary entries from the 1940s and reflections on the return to the ruins of bombed European cities.

Anders responded to Hannah Arendt’s hotly debated reportage Eichmann in Jerusalem with an open letter addressed to Eichmann’s son Klaus. In We, the Sons of Eichmann (1964), Anders describes the goodliness of machine mediated life and work in the modern world as a structurally monstrous ‘Eichmannworld’. In this world, ethics is incapacitated by technology and action is transformed into mere participation. There was, however, no personal exchange on the Eichmann books between Arendt and Anders. This contact was only reestablished in 1970, after Heinrich Blücher’s death. Anders’s attempt to invoke the so called ‘Lex Arendt’ (BVerfG 2 BvR 493/66) and win reparation for his impeded academic career in Germany came to nothing after Arendt’s sudden death in 1975. Anders wrote The Battle of Cherries, a fictitious dialogue, in her memory. It was published posthumously in 2011.

Anders kept on returning to the discussion of the overarching theme of his work after 1945: the ‘Promethean gradient’. This phrase describes an increasingly more insurmountable differential between the human and the technological objects created by humans, and the consequences this has for humans and the world.

In 1970, soon after the moon landing in 1969, Anders reiterated his central thesis in The View from the Moon: The further humanity removes itself from the world, the smaller the chance for a return becomes. The more technology progresses, the smaller is the prospect to ever ‘catch up with and reign in’ the technological objects that are slipping from the grasp of their own creators. In 1972, Anders published End Time and the End of Time, a volume reflecting on the nuclear situation that thematically links up with the essay ‘On the Bomb and the Roots of our Blindness toward the Apocalypse’ (part of The Obsolescnece of Human Beings Vol. 1).

In the early 1980’s, the second volume of The Obsolescence of Human Beings, which had long been delayed, and the extended edition of End Time and the End of Time were published in quick succession (the latter with a new title: The Nuclear Menace). To date, The Nuclear Menacehas seen seven German editions. Günther Anders only occasionally went on ‘holidays from the moralism’ of fighting against the nuclear threat (Heresies, p. 341), but he did do so: for instance in his collection of poems and fables (The View from the Tower, 1968) or in essays on Art and Literature – on Kafka, Bertolt Brecht, John Heartfield, George Grosz – later republished in The Human without World. In Heresies (1982), dedicated to the ‘the fluttering creatures of metaphysics who make such a nuisance’, Anders returns to the philosophy of nature, anthropology and final questions. In the same year, Anders, a professed atheist, left the Isrealitische Kultusgemeinde, The Jewish Cultural Community Austria, in protest against Israel’s invasion of Lebanon (1982 Lebanon War). Anders wrote the self-reflective essay My Jewishness and the question of Jewishness is also a theme of the extensive correspondence collected in the literary estate, which includes exchanges with Arendt, Herbert Marcuse, Hans Magnus Enzensberger und Anders’s lifelong friend Hans Jonas, who sent the draft of his philosophical long-seller Das Prinzip Verantwortung (1979) to Vienna prior to publication.

In conversation with Gershom Scholem, 1976.

In 1986, following quieter years in the 70s, an interview prompted by the accident in Chernobyl caused a real scandal. Anders’s blunt demand that advocates and operators of nuclear installations ought ‘to be made ineffective’ provoked vehement and controversial reactions (Von ‚Notstand und Notwehr‘, S. 30). The responses of Heinrich Albertz, Robert Jungk, Petra Kelly, Hans-Christian Ströbele, Peter Glotz and others appeared alongside Anders’s own extended account in Violence – Yes or No? A Necessary Discussion (1987).

In the same year, C.H.Beck marked Anders’s 85th Birthday by publishing a festive edition of his long poem Mariechen: A Bedtime story for Lovers, Philosophers and Members of other Lines of Work. A whale swimming all alone in the Bering Strait provides the image with which Anders recounts his early philosophical anthropology to an imagined companion. He ends the story by endorsing ‘warmness of the heart and giving up on meaning / nihilism and amusement’ (p. 83). In the mid 80s and early 90s, the Austrian magazine FORVM, edited by Gerhard Oberschlick, provided a new platform for Anders’s work. Amongst other writings, this led to the publication of pieces that were to be included in the planned third volume of The Obsolescence of Human Beings (‘Language and End Time’), as well as the two biographical and sociological miniatures Slowworm (Blindschleiche) and Parsifal.

In the mid-1980s.

Late in life, Anders was awarded several public honors, notwithstanding his outsider image and the non-conciliatory nature of his work. In 1979, Anders (and alongside him, the theatre director Piero Rismondo) were the first to receive the Österreichischer Staatspreis für Kulturpublizistik. Four years later he was awarded the Theodor-W.-Adorno-Prize by the city of Frankfurt and in 1992 he received the Sigmund-Freud-Prize for Scientific Prose. He didn’t accept the Andreas-Gryphius-Prize in 1985, stating political reservations, and in the year of his death, he also turned down an honorary doctorate from the University of Vienna. From the 18-21st of October 1990, the first major academic conference on Anders’s work took place at the University of Vienna. It was organized by Konrad Paul Liessmann, who also conducted the last interview with Anders:

‘See, in 1945 there was only one threat that could truly be classified as threatening to bring about the end. There was as yet no AIDS, no natural destruction as we know it today. […] These came later. I believe that my analyses of the end time can easily be applied to these other dangers also. The fact that today we have many methods with which to commit suicide does not intrinsically alter the fundamental aspects of my analyses of the nuclear situation. But yes, I admit, today we have the choice.’

In his private life, his options diminished. In 1975, Charlotte Zelka did not return from a stay with her family in California, and from the late 1980s onwards, Anders moved together with his second wife, Elizabet Freundlich, who was by now practically blind. The marriage with Charlotte Zelka was never officially divorced. Anders’ last address in Vienna was Lackierergasse 1 in the 9th district, close to Sigmund Freud’s former office.

Anders was greatly afflicted by painful polyarthritis. He died penniless in an old people’s home in the 19th district on the 17th of December 1992, where he had spent the final year of his life greatly weakened by heart attacks and strokes. He was buried in a grave of honor in the Hernalser Cementry (row U2, grave number 2). Gerhard Oberschlick acts as his literary executor since 1992.