Auschwitz and Hiroshima: Günther Anders

Abstract Widely translated into several Western languages (with the exception of English), Günther Anders (1902–92) has, in the last two decades, attained the status of a classic figure within twentieth-century critical thought, close to Herbert Marcuse and the Frankfurt School without ever becoming one of its members. This article analyses his intellectual trajectory and his body of work, which includes many articles, essays, short stories, and even a novel. It focuses on his Jewish roots, which made him a paradigmatic representative of the ‘non-Jewish Jew’: a Jew confronted with antisemitism, an internationalist standing before the Jewish tradition. The crucial premises of his original theory, the author emphasises, were Auschwitz and Hiroshima, the extermination of European Jewry, and the atomic bomb. Set out in his most ambitious work, The Outdatedness of Human Beings (Volume 1, 1956; Volume 2, 1980), Anders’ thought appears as a kind of dialectical sublation, from a Marxist perspective, of Heidegger’s philosophy of technique (where technique has replaced human beings as the subject of history), articulated with a radical criticism of Heidegger’s political ontology.