MASTERARBEIT / MASTER’S THESIS Titel der Masterarbeit / Title of the Master‘s Thesis Writing in the Aftermath of Catastrophes: Günther Anders’ Warning Images verfasst von / submitted by Sara-Maria Walker, BA angestrebter akademischer Grad / in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Arts (MA) Wien, 2022 / Vienna, 2022 Studienkennzahl lt. Studienblatt / degree programme code as it appears on the student record sheet: UA 066 941 Studienrichtung lt. Studienblatt / degree programme as it appears on the student record sheet: Masterstudium Philosophie Betreut von / Supervisor: Doz. Mag. Dr. Erik M. Vogt Table of Contents Introduction ........................................................................................................................... 1 1. Chronology ........................................................................................................................ 9 1.1 Studying Past Hitler ..................................................................................................... 9 1.2 Becoming a Political Writer ....................................................................................... 13 2. On the Discrepancy between History and Experience: The Vienna Diary ..................... 25 2.1 On Occasional Philosophy ......................................................................................... 26 2.2 A Delayed Scream: The Best of Philosophy .............................................................. 35 2.3 Expectations Disillusioned......................................................................................... 39 2.4 Postwar Society .......................................................................................................... 46 2.5 Surface and Sound of Vienna..................................................................................... 49 2.5.1 Historical Referents ............................................................................................. 51 2.5.2 Silence ................................................................................................................. 53 2.5.3 Reversal of Victims and Perpetrators .................................................................. 53 2.5.4 Philistines of the Apocalypse............................................................................... 54 2.5.5 Distorted Recollection ......................................................................................... 57 2.5.6 Survival of a One-Armed Time Sense ................................................................. 59 2.5.7 As Though Nothing Had Happened .................................................................... 60 2.6 The Returnee .............................................................................................................. 62 2.7 The End of the Diary.................................................................................................. 66 2.8 From Diary Eyes to Eyes Closed: The Vienna Diary as a Propaedeutic for Anders’ Philosophy of Warning .................................................................................................... 71 3. Anders’ Diaries as Warning Images ................................................................................ 77 4. Attempts at Breaking the Spell of the Discrepancy between History and Experience ... 95 4.1 Japan Diary ................................................................................................................ 95 4.2 Anders’ Noah 1: The Difficulty of Warning ............................................................ 100 4.3 Anders’ Noah 2: The Prophylactic Apocalyptic ...................................................... 105 4.4 Self-Critique ............................................................................................................. 109 4.5 The Doomsday Clock, the Prophylactic Apocalyptic and Threats Today ............... 112 Conclusion ......................................................................................................................... 116 Literature ........................................................................................................................... 119 Acknowledgement ............................................................................................................. 130 Abstract ............................................................................................................................. 131 “Though they are masters of the atomic bomb, yet it is created only to destroy them.” — Simone de Beauvoir, The Ethics of Ambiguity1 “There is nothing innocuous left. The little pleasures, expressions of life that seemed exempt from the responsibility of thought, not only have an element of defiant silliness, of callous refusal to see, but directly serve their diametrical opposite. Even the blossoming tree lies the moment its bloom is seen without the shadow of terror; even the innocent ‘How lovely!’ becomes an excuse for an existence outrageously unlovely, and there is no longer beauty or consolation except in the gaze falling on horror, withstanding it, and in unalleviated consciousness of negativity holding fast to the possibility of what is better.” — Theodor W. Adorno, Minima Moralia2 “The real social function of philosophy lies in its criticism of what is prevalent.” — Max Horkheimer, “The Social Function of Philosophy”3 Introduction That contemporary threats to the world are today called out on a daily basis cannot be denied. “It is 100 seconds to midnight” – 100 seconds to a state of global calamity – the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists warns, for instance, in its 2022 Doomsday Clock Statement as the threat posed by climate change becomes greater with every passing day a wholesale transformation of what the Swedish writer Andreas Malm has recently called “fossil capital” remains absent and the threat posed by nuclear war is accelerated through 1 Simone de Beauvoir, The Ethics of Ambiguity, translated by Bernard Frechtman, New York: Philosophical Library 1948, 9. 2 Theodor W. Adorno, Minima Moralia. Reflections on a Damaged Life, translated by E.F.N. Jephcott, New York: Verso 2005, 25. 3 Max Horkheimer, “The Social Function of Philosophy” in Zeitschrift für Sozialforschung. Studies in Philosophy and Social Science, edited by Max Horkheimer, Volume 8, 1939-1940, Reprint, Munich: DTV 1980, 331. 1 the modernization of technologies as well as Russia’s invasion of Ukraine this year.4,5 At the same time what equally cannot be doubted is that, for many, life – especially in those privileged countries in which the devastation is not felt as acutely as in others – continues in a way entirely irreconcilable with these threats. Especially the threat posed by nuclear war is cast away by most without any thought given to the fact that nine governments continue to possess the power of blowing up entire cities armed with around 14,000 nuclear bombs multiple times stronger than those dropped in Hiroshima and Nagasaki in the Second World War. Daniel Immerwahr pointedly describes today’s state as one in which “[w]e’re entering an age with nuclear weapons but no nuclear memory”. 6 According to him, the enduring fear that once characterized the Cold War is fading even though historians now know how close the world came to a nuclear war.7 Fewer and fewer people are left who are able to vividly remember the news of the 4,400 kg nuclear bomb dropped on Hiroshima in 1945 or are able to recall an above-ground nuclear test, the last one being in 1980.8 But not only existential threats are for many not registered as part of their own experience: the ones murdered in wars and those dead from the ongoing pandemic are only registered by most as part of an abstract number mentioned by news anchors. One has the sense of turning off an entire world each time one shuts down one’s many technological devices or drops the papers that let one still entertain the phantasy that one’s life doesn’t translate into vehement indifference. At the same time, economic and technological systems that structure societies as well as one’s life often remain similarly unregistered as those 4 See Bulletin Science and Security Board, “At dooms doorstep: It is 100 seconds to midnight. 2022 Doomsday Clock Statement” in Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, edited by John Mecklin, 20 January 2022, accessed 13 June 2022, URL: https://thebulletin.org/doomsday-clock/current-time/. Also see the statement published in the wake of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine: Bulletin Science and Security Board, “Bulletin Science and Security Board condemns Russian invasion of Ukraine; Doomsday Clock stays at 100 seconds to midnight” in Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, 7 March 2022, accessed 13 June 2022, URL: https://thebulletin.org/2022/03/bulletin-science-and-securityboard-condemns-russian-invasion-of-ukraine-doomsday-clock-stays-at-100-seconds-to midnight/?utm_source=ClockStatementPage&utm_medium=Web&utm_campaign=DoomsdayClo ckMarchStatement. 5 The term “fossil capital” coined by Andreas Malm refers to capitalism’s dependency on the combustion of fossil fuels. See Andreas Malm, Fossil Capital. The Rise of Steam Power and the Roots of Global Warming, New York: Verso 2016. 6 Daniel Immerwahr, “Forgetting the apocalypse: why our nuclear fears faded – and why that’s dangerous” in The Guardian, 12 May 2022, accessed 1 September 2022, URL: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2022/may/12/forgetting-the-apocalypse-why-our-nuclearfears-faded-and-why-thats-dangerous. 7 ibid. 8 ibid. 2 physical processes internal to the body. And though science and technology make us into what Sigmund Freud called a “prosthetic God”, the way we become subject to the needs of these prostheses – be it the smartphone or those power plants enabling the usage of our devices – is often a process entirely unconscious to us.9 What is apparent then is that experience is governed by discrepancies that have become so naturalized that they only rarely become the source of stupefaction. Instead these discrepancies have become second nature upon whose mention most will likely only shrug their shoulders. However, in light of contemporary threats and the wider global failure of governments and society mitigating them, one might have to ask oneself if those threats do not also find their correlative in that experience in which those threats largely go unseen and unfelt. Don’t existential threats find an ally in the individual that believes in the stable world before its eyes in spite of its knowledge of the uninhabitable planet prepared by the present? One could thus ask if it would not be the task of a philosophy that aims at grappling with the most urgent problems of contemporary society to examine experience that proceeds with such indifference to present and future suffering and to turn toward that prevalent phenomenon, that one could call the discrepancy between history and experience. In order to confront this task, one might first seek to find older philosophical efforts of analyzing and contending with the irreconcilability of experience and history. There had in fact been a writer in the last century who such an effort lead to argue that we can only truly see today with our eyes closed, meaning that the catastrophic state of the world can only be known once a widened imagination takes the place of that familiar gaze upon an illusory stable world that leads to blindness for the past, the present as well as the future.10 This writer was the German-born author and anti-nuclear activist Günther Anders who sought to detect those discrepancies structuring experience in wake of the 20th century catastrophes of Auschwitz and Hiroshima. For Anders, the problem of discrepancies structuring experience became most acute with the invention of the atomic bomb and its capacity for destruction being too vast for the imagination to truly grasp its dimensions. The blindness in the face of the bomb that he held to characterize the experience of the majority of people, was rooted, according to 9 See Sigmund Freud, Civilization and its Discontents, translated and edited by James Strachey, New York: Norton & Company 1962, 39. 10 In his Japan Diary from 1958, Anders writes that “real vision today is only possible with one’s eyes being closed”. See Günther Anders, “Der Mann auf der Brücke. Tagebuch aus Hiroshima und Nagasaki (1958)” in Hiroshima ist überall, Munich: C.H. Beck 1982, 48. 3 him, in the fundamental discrepancy between that which humanity has become capable of technologically producing and the consequences of that production, which humanity is no longer fully capable of imagining. 11 What is integral to Anders’ “philosophy of discrepancy” – a term through which he characterized his work in retrospect – is the examination of his own experiences as well as those of his contemporaries as they related to the catastrophes of the Second World War, the Cold War, the Vietnam War and the nuclear disaster in Chernobyl.12 In order to examine the discrepancies of experience and present them in their starkness, Anders devised a form of philosophy that emerged from the concrete experience of the contemporary world, which he would call “Gelegenheitsphilosophie” [“occasional philosophy”].13 His occasional philosophy can be described as the effort of creating literary and philosophical interventions by detecting prevalent forms of amnesia, indifference and non-contemporaneity and by analyzing technologies such as the nuclear bomb as well as the everyday language that disguises the consequences of such technologies. Anders understood his writing as a form of warning, dedicated to leading his contemporaries to insight and practice in a new era in which blowing up the entire world became possible after millions were systematically murdered in the Nazi camps and thousands lost their lives in heat flashes of “Fat Man” and “Little Boy” and died from radiation sickness in the aftermath.14 In order to better understand experience and devise a philosophy éngagée that could serve as a form of warning in the nuclear age, Anders experimented with literary forms. His occasional philosophy adopted the form of the essay, the fable, the manifesto, the parable, the aphorism, the gloss, the dialogue as well as the philosophical diary and would frequently consist in an amalgamation of these forms. While Anders is most known for his analysis of the fundamental discrepancy between production and imagination mentioned above, which he introduces in an essay on the 11 See Günther Anders, Die Antiquiertheit des Menschen 1. Über die Seele im Zeitalter der zweiten industriellen Revolution, Munich: C.H. Beck 2018 [1956], 296-300. 12 See Günther Anders, “Die Bombe hängt nicht nur über den Universitäten” in Günther Anders antwortet, edited by Elke Schubert, Interview with Norbert Weidl and Michael Köhler 1983, Berlin: Tiamat 1987, 104. In this thesis, all originally untranslated German quotes are my translation, unless otherwise indicated. 13 Anders describes his work as occasional philosophy in Die Antiquiertheit des Menschen. See Anders, Die Antiquiertheit des Menschen 1. Über die Seele im Zeitalter der zweiten industriellen Revolution, 20. See also Max Beck, Günther Anders’ Gelegenheitsphilosophie, Vienna: Klever 2017. 14 For Anders the invention of the atomic bomb designated a new era that he would describe as “Frist” [“reprieve”]. See Günther Anders, “Die Frist” in Die atomare Drohung, Munich: C.H. Beck 2003 [1981], 170-221. 4 bomb to be found in his most known work Die Antiquiertheit des Menschen [The Obsolescence of Man] from 1956, I intend to show that many of his most versatile and microscopic analyses of the discrepancy between history and experience can be found in Anders’ diary on postwar Vienna “Wiedersehen und Vergessen. Rückkehr nach Europa 1950” [“Returning and Forgetting. Return to Europe 1950”] in which he grapples with the world following the years of National Socialism and the catastrophe of Auschwitz.15 The absence of any more extended consideration of this diary within the secondary literature appears to call out for particular attention. In this thesis, I intend to demonstrate how the Vienna Diary, which captures Anders’ experience of returning to Europe after his fourteen year long American exile can be read as a “propaedeutic” for Anders’ later writing explicitly dedicated to warning against the atomic bomb and its consequences. Anders’ diaries, by contrast to the commonplace idea of diary writing, are not so much concerned with the idea of a presumed interiority but are instead a unique instrument for seeing in the appearance of the present what otherwise goes unseen. They are a medium for registering the many ways in which contemporary society and the appearance of the present is non-contemporaneous with its own time: its technologies, the ruin and liquidation of humans brought about in the past and the continual preparation for upcoming ruin and disasters. Anders’ diaries were for instance drafted during his exile in America, upon his arrival in Paris, in Vienna, in German cities in the early 1950s, upon his trip to Japan in 1958 and upon his trip to his birthplace Breslau. Anders’ “diary eyes” can 15 See Günther Anders, “Wiedersehen und Vergessen” in Tagebücher und Gedichte, Munich: C.H. Beck 1985, 94-213. The diary “Wiedersehen und Vergessen” was first published in its entirety in the collection of Anders’ diaries Die Schrift an der Wand. Tagebücher 1941 bis 1966 in 1967. Jason Dawsey has translated the title of the diary as “Returning and Forgetting” and has so far been the only one to analyze the diary thoroughly. See Jason Dawsey, “Where Hitler’s Name is Never Spoken: Günther Anders in 1950s Vienna” in Austrian Lives, edited by Günter Bischof, Fritz Plasser and Eva Maltschnig, New Orleans: University of New Orleans Press, Innsbruck: Innsbruck University Press 2012, 212-239. On Anders’ return to Europe, see Kerstin Putz, “‘Zufällige Konstanz’. Günther Anders’ Remigration nach Wien” in Bilderbuch Heimkehr? Remigration im Kontext, edited by Katharina Prager and Wolfgang Straub, Wuppertal: Arco 2017, 313- 323. See also Ann-Kathrin Pollmann, “Die Rückkehr von Günther Anders nach Europa – Eine doppelte Nach-Geschichte” in Jahrbuch des Simon-Dubnow-Instituts/Simon-DubnowInstitute Yearbook XI, edited by Dan Diner, Göttingen, Bristol, Conn.: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht 2012, 389–409. For a dissertation dealing with Anders’ diaries from his time in exile, see FinciPocrnja: “Der Schriftsteller-Philosoph im Exil. Zum Stil von Günther Anders’ Schriften anhand von ausgewählten tagebuchartigen Aufzeichnungen”, unpublished dissertation, University of Vienna, 2015. On Anders’ conception of the diary as well as a discussion of his literary and philosophical practice more generally, see the chapter “Philosophisches Erzählen & ,brauchbare Geschichten‘ | Günther Anders” in Kerstin Putz, Geschichte|n im Detail. Anekdoten in den Kulturwissenschaften, unpublished dissertation, University of Vienna 2017, 199-230. 5 be described as those of a “critical ethnographer” of postwar societies.16 Anders’ diaries as well as his wider experiment in literary forms also point to a void within contemporary philosophy, which with its professionalization increasingly breaks with the long tradition within philosophical writing to find new forms of philosophical production.17 And while this thesis will primarily be concerned with Anders’ literary experiment of the diary and the way in which he examines the discrepancy there between experience and history, the thesis hopes to call into question the academic mode of production of contemporary philosophy that is often taken as self-evident. As Werner Stegmaier points out in his recent study on the history of the forms of philosophical writing, the majority of contemporary philosophers are indifferent to the literary forms of philosophy although this is an entirely unhistorical mode of philosophical production. The history of philosophical writing demonstrates how new forms of writing often emerged from new situations that required orientation.18 While the practice of occasional philosophy was a way for Anders to orientate himself in the situations that he found himself during his time in exile during the Second World War and during the postwar period, he impressed upon his readers – and continues to do so upon the contemporary reader – that the entries found in his diaries are not simply a testimony of the dreadful years he had witnessed but are also “warning images” written for the present in order for the past not to be repeated.19 And one might do well to attempt to read them as such warning images because, however far removed from his time one might insist to find oneself today, Anders’ entries possess a knowledge of that disparate everyday experience structured by discrepancies that is also one’s own. Undeniably, Anders’ diaries are written against the very catastrophic future humanity prepared in his lifetime as well as the one it continues to prepare to this day. Before examining Anders’ diary written upon his return to Europe in 1950 “Wiedersehen und Vergessen”, the first chapter of this thesis will provide a chronology of Anders’ life from his years as a student of Husserl and Heidegger in the 1920s to his return to Europe after seventeen years of exile in France and the United States. Through this chronology, I 16 See Dawsey, “Where Hitler’s Name is Never Spoken: Günther Anders in 1950s Vienna”, 219220. 17 For a study of the many forms of philosophy see Werner Stegmaier, Formen philosopher Schriften zur Einführung, Hamburg: Junius 2021; Christiane Schildknecht (ed.), Philosophische Masken. Literarische Formen der Philosophie bei Platon, Descartes, Wolff und Lichtenberg, Stuttgart: Metzler 1990; Gottfried Gabriel, Christiane Schildknecht (eds.), Literarische Formen der Philosophie, Stuttgart: Metzler 1990. In none of these studies is Anders’ work mentioned. 18 Stegmaier, Formen philosophischer Schriften zur Einführung, 10-13. 19 See Anders, “Warnbilder” in Das Tagebuch und der moderne Autor, edited by Uwe Schultz, Frankfurt am Main, Berlin, Wien: Ullstein 1982 [originally published by Carl Hanser in 1965]. 6 will trace the discrepancies between the practice of philosophy and political reality and between experience and history Anders experienced in his early life as a student, which materialized in retrospect for him in a blindness of the threat posed by National Socialism in the 1920s and in his subsequent continual efforts in finding more adequate forms of philosophical production stemming from the need to comprehend better the present and work against that blindness that governed his life as student. In the second chapter, before examining Anders’ Vienna Diary, I will discuss Anders’ concept of occasional philosophy on the basis of an unpublished manuscript that Anders wrote during his time in exile and upon his return to Europe in 1950 in order to track the evolvement of the concept of occasional philosophy. Afterwards, I will discuss Anders’ Vienna Diary and the way in which he finds there a form of intellectual production capable of uniquely capturing discrepancies between history and experience in postwar Europe on the basis of an examination of Vienna’s appearance, the speech of the Viennese as well as his own reactions to the city as a returnee. I will argue that what Anders found to take place in Vienna in the war’s aftermath in 1950 led him to crucial insights whose consequences he drew in his later writing explicitly dedicated to warning against the nuclear threat. In the third chapter, I will examine Anders’ concept of diary writing as the creation of warning images and discuss the way in which the entries of the Vienna Diary can be read as warning images from which Anders himself drew the consequences. In the fourth and last chapter, I will grapple with Anders’ writing explicitly dedicated to warning against the nuclear threat, that is, firstly, his Japan Diary “Der Mann auf der Brücke. Tagebuch aus Hiroshima und Nagasaki (1958)” [“The Man on the Bridge. Diary from Hiroshima and Nagasaki (1958)”]. One could argue that the Vienna Diary introduces the idea that in order to know the present, one needs to walk through a city with eyes and ears open and attentive to sounds and surfaces in order understand the way in which the past reverberates in the present but more importantly also register the many ways in which the past is irreconcilably lost and fails to become the object of experience. The Japan Diary could be read as a response to the Vienna Diary. It formulates the wish to break the spell of the discrepancy between history and experience by introducing the idea that one can only truly experience today’s world with one’s eyes closed and if a widened imagination of past catastrophes and a possibly catastrophic future takes the place of the appearance of the present in which such knowledge often fails to impress itself upon experience. I will, however, also demonstrate that Anders was very much conscious of the 7 ways in which warning about a catastrophic future fails by examining the story of Noah Anders remakes for the nuclear age and integrates within the Japan Diary. Finally, I will illustrate the way in which Anders reacted to failed attempts of warning about the future by discussing a later rewritten version of the Noah story, which introduces the idea that what would be necessary in order for warnings not to fail would be a change of people’s time consciousness. In the rewritten story, Anders presents Noah as what he calls “a prophylactic apocalyptic”, that is someone who anticipates the future dead and laments their end in the present in order to be proven wrong so that the goal achieved would be identical with his own prophecy ultimately becoming false.20 In the final section of the last chapter, I will ask after the implications of the problems Anders faced when warning about existential threats. I will also pose the question what a changed time consciousness would need to entail in our contemporary world characterized by the perpetuity of the nuclear threat as well as the compounding threat posed by climate change. Through this thesis, I hope to at once offer a reading of Anders’ work through the lens of the discrepancy between history and experience so prevalent in Anders’ Japan Diary, his rewritten Noah story as well as his Vienna Diary. I also hope to illustrate Anders’ continual effort at finding more experimental forms of intellectual production that respond to the present by attempting to find more adequate expressions of the atomic age through language than the appearance of reality could provide. Finally, I hope to show that many questions Anders confronted in his lifetime concerning societal and technological changes, philosophical and literary production as well as the time consciousness of catastrophe, tackle problems contemporary philosophy would do well to make its own, if it has not lost the aspiration to grapple with the most pressing concerns of the present. 20 See Anders, “Die Frist”, 179. 8 1. Chronology 1.1 Studying Past Hitler After the National Socialist German Worker’s Party was officially established at the Hofbräuhaus in Munich and Adolf Hitler became their chairman in the early 1920s, approximately two thousand Nazis marched against the Weimar Republic in the failed Munich Putsch of 1923. At that time, 315 km west of Munich, a student named Günther Stern, who later became known as Günther Anders, studied philosophy at the University of Freiburg with two men whose names later entered the history of philosophy: Edmund Husserl, the founder of phenomenology, who did not live to witness the beginnings of the Second World War; and Husserl’s assistant, Martin Heidegger, who published his magnum opus Being and Time in 1927 and became a member of the Nazi party in 1933.21 In the wake of the First World War Husserl’s phenomenology attracted many students with its call “to the things themselves” and the strive to make philosophy a “strict science” that could keep up with the progress undergone in other academic fields and develop norms of reason through which individual and communal life could be ethically orientated.22 At the time, Husserl himself wrote to William Hocking that in thirty years he never had a listenership so hungry for ideals and noted that the recent war had not only unveiled the moral and religious but also the philosophical plight of humanity. 23 Phenomenology’s aim was to provide a new foundation of epistemology devoid of 21 Anders was born as Günther Sigmund Stern in Breslau, Silesia in 1902. His parents, Clara and William Stern were very well regarded psychologists whose work on the psychology of early childhood was largely based on observations of their own children, Hilde (born 1900), Günther and Eva (born 1904). The results of their research can be found in Psychologie der frühen Kindheit [Psychology of early Childhood] published in 1914. Before coming to Freiburg, Anders studied philosophy with Ernst Cassirer, art history with Erwin Panofsky and psychology with his father at the University of Hamburg. See Konrad Liessmann, Günther Anders. Philosophieren im Zeitalter technologischer Revolutionen, Munich: C.H. Beck 2019 [2002], 14-19; Christian Dries, Günther Anders, Paderborn: Wilhelm Fink 2009, 10. On the last pages of Anders’ dissertation one can find further names of professors who he studied with. See Günther Stern, “Die Rolle der Situationskategorien bei den ‘Logischen Sätzen’”, unpublished Dissertation, Freiburg 1924, 102, URL: http://forvm.contextxxi.org/die-rolle-der-situationskategorien.html. 22 See Eckhard Wittulski, “Der tanzendende Phänomenologe” in Günther Anders kontrovers, edited by Konrad Paul Liessmann, Munich: C.H. Beck 1992, 19. 23 Edmund Husserl, Husserliana – Edmund Husserl, Gesammelte Werke, Band XXVII, Dordrecht/Boston/Lancaster: Kluwer 1989, XIII, footnote; as cited in Wittulski, “Der tanzendende Phänomenologe”, 19. 9 metaphysics as well as historicity.24 Many of Husserl’s classes were phenomenological analyses of concrete objects such as writing utensils with the aim of cognizing their timeless essence. 25 This attraction to phenomenology “with its pretention to behold absolute essences and laws of essence in an eternally valid form” was later interpreted by Max Horkheimer, who, like Anders, had studied in Freiburg in the 1920s, as stemming from the need to rescue something absolutely valid [“irgendetwas absolut Gültiges”] in midst of a general destruction of all that was formerly believed or admired.26 Anders later similarly recalled a desperate youth that sought for doctrines at the time: “the phenomenology of Husserl despite its soberness”. 27 However, the preparation of the fascist regime that would soon bring about a new war had already been underway: Hitler dictated Mein Kampf to two prisoners at Landsberg Prison in 1924. At that time Anders submitted his dissertation on “Die Rolle der Situationskategorien bei den ‘Logischen Sätzen’” [“The Role of the Situation Categories in ‘Logical Sentences’”] at the age of twenty-two under the supervision of Husserl. While Anders had been intrigued by Husserl, like many others, Anders’ dissertation is a critique of Husserl’s phenomenology for focusing on pure consciousness cut off from factuality and thus excluding time, reality and the psychic-subjective genesis of thought.28 When Hitler’s Mein Kampf was published a year later in 1925, a second volume following in 1926, Anders followed Husserl’s former assistant Heidegger to Marburg. Along with Herbert Marcuse, Hans Jonas, Karl Löwith and Hannah Arendt, Anders was fascinated by Heidegger’s so-called “concrete” philosophy of human existence, providing a kind of anchoring of philosophy within the world. While Anders later recalled having stood under a demonic spell cast by Heidegger’s breakthrough to metaphysics and ontology, his later friend Marcuse remembered that Heidegger’s “concrete philosophy” at the time appeared as a “new beginning” dedicated to “the talk of existence [Existenz], of our existence, of fear [Angst] and care and boredom”.29 Both Anders and Marcuse later sharply criticized their former 24 Wittulski, “Der tanzendende Phänomenologe”, 20-21. ibid., 21-22. 26 Max Horkheimer, Gesammelte Schriften, Band 10, Nachgelassene Schriften 1915-1931, Frankfurt: Suhrkamp 1990, 176; as cited in Wittulski, “Der tanzendende Phänomenologe”, 18-19. 27 Günther Anders, “Nihilismus und Existenz” in Über Heidegger, edited by Gerhard Oberschlick, Munich: C.H. Beck 2001, 42. 28 See Reinhard Ellensohn, Der andere Anders: Günther Anders als Musikphilosoph, Pieterien, Bern: Peter Lang 2008, 34-35; Eckhard Wittulski, “Der tanzende Phänomenologe”, 23-25. 29 Günther Anders, “Wenn ich verzweifelt bin, was geht’s mich an?” in Günther Anders antwortet. Interviews und Erklärungen, edited by Elke Schubert, Interview with Mathias Greffrath 1979, Berlin: Tiamat 1987, 22; Herbert Marcuse, “Postscript: My Disillusionment with Heidegger” in Heideggerian Marxism, edited Richard Wolin and John Abromeit, Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press 2005, 176; as cited in Jason Dawsey, “Ontology and Ideology: Günther Anders’s 25 10 teacher’s betrayal as well as his philosophy.30 In retrospect, Anders marked considerable tensions between him and Heidegger already in 1927 when he charged Heidegger of advocating an “anthropology of rootedness” with problematic political implications. 31 Later he criticized Heidegger’s philosophy for its actual “pseudo-concreteness”, for cloistering itself away from phenomena structuring contemporary society such as capitalism and technology. “The province of Heidegger’s concreteness begins behind hunger and ends before the economy and the machine: in the middle ‘Dasein’ is sitting around, hammering its ‘Zeug’ and thereby demonstrates ‘Sorge’ and the renaissance of ontology”, Anders would later write. 32 What becomes apparent is that, although Heidegger’s ontology as well as Husserl’s phenomenology promised philosophy’s commitment to concrete phenomena, both philosophical approaches had been for Anders no means to better comprehend the threats nascent within the present and led him to later recall his time as a student between 1920 and 1927 as a totally “politics-free intermezzo” that he later found hard to comprehend.33 Despite the experiences he had made during the First World War, the rise of National Socialism had moved into the background at the time of his studies. 34 “Even though I didn’t then regard that man [Hitler], who had already Philosophical and Political Confrontation with Heidegger” in Critical Historical Studies, Volume 4, Number 1, Spring 2017, Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 6. 30 Marcuse sharply criticized Heidegger in a correspondence that took place between 1947 and 1948 and was published in 1987. In the first letter, Marcuse writes to Heidegger: “You remained in Germany after 1934, although you could have found a position abroad practically anywhere. You never publicly denounced any of the actions or ideologies of the regime”. For the letters see Martin Heidegger, Herbert Marcuse, “Herbert Marcuse and Martin Heidegger: An Exchange of Letters” in New German Critique, translated by Richard Wolin, No. 53, Spring/Summer 1991, Durham: Duke University Press, 28-32. 31 In an interview from 1979, Anders recalls that he charged Heidegger with these accusations at his stay at Heidegger’s hut in Todtnauberg in 1926 or 1927. During the stay, Heidegger apparently already treated Anders with contempt. Anders also recalls the moment in which Heidegger’s wife asked him whether he would also join the National Socialists to which he replied “Look at me! [...] Then you will understand that I belong to those who you wish to exclude.” See Anders, “Wenn ich verzweifelt bin, was geht’s mich an?”, 23-25. 32 Günther Stern (Anders), “On the Pseudo-Concreteness of Heidegger’s Philosophy” in Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, Volume 8, No 1, March 1948, New Jersey: WileyBlackwell, 347. 33 Günther Anders, “Einleitung” in Mensch ohne Welt. Schriften zur Kunst und Literatur, Munich: C.H. Beck 1993 [1984], XIV. 34 During the First World War, Anders witnessed mutilated soldiers when being sent from Germany to France to serve at a paramilitary union with his schoolmates. “On the way, at a train station, probably in Lüttich, I saw a number of men who, strangely, began at the hips. They were soldiers who had been placed on their stumps and leaned against the wall. So they waited for the train home”, Anders recalled in an interview with Mathias Greffrath. See Günther Anders; Mathias Greffrath, Mathias, “Lob der Sturheit” in Die Zeit, No. 28, 4 July 2002, accessed 12 February 2022, URL: https://www.zeit.de/2002/28/200228_a-anders.xml. During Anders’ service, he befriended a French boy. His schoolmates regarded this to be as an act of treason for which they started torturing him. For the first time, Anders underwent what he would call “the Jewish fate of 11 back then openly and publicly supported the degradation and elimination of people, as a roaring clown”, Anders recalled: But I, or the likes of us – I mean the intellectually and morally alive academic youth of my generation –, we nonetheless almost studied past [beinahe vorbeistudiert] this figure and his movement; and did not recognize that nothing, no Heideggerian “Thrownness” and no renaissance of music from the Middle Ages (these were the sensations at the Uni Freiburg) was as important as it would have been to oust Hitler and his movement. After 55 years, this blindness is for me today and with Auschwitz before my eyes, which I cannot or do not want to or am not allowed to wipe out – nonetheless inconceivable. If not to say: shameful.35 However, Anders soon began to work against the earlier blindness that had characterized his time as a student. In 1928 Anders read Mein Kampf for the first time and despite his mocking friends understood the danger of this, as Anders would later call it, “mean, loathing, hate arousing, [...], ceremonious, rhetorically thrilling [...] undoubtedly very intelligent book”.36 Anders came to take the threat that Hitler and his party posed more and more seriously. Nevertheless, it took some years for Anders to become the politically engaged writer warning against contemporary forms of blindness he would later become known for. Yet it seems that Anders’ early experience of “almost studying past Hitler” made him aware of an often-existent gulf between practices of philosophy and political reality. Later, Anders intended to overcome this gulf through his philosophical production. However, one could argue that important elements implicit to the philosophies of Anders’ teachers – Husserl’s phenomenology with its gaze upon objects of daily experience and Heidegger’s existential philosophy with its emphasis on existence within the world – are taken up and transformed in Anders’ work. In the next section, I will trace Anders’ life from the end of the 1920s up to his years in exile in France and the United States, to his speechlessness upon the dropping of the atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki and to his return to Europe in the early 1950s. I will thereby attempt to illustrate Anders’ path to becoming a politically engaged writer experimenting with forms of intellectual production. prosecution”. See Günther Anders, “Mein Judentum” in Mein Judentum, edited by Hans Jürgen Schultz, Stuttgart: Kreuz Verlag 1978, 62. 35 Anders, “Wenn ich verzweifelt bin, was geht’s mich an?”, 21-22. 36 Anders as cited Liessmann, Günther Anders. Philosophieren im Zeitalter technischer Revolutionen, 21. 12 1.2 Becoming a Political Writer After Anders’ break with Heidegger around 1927, which Anders would later describe to Theodor W. Adorno as a “harsh, personal turning away”, Anders’ philosophical interest moved closer to a philosophical anthropology stemming from his engagement with Max Scheler who he assisted for a short time in 1926.37 Also Marx’ ideas of alienation and dehumanization started to shape his work.38 In 1928, Anders published Über das Haben. Sieben Kapitel zur Ontologie der Erkenntnis [On Having. Seven Chapters on the Ontology of Cognition], in which he examines the specific nature of cognition and whose last chapter resembles Anders’ dissertation.39 At the end of the 1920s, a classical academic career still seemed a possibility for Anders. He thus hoped to be asked to habilitate after giving a lecture on philosophical anthropology, “Freiheit und Erfahrung” [“Freedom and Experience”], at the Kant-Congress in Frankfurt in 1930 in front of Horkheimer, Adorno, Karl Mannheim, Paul Tillich and Hannah Arendt.40 Arendt and Anders married in 1929 after an acquaintance in Berlin and moved to Frankfurt. 41 Anders’ early philosophical anthropology that he presented at the congress argues that in contrast to the animal that relates to the world through instincts, man’s relationship to the world is structured by being estranged from the world even though man is existentially dependent on it. Man’s freedom consists in his indeterminateness, which enables man to change throughout history in the changing artificial world he creates. 42 Though Anders’ lecture at the congress was well received, Anders’ habilitation project “Philosophische Untersuchungen über musikalische Situationen” [“Philosophical Investigations of Musical Situations”] with Tillich subsequently failed due to misgivings by Adorno for its closeness to Heidegger’s thought.43 Tillich suggested that Anders should wait until 1932 to propose a project on Friedrich Schelling. According to Dawsey, Tillich’s suggestion exemplified a 37 Günther Anders: Letter to Theodor W. Adorno on 27.08.63, Literary Archive of the Austrian National Library, Vienna (LIT), Nachlass Günther Anders, Sign.: 237/B1479; as cited and translated in Jason Dawsey, The Limits of the Human in the Age of Technological Revolution: Günther Anders, Post-Marxism and the Emergence of Technology Critique, unpublished dissertation, University of Chicago 2013, 37-39. 38 ibid., 39. 39 See Wittulski, “Der tanzende Phänomenologe,” 27-28. 40 ibid., 28. 41 Elizabeth Young-Bruehl, Hannah Arendt. For Love of the World, New Haven, London: Yale University Press 1983, 77-78. 42 For a discussion of Anders’ philosophical anthropology, see Dries, Günther Anders, 23-31. 43 Dawsey, The Limits of the Human in the Age of Technological Revolution: Günther Anders, Post-Marxism and the Emergence of Technology Critique, 46. 13 general assumption of the German Left that the momentum that the Nazi Party had gained in the 1930 Reichstag vote would die down.44 In a late interview, Anders recalled that at the time it had still been conceivable for him to write a system of philosophical anthropology, which he had prepared in 1929. “But then came Hitler”, Anders said, “or rather the pre-Hitler times and the demand of the day, that turned into the ‘demand of years’, [that] tasked me from mornings to evenings”.45 Anders did not propose a habilitation project again but moved with Arendt to Berlin where he became acquainted with the artists John Heartfield, George Grosz and Bertolt Brecht whose politically engaged art left a lasting impression on Anders.46 Anders met Brecht after he had written a radio production on “Bertolt Brecht als Denker” [“Bertolt Brecht as a Thinker”], which impressed Brecht who was at that time foremost known as the author of the Dreigroschenoper [Three Penny Opera] and was not recognized as a thinker by most philosophers. 47 Brecht made sure that Anders got a job at Herbert’s Ihering’s Berliner Börsen-Courier.48 The new form of thought that Anders found in Brecht’s work with its “unmasking and criminalization of the bourgeois world” also shows itself in some of the articles that Anders wrote in Ihering’s paper.49 Micaela Latini points out that Brecht played a major role in Anders “endeavor to turn his back on the academic world”. 50 Although Anders had already argued for a philosophy of timeliness and practice in 1924, following his acquaintance with Brecht, he identified a crisis in academic philosophy and 44 ibid., 47-48. Anders, “Wenn ich verzweifelt bin, was geht’s mich an?”, 27. 46 Dawsey points out that Anders’ relationships to these artists contributed decisively to shifts in his anthropological thinking. Furthermore, engaging in the critique of radical art and modernist literature spurred his thoughts on new forms of unfreedom. See Dawsey, The Limits of the Human in the Age of Technological Revolution: Günther Anders, Post-Marxism and the Emergence of Technology Critique, 51. 47 Unfortunately, the radio production could not be preserved. See Günther Anders, “‘Geschichten vom Herrn Keuner’ (1979)” in Mensch ohne Welt. Schriften zur Kunst und Literatur, Munich: C.H. Beck 1993 [1984], 159. 48 Anders, who was at that point still known as Günther Stern, contributed so many articles to Ihering’s paper that Ihering and him came to the conclusion that some of Anders’ articles would be published under the name “Anders”. According to Anders, from that moment on, he published all non-philosophical texts under the name “Günther Anders”. See Anders, “Wenn ich verzweifelt bin, was geht’s mich an?”, 29-30. 49 Micaela Latini, “Die letzten Bilder der Menschheit. Günther Anders und die deutschsprachige Literatur” in Studia Austriaca, Vol. 25, 6 June 2017, accessed 25 September 2022, URL: https://riviste.unimi.it/index.php/StudiaAustriaca/article/view/8542/11654. 50 Micaela Latini, “Die letzten Bilder der Menschheit. Günther Anders und die deutschsprachige Literatur”. 45 14 an uncertainty in its style.51 According to Anders, the problem of academic philosophy is that it does not know “for whom philosophy is being done” and “is undecided about whether [...] to transmit existing knowledge [...], to create new theoretical material or [...] to speak to a non-theoretical side of mankind”.52 In an article published a few months later, he argued that philosophy ought to also address non-philosophers.53 As Bernhard Fetz writes, this “plea to an active philosophy, one that was comprehensible to large numbers of people, charted the path on which Anders would remain for the rest of his philosophical life”. 54 During his time in Berlin and following his acquaintance with Brecht, Anders himself started to experiment with literary forms as well as started to work on a didactic anti-fascist Novella Die Molussische Katakombe [The Molussian Catacomb] for which he would collect Nazi-flyers to understand fascist mechanisms.55 The work is a collection of fables placed in the framework of a novel that tells the story of the dictatorial state Molussia and Molussia’s older generation of prisoners who pass on stories of resistance against the regime they had learned by heart to the younger generation of prisoners. According to Anders, the book had been influenced by Brecht’s fables and was close to the concerns of Marxism in its ideology critique and dismantlement of vocabulary.56 Unfortunately, the book could not be published at the time and thus could never, according to Anders, fulfill its intended function.57 It was published in the year of Anders’ death in 1992. In a late interview, Anders recalled that from 1931 to 1945 the content of his writing had almost entirely been National Socialism and the war. 58 Anders’ Molussia manuscript illustrates the way in which the dedication to certain content required a different form. 51 Günther Anders [Stern], “Smarte Philosophie” in Berliner Börsen Courier, Nr. 101, 1 March 1932; as cited and translated in Bernhard Fetz, “Writing Poetry Today: Günther Anders between Literature and Philosophy” in The Life and Work of Günther Anders. Émigré, Iconoclast, Philosopher, Man of Letters, edited by Günter Bischof, Jason Dawsey and Bernhard Fetz, Innsbruck, Wien, Bozen: Studienverlag 2014, 121. 52 Anders as cited in ibid., 121. 53 Günther Anders [Stern]: “Philosophische Tips” in Berliner Börsen-Courier, Nr. 579, 11 December 1932; as cited in Putz, Geschichte|n im Detail. Anekdoten in den Kulturwissenschaften, 207. 54 Bernhard Fetz, “Writing Poetry Today: Günther Anders between Literature and Philosophy”, 122. 55 See Elke Schmitter, “Nachrichten aus der Katakombe. Günther Anders fabuliert” in Ganz Anders? Philosophie zwischen akademischen Jargon und Alltagssprache, edited by Rüdiger Zill, Berlin: Parerga 2007, 162. 56 Anders, “Wenn ich verzweifelt bin, was geht’s mich an?”, 31. 57 ibid., 31. 58 ibid., 28. 15 “The wide spectrum of philosophical issues was of course supplanted by literary genres – whereby I mean that from now on I no longer wrote philosophical-discursive prose, at least barely, but instead made use of the different literary genres depending on the occasion”, Anders recalled. 59 Because Anders addressed his political writing to the Germans, he argued that it would be senseless to formulate his didactic texts in such a way that they could only be understood by academic colleagues: “As senseless, as when a baker would only bake his breads for fellow bakers”. 60 Thus he saw the literary form better suited for his purpose than the philosophical treatise. During Anders’ time in Berlin in the early 1930s, he also started publishing his literary texts such as poems and stories under the name “Anders”.61 What also needs to be taken into account for this change in Anders’ writerly production is that in Berlin Anders found himself in the social milieu of left-wing artists experimenting with artistic forms. Politically engaged artists like Grosz, Heartfield and Brecht seemed to have had a strong influence upon Anders’ own practice of writing, which became more political as well as more experimental in the 1930s. Anders’ appreciation for Heartfield becomes palpable in an address that Anders gave a few years later at a Heartfield exhibition in New York where he praised Heartfield’s photomontage’s capacity to render visible the interrelatedness [“Verkettung”] of elements within reality that in everyday life remains invisible to the eyes.62 Grosz’ work, Anders would later argue, needs to be understood as “‘an optical version of Marxism’” because Grosz confronts the “appearance of the world” as the theorists of Marxism confronted “opinions about the world”. 63 Brecht’s usage of “alienation”, on the other hand, was necessary to reevaluate too familiar situations that we unjustly regard as unchangeable and do so to our ruin.64 What is apparent then, is that these artists had different approaches toward concrete phenomena of everyday life than Anders’ former teachers. They aimed at finding an artistic and experimental approach to analyzing life under capitalism and the rise of fascism, finding means to make something visible that otherwise goes unseen. These approaches to social reality appear to have allowed for a better comprehension of societal tendencies than the philosophy at Freiburg was able to offer. 59 ibid., 28. ibid., 28. 61 ibid., 30. 62 See Günther Anders, “Über Photomontage. Ansprache zur Eröffnung der Heartfield-Ausstellung 1938 in New York” in Mensch ohne Welt. Schriften zur Kunst und Literatur, Munich: C.H. Beck 1992 [1984], 175-176. 63 Günther Anders, “George Grosz” in Mensch ohne Welt. Schriften zur Kunst und Literatur, Munich: C.H. Beck 1992 [1984], 211. 64 Günther Anders, “‘Leben des Galilei’ (Sept. 1966)” in Mensch ohne Welt. Schriften zur Kunst und Literatur, Munich: C.H. Beck 1992 [1984], 158. 60 16 In the early 1930s Anders did not only respond to the rise of National Socialism through writing. He also organized a seminar on Hitler’s Mein Kampf in 1932, which he recalled to not have been easy, as many intellectuals did not want to take the book seriously. “It would have been easier to drum together a seminar on Hegel”, Anders later recalled.65 After the Reichstag fire in February 1933, Hitler’s appointment to chancellor and after the Nazis ransacked Brecht’s apartment in which Anders’ name could be found in an address book, Anders fled to Paris.66 Anders later recalled the details of his flight during which he feigned sleep, hidden behind his raincoat in the corner of a train compartment while seven SA-men were roaring and singing about letting knives run into “the Jewish body” and about being prepared for every mass murder. 67 “Like this from Bahnhof Zoo until Cologne”, Anders recalled, “And I was the Jewish body, who sat next to them and that they did not recognize”.68 Anders made it safely to Paris, where he was stripped off his German citizenship in the same year.69 The obstacles to receiving a residence permit or work permit, made the living conditions in Paris more difficult for Anders than they would later be in America.70 “From what one was supposed to live was not clear”, Anders recalled, “and from what one did live, is retrospectively barely reconstructable”.71 In Paris, Anders heard that Heidegger supported the Nazi Party. Heidegger’s inaugural speech upon becoming the rector of the University of Freiburg in 1933 was published in the Freiburg student newspaper and quickly made round to Heidegger’s exiled students.72 The problematic political implications that Anders earlier suspected to underlie Heidegger’s “anthropology of rootedness” reveal themselves in the rector’s speech in all their starkness when Heidegger writes: “The following of teachers and students solely awakens and gains strength from the truthful and collective rootedness in the essence of 65 ibid., 32. ibid., 34. 67 Günther Anders, “Ruinen heute” in Tagebücher und Gedichte, Munich: C.H. Beck 1985, 229. 68 ibid., 229. 69 Günther Anders, “Über Pflege des ostdeutschen Kultur-Erbes” in Günther Anders antwortet, edited by Elke Schubert, Berlin: Tiamat 1987, 177. 70 Anders, “Wenn ich verzweifelt bin, was geht’s mich an?”, 37. 71 ibid., 34. 72 Jürgen Habermas, “The Inimitable Zeitschrift fur Sozialforschung: How Horkheimer Took Advantage of a Historically Oppressive Hour*” in Telos, translated by David. J. Parent, No. 45, 1980, 120. 66 17 the German university”.73 In 1934, Marcuse marked his break with Heidegger and wrote that it is now “that the titanic fall of classical German philosophy takes place”.74 During his years in Paris, Anders continued to work on his Molussia manuscript, which Arendt had brought when she joined Anders in Paris.75 According to Anders, due to the prohibition to work, many people in exile started writing because they wanted to explain the failure of the left parties and planned to return with new insights “in two or three years”, which points to the fact that many did not expect that a return would not be possible for much longer.76 Although living conditions were very difficult, intellectual life among the German exiles developed in Paris as well as in the South of France where people like the Family Mann, Brecht and Lion Feuchtwanger stayed for a time. Anders’ Molussia manuscript was not published at the only German language publishing house that Anders deemed suited to print political-didactical prose. His manuscript, which he had at that point worked on over many years, wasn’t published because it wasn’t in line with party communism.77 During Anders’ time in Paris, he also held a lecture on Franz Kafka, wrote political poems, published a prize-winning short-story called “Der Hungermarsch” [“The Hunger March”] and struck up a relationship with his great cousin Walter Benjamin.78 To Adorno, Anders would later write that Benjamin was important for his style and claimed to plan to dedicate his philosophical diaries to him.79 Undoubtedly, Benjamin, who had by then already written Einbahnstraße [One-way Street] with its microscopic societal analyses of phenomena, might be seen as influential for the development of the philosophical diary form in Anders’ work. We will discuss some affinities between Anders’ and Benjamin’s forms of writing in the third chapter. In Paris, Anders also listened to the famous Hegel seminars by Alexandre Kojéve, which shaped Anders’ understanding of G.W.F. Hegel whom he refers to in the unpublished manuscript 73 Martin Heidegger, “Die Selbstbehauptung der deutschen Universität. Rede gehalten bei der feierlichen Übernahme des Rektorats der Universität Freiburg i. Br. am 27.5.1933” in Die Selbstehauptung der deutschen Universität. Das Rektorat 1933/24, edited by Hermann Heidegger Frankfurt: Vittorio Klostermann 1990 [1983], 9. 74 Herbert Marcuse as cited in Habermas, “The Inimitable Zeitschrift fur Sozialforschung: How Horkheimer Took Advantage of a Historically Oppressive Hour*”, 120. 75 Elizabeth Young-Bruehl, Hannah Arendt. For Love of the World, 115-16. 76 Günther Anders, “Wenn ich verzweifelt bin, was geht’s mich an?”, 34. 77 ibid., 31. 78 See Dawsey, The Limits of the Human in the Age of Technological Revolution: Günther Anders, Post-Marxism and the Emergence of Technology Critique, 61. 79 Günther Anders, Letter to Theodor W. Adorno on 27.08.63, Literary Archive of the Austrian National Library, Vienna (LIT), Nachlass Günther Anders, Sign.: 237/B1479. 18 on occasional philosophy, which we will discuss in the next chapter. 80 In the journal Recherches Philosophiques, Anders published two essays: “Une interpretation de l’apostériori”, which was translated by Emmanuel Levinas; and “Pathologie de la liberté”, which sum up his early philosophical anthropology. 81 According to Christian Dries, Anders’ early anthropology here came to a halt.82 Although Anders took up the thoughts presented in these early essays in some of his later writings, societal developments and catastrophes of the 20th century will constitute his primary objects of attention. As Dries notes, Anders was later no longer concerned with the basic structures of the human condition but with the modern superstructures that man has made and to which man becomes subject.83 In 1936, the year in which the alliance of the Axis powers grew out of diplomatic efforts between Nazi Germany, Italy and Japan and German troops entered the Rhineland, Anders fled to America. Anders and Arendt separated. To get a US immigration visa was very difficult at the time. Horkheimer helped Anders to get his visa for the United States by providing money and a “Mitarbeiteraufforderung” [“employee request”] from the Institute for Social Research, which had moved to New York. 84 Anders’ older sister Hilde Marchwitza also made it to America after serving a sentence at a German prison for being active in a communist resistance group against the Nazis.85 Anders’ younger sister Eva Michaelis-Stern became a Zionist and fled to Palestine and then went to London where she facilitated the emigration of German-Jewish children to Palestine.86 Anders’ parents, Clara and William Stern, could also enter America when Anders’ father, who had an 80 Dawsey, The Limits of the Human in the Age of Technological Revolution: Günther Anders, Post-Marxism and the Emergence of Technology Critique, 62-63. 81 Dries, Günther Anders, 30. Anders’ early anthropological texts were influential for Jean-Paul Sartre. See Dawsey, The Limits of the Human in the Age of Technological Revolution: Günther Anders, Post-Marxism and the Emergence of Technology Critique, 63-64; Anders, “Wenn ich verzweifelt bin, was geht’s mich an?”, 36. 82 Dries, Günther Anders, 30. 83 ibid., 30-31. 84 See Kerstin Putz, “Improvised Lives. Günther Anders’s American Exile” in Quiet Invaders Revisited. Biographies of Twentieth Century Immigrants to the United States, edited by Günter Bischof, Series: Transatlantica Volume 11, Innsbruck, Wien, Bozen: Studien Verlag 2017, 231. 85 Raimund Bahr, Günther Anders, Leben und Denken im Wort, St. Wolfgang: Edition Art & Science 2010, 55-56. 86 Sara Kadosh, “Eva Michaelis Stern”, Shalvi/Hyman Encyclopedia of Jewish Women, 31 December 1999, Jewish Women’s Archive, accessed 19 September 2022, URL: https://jwa.org/encyclopedia/article/stern-eva-michaelis. 19 international reputation in psychology, was offered a position at Duke University. 87 Anders’ father’s uncritical attitude toward the military and patriotic atmosphere during the First World War and subsequent blindness for National Socialism continued to gnaw on Anders. This becomes apparent in his diary “Breslau 1966” when he writes: “Father’s lack of criticism, namely his naive patriotism, continues to occupy my mind. How can his lack of judgment be reconciled with his intelligence, and his political anxiousness with his otherwise existing integrity?”88 Anders’ sister Eva writes in a memoir of her father that he suffered a “cruel awakening” in 1933 when the Nazis expelled him from Hamburg University and prohibited him to enter the Psychological Institute, which was founded by him.89 “His students were told that he was a destructive person, his books were eliminated from the library, his cooperation on journals founded by him forbidden”, writes MichaelisStern.90 After difficulties adjusting to the new environment in the United States, Anders’ father died only two years later in 1938.91 Eighteen years later Anders dedicated the first volume of Die Antiquiertheit des Menschen to his father, writing: “These sad pages on the destruction of man were written in memory of him, who has ineradicably planted the concept of human dignity into his son.”92 When Anders entered the United States, he did not, however, work on research projects at the Institute for Social Research but did contribute to its journal. 93 In 1937, Anders reviewed Alois Fischer’s book on Heidegger’s existential philosophy in which Anders sharply criticizes Heidegger’s philosophy as an idealism that can “be brought into line” [“gleichschaltbar”].94 According to Anders, when coming to America, he did not have any reputation as a writer and he also widely refused to write in English, as he wanted his 87 Dawsey, The Limits of the Human in the Age of Technological Revolution: Günther Anders, Post-Marxism and the Emergence of Technology Critique, 60. 88 See Günther Anders, “Wenn ich verzweifelt bin, was geht’s mich an?”, 21; Günther Anders, “Breslau 1966” in Besuch im Hades. Auschwitz und Breslau 1966. Nach ‘Holocaust’ 1979, Munich: C.H. Beck 1996, 165-166. 89 Eva Michaelis Stern, “William Stern 1971-1938. ‘The man and his achievements’”, Offprints from the Yearbooks of the Leo Baeck Institute, London 1972-79, Literary Archive of the Austrian National Library, Vienna (LIT), Nachlass Günther Anders, Sign.: 237/S3, 147-150. 90 ibid., 150. 91 Dawsey, The Limits of the Human in the Age of Technological Revolution: Günther Anders, Post-Marxism and the Emergence of Technology Critique, 60. 92 Günther Anders, Die Antiquiertheit des Menschen 1. Über die Seele im Zeitalter der zweiten industriellen Revolution, 5. 93 Putz, “Improvised Lives. Günther Anders’s American Exile”, 231. 94 Günther Anders, “[Zusammenfassender Vorbegriff] (1937)” in Günther Anders, Über Heidegger, edited by Gerhard Oberschlick, Munich: Beck 2001, 28. 20 writing to address Europe and the Germans.95 And although Anders’ father had the means to support him financially for a time, he was faced with continual financial problems and did all kinds of jobs such as factory-work next to publishing poems in the New York based German-Jewish exile journal Aufbau. 96 According to Anders, his critique of the technological age in Die Antiquiertheit des Menschen would not have been possible without the experience of working at a factory, thereby emphasizing the crucial role that experience played for his philosophical analyses. 97 Coming from an academic upper middle class background, being confronted with American culture and everyday life had been a crucial experience for his critique of television and commodities. To Lion Feuchtwanger, Anders also mentioned being supported by a committee and having been able to support his actual work through ghost writing and holding seminars.98 Thus one does not know to what extent Anders did actually rely on manual labor. After spending three years in New York, Anders moved to California in 1939, where he worked as a cleaner in a Hollywood costume palace and continually attempted to make a breakthrough with a film manuscript for Hollywood.99 As a cleaner, part of his job would be to clean SA-boots, which already belonged to a film set in America while Europe was the site of war.100 At the time, Anders struck up relations with the intellectuals living in California, such as Alfred Döblin, Thomas Mann, Marcuse, Horkheimer and Adorno while still remaining an outsider to the Frankfurt School’s inner circle although they shared similar concerns such as the alienation of the individual and the criticism of mass culture. Anders later emphasized that he did not actually belong anywhere: He was no longer a Heideggerian, didn’t belong to Adorno’s and Horkheimer’s circle, and wasn’t a communist party member. Anders recalled “Actually, I wasn’t taken seriously, neither by Brecht, because my philosophizing wasn’t Marxist enough, nor by the academics, because I didn’t engage in philosophizing as an intellectual about the philosophy of others”.101 In 1942, however, at the invitation of Marcuse, Anders participated in a seminar in Santa Monica that intended to bring together the circle around Brecht and the Frankfurt 95 Günther Anders, “Wenn ich verzweifelt bin, was geht’s mich an?”, 34-35. See Liessmann, Günther Anders. Philosophieren im Zeitalter der technologischen Revolutionen, 200. 97 Anders, “Wenn ich verzweifelt bin, was geht’s mich an?”, 37-38. 98 See Beck, Günther Anders’ Gelegenheitsphilosophie, 34-35. 99 Anders, “Wenn ich verzweifelt bin, was geht’s mich an?”, 37. 100 Dries, Günther Anders, 14. 101 Günther Anders, “Brecht konnte mich nicht riechen”, in Günther Anders antwortet. Interviews & Erklärungen, edited by Elke Schubert, Interview with Fritz. J. Raddatz 1985, Berlin: Tiamat 1987, 102. 96 21 School. 102 Anders’ presentation at the seminar combined elements of his philosophical anthropology with Marx’s critique of capitalism.103 In 1943, Anders worked for a brief period at the Office of War Information. When asked to translate a book about Japan into German, Anders quit, saying to his boss that he hadn’t fled fascism in order to produce American fascist brochures for Germans.104 In 1943 Anders first came to hear of rumors about Nazi extermination camps, which were confirmed in spring 1944. 105 It later became ungraspable to Anders that people would claim that they hadn’t known about the extermination camps when he had heard of them in America. 106 During the 1940s, Anders wrote many political poems and worked on multiple philosophical diaries in which he wrote about his experience of exile and the question of what form of writing and what kind of language would be proper today.107 In his unpublished diary on poetry, Anders describes poetry, which he claimed to have been half of his writerly output, as a necessary way to comprehend the atrocities that he failed to grasp. 108 “Man’s self-destruction, the apocalypse we have made ourselves, the gas ovens: I allow all of these motifs of horror. I make poetry of them, I tattoo them on myself, memorize them. But why? Because I cannot grasp them”, he writes. 109 The themes of Anders’ poems were emigration, homesickness, Nazi violence against people and the genocide and were dedicated to “children to whom dying, to adults to whom killing became everydayness”. 110 Later Anders became doubtful of poetry as an appropriate medium and supported Adorno’s statement on the barbarity of poetry writing 102 Dawsey, The Limits of the Human in the Age of Technological Revolution: Günther Anders, Post-Marxism and the Emergence of Technology Critique, 76. 103 ibid., 76. 104 Anders, “Wenn ich verzweifelt bin, was geht’s mich an?”, 38. 105 Günther Anders, “Nach ‘Holocaust’ (1979),” in Besuch im Hades. Auschwitz und Breslau 1966. Nach ‘Holocaust’ 1979, Munich: C.H. Beck 1996 [1979], 198. 106 ibid., 198. 107 See for instance Anders’ New York diary from 1949 published under the title Über philosophische Diktion und das Problem der Popularisierung as well as his Los Angeles diary from 1941, “Über Gedichte” and several poems published in Tagebücher und Gedichte. See Günther Anders, Über philosophische Diktion und das Problem der Popularisierung, edited by Heinz Ludwig Arnold, Göttinger Sudelbücher, Göttingen: Wallstein 1992; Günther Anders, Tagebücher und Gedichte, Munich: C.H. Beck 1985. 108 Günther Anders, “Den Tod der Welt vor Augen” in Günther Anders antwortet. Interviews & Erklärungen, edited by Elke Schubert, Interview with Mathias Greffrath 1982, Berlin: Tiamat 1987, 61. 109 Günther Anders: Dichten heute 1948, Literary Archive of the Austrian National Library, Vienna (LIT), Nachlass Günther Anders, Sign.: 237/W37; as cited and translated in Fetz, “Writing Poetry Today: Günther Anders between Literature and Philosophy”, 128. 110 Günther Anders, “Über Gedichte” in Tagebücher und Gedichte, Munich: C.H. Beck 1985, 270. 22 after Auschwitz.111 During his years in American exile, Anders also drafted a diary on what he would call occasional philosophy, a form of philosophy that emerges from concrete life situations. He there envisioned such philosophy to take the form of a diary. During his years in exile, Anders also wrote a diary in which he tested the style of occasional philosophy by examining the way in which love relationships change over generations, the difficulties that couples faced in American exile and general features characterizing his generation of exiles such as the “devaluation” of private life when all private disasters came to appear absurd when measured against the mass catastrophes of the time.112 Although Anders did not publish a lot of the writings that he had worked on at the time, the years of exile were decisive for his later intellectual production. During that period, he experimented with multiple literary genres, developed his occasional philosophical style and continually asked himself how to confront the atrocities he was geographically separated from, in writing. In 1944 Anders met the Austrian writer Elisabeth Freundlich, who needed to flee Vienna upon the Nazi’s seizure of power and was an editor at the Austro American Tribune, to which Anders contributed his political prose.113 Anders and Freundlich married in 1945. In that year Anders learned of the collapse of the “Third Reich”, which he described as anti-climactic as Nazi Germany had not collapsed due to resistance from within.114 On August 6 of the same year, Anders heard that an atomic bomb had been dropped on the city of Hiroshima and three days later one on the city of Nagasaki. Anders described these events as the fourth and most incisive caesura in his life – the first caesura being the experience of World War I, the second caesura being the rise of National Socialism in Germany and the third caesura consisting in finding out about the Nazi extermination and concentration camps. 115 However, it was the dropping of the atomic bombs on the Japanese cities that left him speechless for several years. “[W]hen the news came on the evening of August 6, 1945, I turned pale. I wasn’t able to write about it, I sat in front of the white paper and tried to write about the enormity and couldn’t find the words”, Anders 111 Günther Anders, “Brecht konnte mich nicht riechen”, 110-111. Günther Anders, Lieben gestern. Notizen zur Geschichte des Fühlens, Munich: C.H. Beck 1997, 20. 113 Putz, “Improvised Lives. Günther Anders’s American Exile”, 232-233. 114 Anders, “Wiedersehen und Vergessen”, 113. 115 Anders, “Wenn ich verzweifelt bin, was geht’s mich an?”, 41-42. 112 23 later recalled.116 “My imagination, my thinking, my mouth and my skin protested against the monstrosity of these events”, he remembered.117 However, the dropping of the atomic bomb quickly came to signify the beginning of a new era for Anders: the time in which humanity had become irrevocably capable of exterminating itself. 118 Realizing that he shared the inability to truly imagine the consequences of this new era with millions, Anders, when first being able to write on the atomic bomb in the 1950s back in Europe, would draft a chapter on “apocalyptic blindness”, a concept referring to the inability to respond sufficiently to the threat posed by the bomb.119 The chapter would later find its way into the first volume of Die Antiquiertheit des Menschen. For Anders, the general phenomenon of blindness characterizing his age was nevertheless no excuse to give into it. Instead he dedicated his efforts to detecting discrepancies in experience and language and to constructing a form of philosophy that would be able to intervene within forms of blindness, that he knew to have structured both his years as a student as well as his later life. In 1950 Anders decided to leave behind the United States, where he had recently been given a lecturer position at the New School for Social Research.120 Freundlich and Anders decided to return to Europe. The decision was made due to personal reasons as well as the political situation of the Cold War, McCarthyism and its radical anti-communism.121 In the interview for his lecturer position, Anders had been asked about his relations to Brecht and Hanns Eisler.122 And although Anders had never been a member of the communist party, he recalled to have been treated as such and that it had taken fourteen years instead of three to get his citizen papers in the United States.123 And if that is true, it appears that once Anders got his citizen papers, he left the country. 116 Audio footage from Günther Anders in “Philosoph Günther Anders: ‘Fortschritt macht blind’”, Conversation with Ludger Lütkehhaus, SRF Kultur, Passage, accessed 25 September 2022, URL: https://www.srf.ch/audio/passage/philosoph-guenther-anders-fortschritt-machtblind?id=10182017, 1:40. 117 Anders, “Wenn ich verzweifelt bin, was geht’s mich an?”, 41-42. 118 ibid., 42. 119 In the 1979 interview with Matthias Geffrath, Anders recalls this moment to have been in Europe in 1950 or 1951. In his Japan Diary, he recalls this moment as having been in Styria in 1954. See Günther Anders “Wenn ich verzweifelt bin, was geht’s mich an?”, 41-42; Günther, Anders, “Der Mann auf der Brücke. Tagebuch aus Hiroshima und Nagasaki (1958)”, 28-29. 120 Dawsey, The Limits of the Human in the Age of Technological Revolution: Günther Anders, Post-Marxism and the Emergence of Technology Critique, 86. 121 ibid., 86. 122 Anders, “Wenn ich verzweifelt bin, was geht’s mich an?”, 39. 123 ibid., 33. 24 2. On the Discrepancy between History and Experience: The Vienna Diary The intention behind the previous chapter dealing with the chronology of Anders’ life from the 1920s up to 1950 was to trace Anders’ evolvement of becoming a political writer as well as to demonstrate that the discrepancy between history and experience often provided the spur for Anders’ writerly production after he had realized that certain forms of philosophy could fail to respond adequately to nascent threats within social reality. What becomes apparent when one traces Anders’ writerly efforts, is that he at once turned to more literary genres to grapple with social reality while at the same time sought to find a form of philosophy that would not be divorced from the problems of the present. The following chapter will be dedicated to discussing one of these efforts: Anders’ diary on postwar Vienna, which he drafted upon his return to Europe in 1950. In “Wiedersehen und Vergessen” the chronology’s guiding discrepancy between history and experience again emerges as an acute problem. Anders captured there the ways in which Vienna keeps silent about the years of National Socialism, which had so fundamentally changed his own life and that of his family. Before examining the way in which the discrepancy between history and experience becomes palpable in the versatile forms of remembering and forgetting captured by the diary, it might prove fruitful to first take a closer look at the way in which Anders conceived of the effort to produce a philosophy closely tied to concrete experience. Theoretical remarks on what this philosophy ought to look like can be found in an unpublished manuscript bearing the title “Gelegenheitsphilosophie” [“Occasional Philosophy”]. While the majority of the manuscript was drafted during Anders’ American exile between 1942 and 1950, a portion of the text was added once he returned to Europe.124 Examining Anders’ notion of occasional philosophy allows one to 124 From Anders’ own remarks on the first page of the typewritten manuscript (which bears the heading “Vorwort” [“preface”), we know over what period of time Anders was working on the manuscript. There Anders writes: “The following remarks, except for the last part, were made in the United States. Namely in the years 1942-50, in the second half of the period of exile”. See Günther Anders, Literarische Tagebücher : Halkyone 19: Gelegenheitsphilosophie, Literary Archive of the Austrian National Library, Vienna (LIT), Nachlass Günther Anders, Sign.: 237/W116. The manuscript is a collection of lose and unnumbered pages. None of its entries bear a specific date. Above most of the entries one finds the indication of a date to be added by the word “den”. Because the last part of the manuscript already mentions the atomic bomb, we can assume that this part was written once Anders had returned to Europe. As mentioned earlier, according to Anders’ own statements, it had also been in the wake of his return to Europe, in the early 1950s, in which he could first bring himself to write on the atomic bomb. 25 ask in what ways the Vienna Diary might be seen as the realization of occasional philosophy and in what ways the diary and the experience of Anders’ return more generally, spurs him to refine his concept. What will be shown to prove striking is the conceptual shift that Anders introduces in the last pages of the manuscript whose creation one might suspect to have actually intersected with his experience of returning to Europe and thus the time in which he penned his Vienna Diary as well as the time in which he first started writing on the implications of the atomic bomb and the inability of the faculty of imagination to truly grasp the extent of destruction possible through today’s technology. One could argue that this intersection underscores the significance of Anders’ experience of returning to Europe and postwar Vienna for his later intellectual production. 2.1 On Occasional Philosophy One of the aspects that appear to make it worthwhile to ask how Anders’ concept of occasional philosophy relates to the Vienna Diary, is that Anders first envisions this kind of philosophy to take the form of a diary, more precisely what he calls a “philosophical diary” in the unpublished manuscript, a qualification that he will later not use in the publication entailing the Vienna Diary nor for most of the other diaries he publishes.125 While he will frequently describe his work as occasional philosophy, e.g. in the two volumes of Die Antiquiertheit des Menschen, it is in the manuscript that Anders first outlines the concept and argues that the diary form is necessary for its exposition. In the manuscript, he does not simply write about his idea of occasional philosophy but at the same time also intends to produce occasional philosophy through a diary-like form and in entries consisting of essayistic expositions as well as dialogical discussions. We can thus also arrive at an understanding of what Anders envisioned as occasional philosophy through those remarks that refer to his own immediate undertaking. In the manuscript, Anders conceives of occasional philosophy as a form of philosophy that is initiated by specific situations that one experiences and that is supposed to illustrate the genesis of thought from experience. Against the presumption that any situation might here 125 “The discussion in the following pages remains ‘concrete’ insofar as the questions discussed remain tied to their situation of origin. There is no other literary form for this than the diary”, Anders remarks. Günther Anders, Literarische Tagebücher : Halkyone 19: Gelegenheitsphilosophie, Literary Archive of the Austrian National Library, Vienna (LIT), Nachlass Günther Anders, Sign.: 237/W116. 26 be suitable, occasional philosophy ought to be concerned with those situations that affect one not only as a private person but also more generally as part of society.126 However, this distinction is not as simple as one might at first assume. Anders understands the affects through which someone responds to a situation, someone’s hopes or fears for instance, as societally mediated. Thus he understands affects to bear something general. However, Anders intends to focus on those occasions that one also experiences as such. To illustrate what he means by this, he provides an example. Given the monstrous events of the epoch, the question of how people are supposed to go on living after the mass murders is, according to Anders, one that one poses to oneself but has the sense to concern everyone. 127 Furthermore, Anders regards the situations initiating his diary entries and thus occasional philosophy as situations in which one cannot initially grasp what is happening and in which one is stupefied and embarrassed.128 Occasional philosophy can thus also be understood as an attempt to take on the labor of the concept and of cognizing that which one initially could not without necessarily arriving at any definitive conclusion. One could thus suppose that Anders wished for occasional philosophy to be a written confrontation with situations that he had himself experienced, for instance hearing about the dropping of the atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki and being unable to respond and to find words. 126 See Beck, Günther Anders’ Gelegenheitsphilosophie, 66-69. Anders writes: “The presupposition that as one who experiences one is only the empirical or most private I, that one experiences only uniquely empirical things, that only through thinking something general is added to it, is simply phenomenologically wrong. By this I do not only mean that the objects of our hope and fear are already of a ‘general nature’ (for example: How will people be able to live on after the mass murders?), but that ‘one’ [‘man’] already experiences the question itself a s g e n e r a l [ a l s a l l g e m e i n e r]. Confronted with the monstrous events of the time, nobody asks himself: ‘what shall I say to this now?’, rather ‘one’ asks oneself: ‘What should o n e [m a n] say about it?’ or: ‘How can o n e [m a n] go on living?’” The original German quote is: “Die Voraussetzung, als Erlebender sei man nur das empirische oder privateste Ich, erlebe nur einmalig Empirisches, erst durch das Denken kaeme das Allgemeine dazu, ist einfach phänomenologisch falsch. Damit meine ich nicht nur, dass die Gegenstaende unserer Hoffnung und Angst bereits ‘allgemeiner Natur’ sind (etwa: Wie werden Menschen nach den Massenmorden weiterleben können?), sondern dass ‘man’ die Frage selbst bereits a l s a l l g e m e i n e r erlebt. Konfrontiert mit den ungeheuerlichen Ereignissen der Zeit fragt sich niemand: ‘was soll i c h nun dazu sagen?’; vielmehr fragt ‘man’ sich: ‘Was soll m a n dazu sagen?’ oder: ‘wie soll m a n da weiterleben?’” Günther Anders, Literarische Tagebücher : Halkyone 19: Gelegenheitsphilosophie, Literary Archive of the Austrian National Library, Vienna (LIT), Nachlass Günther Anders, Sign.: 237/W116. As Beck has shown, Anders reinterprets Heidegger’s concept of “man” [“one”]. Anders gives the concept a positive connotation and uses it in order to designate a form of “solidarity” through which certain situations are experienced. See Beck, Günther Anders’ Gelegenheitsphilosophie, 67-68. 128 See Beck’s discussion on occasional philosophy as “Verlegenheitsphilosophie” [“philosophy of disconcertedness”] in Beck, Günther Anders’ Gelegenheitsphilosophie, 64. 127 27 In the manuscript, Anders regards the literary form of the diary to be the only suitable form for occasional philosophy as he suspects this form would guarantee that the discussed questions remain interwoven with the situation from which they originated.129 At the same time, however, Anders insists that whoever is searching for a testimony of his life will be disappointed and the qualification of the diary as “philosophical” serves as a kind of “prophylactic” warning to himself.130 “Even if my entries are about experiences, thus about me, I nevertheless solely intend to follow ‘problems’”, writes Anders.131 Yet he also qualifies this remark in the next line by writing that it is inevitable that something of the life and the person enters an exemplification of the emergence of philosophy from experience. 132 The manuscript’s intention as stated on the first page is being a philosophical diary that carries out what Anders there calls a “‘sublation’ in actu”, neither a chronological protocol of one’s experiences nor a philosophical system in which experience has already been transformed beyond recognition. 133 “Whoever keeps experiences of the day without intending for their ‘sublation’, [...] is like someone who eats without digesting and without nourishing himself”, writes Anders.134 One could say that occasional philosophy ought to analyze and present concrete experience as expressions of philosophical problems. Max Beck pointedly describes Anders’ idea when he writes, “Occasional philosophy only works through the dialectical movement between the singular and the general, more precisely: occasion and conceptual reflection (one cannot be separated from the other)”.135 Yet, when reading the manuscript on occasional philosophy, one might get the sense that the manuscript itself does not conform to the idea of occasional philosophy that Anders intends to explicate. Anders barely mentions any concrete experiences or societal situations from which the need for occasional philosophy arises. References to Hitler, mass murder, monstrous events and the atomic bomb remain marginal. In the foreground are expositions of the relationship between the singular and the general, discussions on what makes an object suitable for philosophical investigation, remarks on history entering 129 Günther Anders, Literarische Tagebücher : Halkyone 19: Gelegenheitsphilosophie, Literary Archive of the Austrian National Library, Vienna (LIT), Nachlass Günther Anders, Sign.: 237/W116. 130 ibid. 131 ibid. 132 ibid. 133 ibid. 134 ibid. 135 Beck, Günther Anders’ Gelegenheitsphilosophie, 69. 28 philosophy with Hegel as well as debates on philosophical interpretation as such in a situation in which one can no longer integrate the singular into a meaningful whole. The diary form of the manuscript allows for the day-to-day tracking of the creation and debate of a concept but in this case it barely serves the illustration of how the need for a concept and the need to reconsider postulates once taken for granted evolve from a specific historical situation. Many entries do not indicate at what time period and from what place Anders is writing. This absence is reflected in the omission of concrete dates above the manuscript’s entries. One of the few instances, however, in which an implicit need is articulated, is in an entry in which Anders writes about a philosophical journal that he recently received and which was published under Hitler. 136 According to Anders, the journal contains two philosophical articles: one by a philosopher who translated Nazi orders into metaphysical statements intending to please those in power; and the other by a philosopher dealing with those “eternal questions”, which makes him in Anders’ eyes equally opportunist when “nothing [is] as convenient as eternity in the right moment”.137 Anders argues that reading the second article by someone who so decisively denies that philosophy has anything to do with the “demands of the hour”, will turn one’s face “red out of shame”.138 Against such a gesture, against dwelling in metaphysics, which can then serve as one’s alibi not to engage with the most pressing issues of the contemporary world, is what Anders’ writing tried to make itself against. In the manuscript, however, Anders mentions no explicit political intent behind the idea of occasional philosophy nor that he envisioned it as a kind of philosophy engagée aiming at understanding and interfering within social reality. However, in two entries that one can find among the last pages of the manuscript, which the preface suggests to have been written when Anders had already left America and returned to Europe, the need for a different form of philosophy is more acutely articulated. It is expressed through a critique of professional philosophy for foremost dealing with the history of philosophy as well as a critique of traditional systematic philosophy. In the last pages of the manuscript, Anders asks whether it is pointless to ask someone concerned with “the role of the conscience in Friess with special consideration of his middle period”: 136 Günther Anders, Literarische Tagebücher : Halkyone 19: Gelegenheitsphilosophie, Literary Archive of the Austrian National Library, Vienna (LIT), Nachlass Günther Anders, Sign.: 237/W116. 137 ibid. 138 ibid. 29 “And what about the murder of millions? And the atomic bomb?”139 This leads him to suspect that “the gulf that exists between the interest and style of their investigations and that which actually happens today is much too great [...]. In the best case, mass murder would become an example and the atomic bomb a footnote”.140 It is precisely this gulf between the interest and style of philosophical writing and what happens in the contemporary world that Anders intended to overcome in so many of his works. Anders’ Vienna Diary aims at better understanding the present, when he searches for the material traces of a past of fascism and mass murder and when he examines what constitutes the Vienna of 1950 and its people. His Japan Diary examines the appearance of the cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in the aftermath of the bombings and discusses people’s reaction to the ever-present nuclear threat. In both of these diaries Anders illustrates how the experience of concrete places at a specific time period becomes indispensable for occasional philosophy. In both of these instances, the diary form is essential as it allows the writer to minutely capture the paradoxes and discrepancies that emerge from the attempts to grapple with the present. Through Anders’ interest in examining the concrete social reality of places after catastrophes as well as his use of the diary form that is directed at the present, Anders attempted to bridge the gulf that he saw gaping. The qualification “philosophical” no longer designates the Vienna Diary nor the Japan Diary when they were published. How is one to make sense of this? The last entry of the manuscript on occasional philosophy might provide a preliminary answer. There, Anders asks himself what he is actually doing, whether occasional philosophy can still be considered philosophy and if occasional philosophy’s intent would mean that one classifies the occasional and the singular within general philosophical relations.141 “Likely not”, he concludes and continues: But could one do that? Could one actually find any ‘general philosophical connections’ [‘allgemeine philosophische Zusammenhaenge’] within which something like the atomic bomb could gain clarity? Do these philosophical connections even exist? Isn’t it the other way around? Does not the singular – in this case the atomic bomb – have such broad consequences due to its monstrosity, doesn't it change the world so fundamentally that the ‘general’ can only be perceived as a child of this singular? Formally speaking: don’t we have to arrange the general around the singular instead of, as usual, ‘classifying’ the singular within the general? 139 ibid. ibid. 141 ibid. 140 30 ** And who knows if this isn’t mutatis mutandis the case for all historical facts? If this is the case, is not then Hegel’s demand that one needs to replace traditional logic by a wholly different one of tremendous relevance?142 This last entry indicates a small conceptual shift in Anders’ conception of occasional philosophy. What creates the need for occasional philosophy is here not so much the need for an expression of the genesis of thought from experience, which Anders articulates in an earlier entry of the manuscript when he writes: “[f]or us it is a matter of tracing the philosophical trains of thought down to the pre-philosophical level, to those situations and events from which philosophizing rose”. 143 The last entry of the manuscript instead suggests that the need for occasional philosophy stems from the need to find an expression for the general and far reaching consequences of singular historical situations. Occasional philosophy can here be understood as a form of philosophy that consists of attempts to grasp the changed and new general parameters historical situations brought about. In Anders’ case, it confronts the present by asking for instance how new technology changes the world we live in and how historical events such as splitting of the atom ought to change our understanding of the human. The last entry of his manuscript is an appeal for a non-subsumptive logic in which historical situations are not sublated within philosophical frameworks (e.g. philosophical conceptions of history as progress) but in which one arrives at an understanding of new concepts or concepts as objects of necessary change through an examination of concrete historical situations. Because the manuscript suggests that the last entry was written once Anders left the United States, one can suppose that the small conceptual shift in Anders’ understanding of occasional philosophy took place upon 142 The German original quote from the manuscript is: “Aber könnte man das denn? Faende man denn überhaupt ‘allgemeine philosophische Zusammenhaenge’, innerhalb derer so etwas wie die Atom=bombe an Deutlichkeit gewinnen könnte? Gibt es diese philosophi=schen Zusammenhaenge überhaupt? Liegt die Sache nicht vielmehr umgekehrt? Hat nicht das Singulare – hier also die Atombombe – durch seine Ungeheuerlichkeit so breite Folgen, veränder es nicht die Welt so von Grund auf, dass das ‘Allgemeine’ nur noch als Kind dieses Singularen gesehen werden kann? Formal gesprochen: Haben wir nicht das Allgemeine um das Singulare herum anzuordnen, statt, wie üblich, das Singulare ins Allgemeine ‘einzuordnen’? ** Und wer weiss, ob das nicht mutatis mutandis von allen geschicht=lichen Tatsachen gilt? Wenn das der Fall sein sollte, ist dann nicht Hegels Anspruch, die überlieferte Logik durch eine ganz andere ersetzen zu müssen, von ungeheuerer Aktualität?” See Günther Anders, Literarische Tagebücher : Halkyone 19: Gelegenheitsphilosophie, Literary Archive of the Austrian National Library, Vienna (LIT), Nachlass Günther Anders, Sign.: 237/W116. 143 ibid. 31 Anders experience of returning to Europe in 1950 and being confronted with cities in the aftermath of the war. And it is perhaps only with the last entry of the manuscript that one might better understand why Anders states in the preface that the manuscript and its entries on occasional philosophy intended to achieve some “truth in a different, pragmatic sense”.144 Whatever Anders himself might have meant by this expression, one could suppose that a pragmatic truth refers to the consequences for the production of occasional philosophy as such. In this sense, we might also regard the end of the manuscript as pointing towards a truly more concrete philosophy than the manuscript itself was able to offer. And one realization of this concrete philosophy can indeed be said to be the Vienna Diary that Anders penned upon his return to Europe: a diary that, by contrast to the manuscript, does not remain undated but one in which place and time determines the writing. For his Vienna Diary and his Japan Diary, the qualification “philosophical” might have fallen away because the aim of these works was not to produce something strictly philosophical or seek to illustrate philosophizing “in actu” but instead find a way to confront his and other’s experience of history through writing and to find a form through which to illustrate discrepancies within experience and their possible consequences. Anders continues to use the term “occasional philosophy” to describe his work in the two volumes of Die Antiquiertheit des Menschen as well as his Ketzereien [Heresies]. In order to gain a more complex understanding of the term, it might be helpful to shortly discuss the way in which Anders conceives of his philosophical method in these three works. In the introduction to the first volume of the Die Antiquiertheit des Menschen, he describes “occasional philosophy” as a “hybrid crossing of metaphysics and journalism: namely philosophizing that has today’s situation or rather characteristic pieces of today’s world as its object”. 145 According to Anders, this implies that the examination of contemporary phenomena can lead to the discussion of philosophical problems that may appear disconnected from these phenomena, e.g. his essay that deals with the shame felt before technological devices will lead to a “metaphysical discussion on the ‘non-identity of the human being with itself’”. 146 One could argue that this conception of occasional 144 ibid. Anders, Die Antiquiertheit des Menschen 1. Über die Seele im Zeitalter der zweiten industriellen Revolution, 20. 146 ibid., 20-21. 145 32 philosophy is reflected in the Vienna Diary, inasmuch as, in the last entries of this diary, Anders will return to anthropological debates about man’s freedom that may appear somewhat disconnected from the analyses found in the rest of the diary. In the introduction to the first volume of Die Antiquiertheit des Menschen, Anders will explicitly state that his investigations make a claim to be philosophical.147 In his publication of the second volume of Die Antiquiertheit des Menschen in 1980, however, Anders’ understanding of his own method appears changed compared to the first volume and his hesitancy of even employing the word “philosophy” to describe his work is made explicit. There Anders restates that his “observations always proceed from concrete singular phenomena of our contemporary life” but argues that it does not matter to him whether his analyses can be classified as philosophical or not and considers whether it would not make more sense to class them among social- or technology psychology.148 He even goes so far as to call into doubt the contemporary legitimacy of the term philosophy, questioning whether the usage of the word itself is not already “a metaphysical prejudice”, in the sense that philosophy ever so often proceeds from the idea that the world can be divided into essence and the empirical and contingent. 149 According to Anders, whoever refuses to abide by this principle, will regard cognition “as empirical experience” because its object is always something contingent and will do without “the honorable name ‘philosopher’”.150 From the publication of the first volume to the publication of the second volume over twenty years later, one can thus register a change in the way Anders thought about occasional philosophy. While Anders stresses the arrival at philosophy after departing from experience in 1956, many years later he prioritizes the observation of empirical objects and uncategorized insights resulting from examining these objects. One might also ask oneself, how Anders arrived at the term “occasional philosophy”. According to Beck, the concept “Gelegenheitsphilosophie” cannot be found within the philosophical tradition.151 Although the term itself might not appear within the tradition and is coined by Anders, Anders’ manuscript on occasional philosophy with its references to Socrates, Aristotle, Hegel and Søren Kierkegaard proves that he attempted to develop it by stepping into dialogue with the tradition of philosophy. In the second volume of Die 147 ibid., 27. Günther Anders, Die Antiquiertheit des Menschen 2. Über die Zerstörung des Lebens im Zeitalter der dritten industriellen Revolution, Munich: C.H. Beck 2018 (1980), 463. 149 ibid., 464 150 ibid., 465. 151 Beck, Günther Anders' Gelegenheitsphilosophie, 56. 148 33 Antiquiertheit des Menschen, Anders names Georg Simmel with his philosophical reflections on the ruin as a predecessor in practicing occasional philosophy. 152 In the afterword to Ketzereien [Heresies], Anders points out that occasional philosophy is a “parallel expression” of the literary term “Gelegenheitsdichtung” [“occasional poetry”] and sets his concept of occasional philosophy in relationship to the way occasional poetry was understood by Johann Wolfgang Goethe.153 According to Beck, historically speaking this form of poetry is to be understood as an homage to a specific occasion, such as a won battle and thus “no poetry for the sake of art”.154 Initially, it was a form of poetry that had a poor reputation and commercial value. Goethe, however, introduced a new connotation to the concept.155 According to the famous Conversations with Eckermann, Goethe said that all his poems were occasional poems, which meant that they had their ground in reality that served as material.156 In Goethe’s case then, the concept of occasional poetry implied a revaluation of the occasion and what could result from it rather than a devaluation of the kind of poetry arising from it. “With this expression [occasional poems], usually used contemptuously to designate wedding carmine or the like, he did not want to devalue his products, but rather to valorize what had sprung from ‘occasions’”, Anders notes about Goethe.157 Beck argues that Anders wishes to introduce the same turn in philosophy that Goethe was able to achieve in poetry.158 However, the difference that Beck marks between Goethe and Anders is that, for Goethe, it is only the poet who is able to transform a specific occasion into something general and poetic, while Anders already regards characteristic situations from which conceptual work arises to already be indicative of something general.159 In other words, Anders did not assume that it is only the philosopher who extrapolates something indicative of general phenomena from the occasion but rather that the philosopher finds an expression for societally and time specific general phenomena through occasions that are themselves already mediated. After having discussed multiple aspects of Anders’ concept of occasional philosophy as a form 152 Anders, Die Antiquiertheit des Menschen 2. Über die Zerstörung des Lebens im Zeitalter der dritten industriellen Revolution, 466. 153 Anders, Ketzereien, Munich: C.H. Beck 1996, 341-342. 154 Beck, Günther Anders' Gelegenheitsphilosophie, 55. 155 ibid., 55. 156 Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Johann Peter Eckermann. Gespräche mit Goethe in den letzten Jahren seines Lebens in Sämtliche Werke nach Epochen seines Schaffens, Volume 19, edited by Heinz Schlaffer, Munich: Hanser 1986, 44; as cited in Beck, Günther Anders' Gelegenheitsphilosophie, 57. 157 Anders, Ketzereien, 341. 158 Beck, Günther Anders’ Gelegenheitsphilosophie, 56. 159 ibid. 58. 34 of intellectual production that proceeds from concrete experience, the following sections of this chapter will discuss Anders’ Vienna Diary, a piece of occasional philosophy, in which the concrete experience of a city in the war’s aftermath becomes indispensible for the knowledge production Anders aims at. 2.2 A Delayed Scream: The Best of Philosophy “After my return”, Anders wrote to Mann in autumn 1952, “I recorded right away my daily conversations with the local population, their stories and arguments, and attempted in appended commentaries to depict the moral condition of the postwar and post-Hitler soul and to more closely define the spiritual vacuum”. 160 What Anders wanted in his Vienna Diary was to understand the local Viennese population and the way this population relates to its past. However, the Vienna Diary, which Dawsey pointedly describes as “a critical impressionistic ethnography of Viennese life in the first decade after Nazism”, does not only attend to the “postwar soul” of the local Viennese population, its striking coldness and indifference as well as insistence to forget and be forgiven. It also attends to Anders’ own response to Europe and the way in which the returnee’s expectations are not met by reality.161 The Vienna Diary altogether comprises 93 dated entries over the course of about fifteen months, spanning Anders’ ship journey to Europe, his arrival in Southampton, England, his time in Paris, train rides through Switzerland, stay in Zurich, and resettlement in Vienna, Austria. While a short segment of the diary was published in English translation in 1952, another short segment as part of Anders’ text on his diaries as warning images in 1964, another segment later as part of a collected volume on Vienna in 1987, the diary was first published in its entirety in 1967 in a collection of Anders’ wartime and postwar diaries Die Schrift an der Wand: Tagebücher 1941 bis 1966 [The Writing on the Wall: Diaries 1941 to 1966] and in a later volume that comprises many of his diaries and poems, Tagebücher und Gedichte [Diaries and Poems], in 1985.162 The diary can be at once described as what Dawsey calls “a contribution to the 160 Günther Anders: Letter to Thomas Mann on 23.09.1952, Literary Archive of the Austrian National Library, Vienna (LIT), Nachlass Günther Anders, Sign.: 237/B227; as cited and translated in Dawsey, “Where Hitler’s Name is Never Spoken: Günther Anders in 1950s Vienna”, 220. 161 Dawsey, “Where Hitler’s Name is Never Spoken: Günther Anders in 1950s Vienna”, 220. 162 Günther Anders, “After All, I Was Only Seventeen: A Story” in Commentary XIV, translated by Francis Golffing, September 1952, 254-58; Günther Anders, “Warnbilder” in Das Tagebuch 35 concept of ‘post-fascism’”, laying bare “a host of noxious socio-psychological and ideological strategies for repressing, distorting or minimizing the horror of the fascist era”.163 At the same time, however, it is evident that the diary is also concerned with asking about the way in which the past more generally creates material traces in the present. One motive why Anders might have sought to understand the survival and non-survival of the past in the present, is that he likely hoped to grasp something of the catastrophic years of war in a way he had been unable to do during his years in exile and geographical distance from the sites of war. What becomes evident, when one reads entries from other diaries that he wrote during his exile is that the discrepancy between what he experienced and what he knew to take place at the same time was always something he was deeply aware of. Ann-Kathrin Pollmann describes Anders’ diary entries from his time in exile as “documents of a deep insecurity of his historical sense of time associated with emigration and the spatial distance to the events in Europe, since they always revolve around the ‘scandal that things had not been able to become experiences’”.164 As already mentioned, Anders regarded poetry as an attempt to grasp the atrocities he could not grasp otherwise. He wrote about the inability to feel anything commensurate when hearing about the high number of people that were killed and about the absurdity of working at a costume palace in Hollywood while millions “slaughtered each other” in Europe.165 In the Vienna Diary, he recalled that hearing about the collapse of the “German Reich” had felt to him like a report, “mere knowledge” and “pitifully weak, much weaker than any bodily experience”. 166 In the United States, however, Anders might have suspected that the absence of a more concrete experience of history might be the result of the geographical distance from the site of destruction and that his return would make him experience something that had earlier appeared to be ungraspable. Where else would one anticipate und der moderne Autor, edited by Uwe Schultz, Frankfurt, Berlin Wien: Ullstein 1985, 77-82; Anders, “Wiedersehen und Vergessen” in Die Schrift an der Wand. Tagebücher 1941 bis 1966, Munich: C.H. Beck 1967, 94-213; Anders, “Wiedersehen und Vergessen” in Tagebücher und Gedichte. Munich: C.H. Beck 1985, 94-213; Günther Anders, “Wiedersehen und Vergessen” in Wien, Wien Allein. Literarische Nahaufnahmen, edited by Erich Hackl, Darmstadt, Newied: Luchterhand 1987, 46-58. 163 Dawsey, “Where Hitler’s Name is Never Spoken: Günther Anders in 1950s Vienna”, 214. 164 Ann-Kathrin Pollmann: “Die Rückkehr von Günther Anders nach Europa – Eine doppelte Nach-Geschichte”, 6. 165 Günther Anders “Rückblendung 1944-1949” in Besuch im Hades. Auschwitz und Breslau 1966. Nach “Holocaust” 1979, Munich: C.H. Beck 1996 [1979], 38; Günther Anders, “Leichenwäscher der Geschichte” in Tagebücher und Gedichte, Munich: C.H. Beck 1985, 4. 166 Anders, “Wiedersehen und Vergessen”, 115. 36 feeling something of all that had happened if not at its concrete site? And it is the site of concrete history and the question how this site has registered the past that then called out for a form of writing attentive to the traces of the past and to what one is able to experience there that one could not while away. What became apparent to Anders is that finding himself at the material site and among ruins of the past does not simply bridge the gap between history and experience. Instead discrepancies again present themselves acutely, even if in different forms. Before examining these discrepancies, it might be helpful to say something about the form of the diary. On the level of form, the diary could be described as a literary collage of entries that entail microscopic societal analyses that capture Anders’ return, the appearance of different postwar cities and offers conceptual commentaries in which Anders speculates about how to make sense of what he sees and hears in Vienna. This collage makes use of different literary genres. The diary begins with a poem, dated 1945, which points to the keeping quiet about Hitler’s name in postwar Vienna. Another poem on the power of language from 1939 can be found as part of one of the later entries in order to demonstrate stanzas that seem “silly” “[i]n the face of the present”.167 The diary also entails a parable, an excerpt from a letter as well as dialogues that exemplify the discussions Anders had with the Viennese. What is striking, when one compares the Vienna Diary to the unpublished manuscript on occasional philosophy is that the question of philosophy is here barely explicitly attended to, and the only instance in which it is, is through a parable. The parable lends itself to be read against the background of Anders’ experience of philosophy as a student, which he retrospectively regarded to have failed to provide a sufficient response to the threat of National Socialism. The diary suggests that the parable was written on the train from Zurich to Vienna in May 1950 and was told to Anders by a fellow passenger on the train. The entry containing the parable is preceded by entries capturing Anders’ shock upon returning to Paris in which he immediately notices how familiar smells and objects from prewar times provide one with the sense that the appearance of the city itself does not actually have the capability to represent the horrors of the past. And it is perhaps this shock of return that leads Anders to then pen a parable that attempts to pose the question of what remains of philosophy. In contrast to many other figures of philosophy, such as Socrates’ “midwife”, the figure of philosophy in 167 ibid., 133. 37 Anders’ parable could be said to appear to be a figure of failure. The parable reads as follows: In the train, somebody told me that from his hut and through his binoculars he had watched someone climbing a high mountain face: all of a sudden the climber had started to wave frantically, had looked like someone flapping, who wanted to fly, and then disappeared into the depths. Only seconds after the fall, did his cry for help enter the hut, minute but clear. – Does not the best of philosophy, sounding down to us from the heights, resemble this delayed scream?168 When thinking back to how Anders described his unpolitical time as a student, one could say that the climber here represents the student of philosophy occupied with climbing the “heights” of metaphysics and ontology while not noticing that the ground underneath the student’s feet is already giving away, “studying past” Hitler and National Socialism, not noticing that there is a threat underway that will soon fundamentally change the society as well as the philosophical postulates the student once took for granted. If the best of philosophy then resembles the delayed scream of the climber that can be heard in the present, one might say that the best of philosophy consists of retrospectively understanding how philosophy has failed to prevent suffering and adequately respond to threats. In other words, the best that sounds down from the heights of philosophy is a scream that should be heard in the present: a scream that designates past failure. And perhaps hearing this scream is today the best of what is left of philosophy as it leads one to reevaluate the wishes inherent to philosophy, measuring its concerns and methods against the social reality it participated in and participates in today. The scream into the present could thus be said to be the expression of both a need and the recognition of failure that tasks the present with a new form of philosophy more attentive to nascent threats within the contemporary world and that would not lead one to study past one’s own time. One could say that most of Anders’ writing stems from the need to find a correction of this image of philosophy as a delayed scream.169 In this sense, one could interpret the parable as a warning image that Anders himself attempted to respond to through multiple literary and philosophical experiments such as the Vienna Diary. However, the Vienna Diary does not simply offer a corrective to that image of philosophy but foremost articulates a 168 ibid., 106. In another sense, however, this parable could be said to illustrate Anders’ conception of the diary as a warning image, which will be discussed in the next chapter. In this sense, the climber could be interpreted as the author of the diary whose writing ought to resemble a scream into the future that will be recognized as a scream of warning, impressing upon the future readers to dedicate themselves to preventing a future as atrocious as the past recorded in the diary. 169 38 problem that had presented itself so prevalently in Anders’ time as a student as well as during his years in exile, namely the discrepancy between experience and history. 2.3 Expectations Disillusioned In order to understand why the relationship between experience and history becomes such an acute problem in the Vienna Diary, one first needs to come to an understanding of the expectations with which Anders returned to Europe in 1950. It is the very incongruity of the expectation of postwar Europe being made up of places and people in which the war years have visibly inscribed themselves and the actual appearance of postwar Europe in which little of the recent past seems to have actually survived, that Anders everywhere contends with in the diary and that will lead him to examine thoroughly the way in which the past does and does not appear in the present. Anders’ expectations are implicitly articulated in many entries of the Vienna Diary. “It seems to me that for years I had doubted that Europe was still there,” Anders already writes in the first entry of the diary.170 After his fourteen-year-long exile in America, the image of Europe that he carried within in him was an image of a landscape of utter ruins in which no familiar building would still be standing – a landscape in which the bombings had obliterated everything of the prewar world that he and his family had fled.171 The image that everything associated with his prewar life, which National Socialism had invalidated, would be either destroyed or changed, had been to him a necessary counterpart to his own disappeared prewar life that seemed equally demolished.172 But Anders did not only expect places to be direct referents to the war years, also people’s faces were supposed to tell many stories of the horror of living through them.173 At his destination, Vienna, people had actually experienced the rise, the “illusory bloom” and the collapse of the “Third Reich”, which to him were events “not entirely real” as he had only witnessed what he called the “beginning of wickedness”, “the picture of 1933”.174 Settling in Vienna meant for Anders to settle in a place in which the fascist regime he had fled 170 ibid., 95. ibid., 100. 172 ibid., 100-101. 173 ibid., 118. 174 ibid., 115. 171 39 from had been in power for years and to live amongst and interact with a population that consisted of supporters and bystanders. Thus one can suppose that the questions with which he arrived in Vienna were: how do people relate to their individual tragedies as well as to the horrors of the events of Second World War; do those people feel guilt who had cheered Hitler or do they still cheer him in silence; and are victims able to shake the hands of those who they know had politically supported a murderous regime? Furthermore, one can suppose that Anders might have also expected that the hate against all that had happened, which he describes to have been the predominant affect during his years in exile – “the only home” of the exiled and “the only fire that would keep us [those in exile] busy” – would finally become supplanted by some feeling that he waited for in vain in the years prior.175 The year 1945 had been to Anders a “terrible anticlimax” as National Socialism had not collapsed through resistance but by a “massive exertion of power from outside”.176 And since then the hate in the exile’s heart waited in vain for a successor as hate was not replaced by any “curiosity about the better things that must now come, or joy about a real new beginning”.177 Thus one can suppose that Anders might have expected that coming to Vienna would supplant hate through a new feeling, responding to a new environment, new people and a new historical situation. Upon returning, Anders expected to feel something of an “obligatory feeling of happiness” or at least feel somewhat alienated when being united with those places in Europe he had longed for, for so many years.178 When one assumes that the reaction felt must correspond in some way to what one knows to have experienced, one would expect that returning, after being driven out of Europe fourteen years earlier, would be an experience at least accompanied by some relief when being united with what one has longed for or by some estrangement when returning to the city of Paris in which one had priory starved and feared for one’s life. However, all the expectations listed above were thoroughly frustrated upon Anders’ return.179 In Paris, what feels to Anders most strange is the way in which those expected feelings stay out and the way in which he instead all too quickly – after a moment of relief 175 ibid., 113. ibid., 113. 177 ibid., 113. 178 ibid., 96. 179 On Anders’ experience of returning to Paris, see Ann-Kathrin Pollmann, “Die Rückkehr von Günther Anders nach Europa”, 6-7. 176 40 that everything is still there – starts to walk through the city’s streets entirely thoughtlessly and as though he hadn’t actually stayed away from this city for fourteen years.180 But what if not his felt response could indicate to him that he now found himself in a country at the age of forty-eight that he had fled with thirty-four and thought would never set foot on again? How would the years of exile and all the losses suffered find expression? But the pull of the familiar landscape of Paris is so strong that finding himself in it soon becomes as natural as it used to be. The only thing Anders feels then is “the feeling of estrangement of not feeling estranged”, resulting in a situation in which he finds himself in an “unhistorical present” in which prewar and postwar time seem to blend into each other.181 “Being here is so natural, the local so seamless that there is simply no room for the decade and a half: for the broad American interlude”, Anders notes about Paris.182 Coming back to the title of the diary, which can be translated as “Returning and Forgetting”, one could thus say that the first striking instance in which Anders is confronted with the phenomenon of forgetting is actually through his own response, more particularly the way in which finding himself in Paris quickly becomes so habitual that the time in American exile seems no longer accessible but through “reversed opera glasses”, in which the years in America seem infinitely distant and shrunken in size.183 The expected landscape of ruins in which the past had everywhere left an impression is also something that Anders does not find upon his return. Instead he needs to contend with a reality that seems entirely unexpected and unreal to him. In Paris, he needs to confront the fact that old familiar smells and objects outlasted the war and outlived the many dead. The familiar smell of “the mixture of Eau de Javel, Muguets, Bleues ordinaires, oil baked goods and urinals”, was there already when Anders stepped out of the Gare du Nord.184 And the croissant-shaped iron continues to hang above the Boulangerie where Anders had last talked to Benjamin who died after taking his life at the border crossing in Portbou, fearing a handing over to the Nazis.185 But the city’s image tells no story of Benjamin nor of any of the other victims. Instead the street around the Boulangerie, “with its chairs and passersby, even trees and sky” and the young mothers taking their children to the Jardin du Luxembourg provides the impression that nothing unusual had ever taken place, that all 180 Anders, “Wiedersehen und Vergessen”, 96-97. ibid., 96-97. 182 ibid., 96. 183 ibid., 97. 184 ibid., 6. 185 ibid., 100. 181 41 is what it had been fourteen years ago. 186 “I roamed the city”, Anders writes, “every corner was talking about a dead person – no, no one was talking about them”.187 Even though the dead are of course absent, the appearance of the city strikes Anders as one in which that absence did not leave traces. His eyes wander to all those objects that were once the contemporaries of those now dead but have persisted without bearing a trace of the past. To stand in front of the “old lantern”, the “familiar house front” and the “shop sign from back then”, and to witness the apparent absence of history in the constancy of things alienates him as it is precisely this constancy that he deems as “the incomprehensible, the forbidden, the impossible” after all that had happened. Paris strikes Anders as no landscape of ruins but one of “resurrected” objects, a landscape of “ghosts” populated by things he long thought to be gone.188 Having arrived in Vienna, Anders is confronted with a similarly unreal landscape. A landscape that presents the splendor of Schönbrunn castle despite all that happened and one in which the city’s blooming flowers equally do not hold any memory of the recent past.189Also the city’s people do not appear as the carriers of the history of the war years. It is the returnee’s passionate speech about what had happened, that they do not fathom, that seems to them already outdated as five years had already passed since the war and it becomes clear to Anders that it is the returnee who demands of people that a now already “died away catastrophe” is painted upon their faces.190 But these faces appear to bear no paint or inscription. They don’t give away who had been complicit in the murder of millions, who had been a bystander of the fascist regime or who had been its victim. Upon observing a family in the garden of a restaurant on a Sunday afternoon, Anders realizes that he cannot make out who of its members could have been complicit in committing atrocities.191 “But with regard to no one can I make up my mind and say: that one; or probably that one; or even only: maybe that one”, writes Anders. 192 What already becomes clear then, is that the appearances of both Paris and Vienna strike Anders not as the sites of history he expected to find. In the diary, both cities are not presented as sites in which the present is seen as the obvious bearer of a past that has everywhere left an 186 ibid., 100, 102. ibid., 104. 188 ibid., 99-101. 189 ibid., 108-110. 190 ibid., 116-118. 191 ibid., 193. 192 ibid., 193. 187 42 impression but as sites of history in which the past appears hopelessly lost in an encompassing and seemingly impenetrable layer of the present and everyday life. While the past appears lost in the immediate appearance of city and people, Anders also needs to confront the fact that the Viennese locals make little effort to try to comprehend the rise and collapse of National Socialism or to come to terms with their role in it. Nowhere does Anders find any form of remorse about what had happened or any reflection on its gravity. “Jesus, I don’t know anything anymore”, a local teacher will say to Anders when asked about his memory of the war years.193 A local clerk will only speak to Anders about the war with regard of the fall out he had with his neighbors. In his speech, what is presented as the most outrageous result of the bombings is the crack left in the dining room, as though what was most horrible about the war – about this “invalid dream” next to “the world in which one does this and that” – was its intrusion upon convention.194 Here one has the sense that not even those who had actually physically experienced the war grasped what had happened to them. Their words seem to testify to a gulf between history and experience. Other locals, by contrast, react defensively when Anders talks about cities such as Rotterdam being more severely destroyed than Vienna or when he indicates that there had been a causal relationship between those times of prewar employment, which they remember as the “good times”, and the subsequent war that would bring them misery. 195 He also comes to hear the locals emphasizing their fundamental innocence and answering any mention of the problem of “collective guilt” by referring to their own misery, as though the atrocities that happened were explained and excused by it. 196 Anti-Semitic views, on the other hand, quickly come to the fore whenever Jews intend to make a claim on their “Aryanized” property. 197 A magazine claims that not enough people have yet learned the Christian virtue of forgiveness.198 This leads Anders to write: In other words: even after the murder of six million Jews, and even in the discussion on forgiveness, one dares to make the Jew the scapegoat again; this time the one who coincidentally happens to be left, the Jew who coincidentally happens not to be 193 ibid., 178. ibid., 125-126. 195 ibid., 176. 196 ibid., 136. 197 ibid., 147-149. 198 ibid., 162-163. 194 43 exterminated. – It is not the thug [Schläger] who is guilty [...] but the beaten one [Geschlagener]: because he cannot forget the blow, the thug and the beaten. –199 But many of the victims who did not forget the blow, nevertheless do not mention it. What particularly stupefies Anders is the way in which people seem to forgive and forget, and do not mention to each other what had happened and what the other had done during the war years. “[Y]esterday’s thugs and yesterday’s defeated people” now sit next to each other on the tram and make each other room.200 A former SA man is now a waiter serving a former concentration camp inmate.201 The clerk N. who was denunciated by his neighbor for not hoisting a flag, now greets this man as enthusiastically as ever as he was “a fine person before Hitler [...] [a]nd now again”.202 And when Anders protests, N. halts him and says “you haven’t been here long, Doctor” and “Doctor, be here a full year from now”.203 And indeed, within a year Anders comes to understand that N.’s behavior is not extraordinary but exemplary for postwar Viennese society. Anders will also meet M. who suffered in a concentration camp for years due to his colleague’s denunciation and who today works again in the same company next to this colleague’s side. “‘One does not always think about it’”, he says to Anders.204 But who are these people that seem to be able to forgive and forget? How do they bear to go on living like this? “[I]n everyday traffic”, Anders writes, “no one mentions the critical years to each other, because heaven knows what will come of it – so if one considers all that, then one starts feeling wretched”.205 For Anders, this situation resembles the legend of Lucifer, as though the good and the evil, after having risen from their graves and being separated from another, return to lying atop of one another in graveyards and battlefields. In the contemporary situation, however, one is talking about an arrangement of the living, not of the dead.206 But what is a society made to resemble an arrangement of the dead? What Anders also comes to notice and what strikes him as equally strange is that the Viennese locals never mention Hitler in any conversation nor those men that – as was once announced to them – had died “for the Führer” in some far away country.207 Strange 199 ibid., 163. ibid., 160. 201 ibid., 160. 202 ibid., 146. 203 ibid., 145. 204 ibid., 187. 205 ibid., 160-161. 206 ibid., 161. 207 ibid., 179-181. 200 44 that the baker family go into detail about the wife’s gallstones, but never mention their dead son.208 And next to these obvious omissions, Anders is everywhere confronted with an exaggerated politeness, for example, in the permanent use of titles such as “Doctor”. “Rudiments from the k and k period”, someone tells him proudly.209 But Anders does not buy into the way in which the Viennese like to dress themselves and their city in the garment of the monarchy. Anders’ diary captures the way in which willful forgetting, defensiveness against thinking about one’s own or other’s guilt and responsibility, silence and exaggerated politeness are characteristic of Viennese postwar society. To Anders, Vienna appears as no place in which people have a more approximate experience of history. Instead the city appears to him full of sites that seem unreal to him, given his expectation of arriving in “postwar Europe”. The appearance of the city, the arrangement of people, the Viennese’s speech, silence and polite manners, and their effort to collectively forget what role they had assumed during the war years gives the appearance of conscious or unconscious efforts of a population to provide no link to the war years. The affects that one could suspect to have supplanted the hatred that kept Anders going during his time in exile would have likely been stupefaction as well as the feeling of insult and nausea when confronted with the forgetting of the past in postwar Vienna. “I smell cheating. One wants to rob my memories”, Anders writes after being able to relax in the park of Schönbrunn. In a later entry, he records: “today’s situation mocks the bloody seriousness of the past twelve years, makes it invalid and degrades it to a spectacle; and this show has now been canceled because another is now on the program”.210 And in the show that is now on the program, no one wishes to make sense of the prior one. Instead the demand to do away with it and to not be held accountable prevails. “After all I was only seventeen”, are the words of a former SA-man who now seeks help from Dr. W. who has lost his entire family in Auschwitz.211 After Dr. W. tells Anders the story, Dr. W. exclaims that he has had enough and that he needs to leave this place. In other words, he needs to leave the Vienna of 1950, a city of polite appearances, which transpires to be a place of moral abysses too difficult to contend with when all moral standards have recently been 208 ibid., 180. ibid., 168. 210 ibid., 110, 161. 211 ibid., 153. 209 45 eroded.212 But Anders does not shy away from such abysses nor does he intend to leave the city. At the end of the entry, he writes: “What I wrote down is just a transcript. But even the transcript seems important to me because tomorrow or the day after tomorrow the monstrous absurdities that have arisen from the situation here will be forgotten or denied”.213 However, Anders does not only transcribe the absurdities as illustrated above. He treats them as problems one has to contend with if one wants to know something about the state of the postwar world because he comes to understand that those very absurdities and that very unreality he finds in postwar Vienna is in fact most real. 2.4 Postwar Society Before attending to the way in which Anders will treat the seeming unreality and those absurdities that stupefy him in Vienna, it is important to first illustrate a realization that Anders records in the early entries of his Vienna Diary as it appears to be formative for his approach toward Vienna. This realization appears to be that the Viennese of 1950 no longer constitute a postwar society grappling with the immediate aftermath of the war he expected to find but a society for whom the normalization of day-to-day life has already taken over experience. He will realize that he finds himself not among postwar people but within what one could call a “post-postwar society”. Let us then track the process through which Anders seems to arrive at this realization. The process seems to start when the tone of his political poems that he wrote during his exile and were addressed to postwar German society, appears to him no longer right. In a late interview, Anders claimed that the corpus of writing produced during his exile was addressed to “the Germany after Hitler”.214 “These texts”, Anders recalled, the didactic-political ones, the political poems, the explanations for fascism, the interpretation of the failure of the left, the advice on how one can perform resistance to a new fascistization – all these texts were not meant for France or America, but instead precisely for “the day after tomorrow” [...] No, we [exiles] did not write for 212 Elsewhere Anders writes: “Previous religious and philosophical ethics have become entirely obsolete without exception, they also exploded in Hiroshima and were gassed in Auschwitz.” See Anders, “Nach ‘Holocaust’” 1979”, 195. 213 Anders, “Wiedersehen und Vergessen”, 160. 214 Anders, “Wenn ich verzweifelt bin, was geht’s mich an?”, 35. 46 the drawer, instead, we believed to write for the suitcase that we would soon be able to open in Germany.215 But Anders did not open this suitcase in Germany. Instead he opened it in Austria, a country in which Anders never lived before but which had been part of Nazi Germany for seven years, whose population had cheered Hitler at the day of the country’s annexation, fought for Nazi Germany in the war and participated in the systematic murder of millions. In Austria, Anders had to measure his writing made for German postwar society against another German speaking postwar society, namely the Viennese society of 1950. One might thus suspect that it would be the Viennese that would first come to designate to him that postwar society, which had for many years only existed to him as the abstract people of “the day after tomorrow”, people that had been as yet unreachable in both time and space. If it is true that Anders had written for postwar German society during his seventeen years of exile, then prior to 1945 his writing was addressed to the future and to a society that had not yet existed. After 1945 then, his writing was addressed to contemporaries that he had no experience of because an ocean separated him from them. In the month of his arrival in Vienna, in May 1950, he thus realizes that the tone of his writing had been fundamentally shaped by the fact that he had been geographically separated from his addressees. Absence “drilled us [exiles] into raising our voices for ears we could never reach”, Anders notes in an entry dated soon after his arrival in Vienna.216 However, with the geographical distance between the formerly exiled and those former people of Nazi Germany now collapsed, he realizes that “volume and tone color” of those texts from exile would need to change in order to adequately address the people that he now found himself amongst.217 But he also quickly comes to the sobering conclusion that it would be impossible to remake that writing prepared for a decade and a half so that its tone would be proper for the people it had been prepared for. “But is it perhaps less impossible to learn to speak again”, he asks himself, “and to throw overboard everything we had prepared over there in a decade and a half?”218 He asks himself whether it will it be possible to no longer adopt a voice that resembles the roar of someone unheard addressing an audience that one can neither see nor hear. Will it be possible to learn to speak to those postwar people when one’s voice has the possibility to be heard from up close and one’s addressees are both visible and audible? The imperative to learning to 215 ibid., 35. Anders, “Wiedersehen und Vergessen”, 109. 217 ibid., 109. 218 ibid., 110. 216 47 speak again should thus be understood as the task to find the proper tone and right language by which to address postwar society in writing as well as the task of literally speaking to those postwar people. Finding the right language requires one to know what one’s addressees themselves speak of and what they omit. In Anders’ case, it required him to turn a piercing gaze upon the Viennese and their city. In the second month of his arrival, Anders comes to realize that for the Viennese the National Socialist State had indeed fallen apart five years ago and since then “had to live on, friend next to enemy, with one another and among one another”.219 They do not share the returnee’s speech seeking to find out what had happened during the war years. For this to change, Anders holds it to be necessary that the returnees now “plant our [their] passion in them [the Viennese]”.220 Those returnees that continue to carry within themselves what he calls the “true hatred: the hatred against the cause and against the guilty” ought to inspire that hatred in people to whom the years of National Socialism appear a long time ago, best forgotten and unmentioned.221 In people, one might add, for whom many such hatred never existed in the first place. In this early entry of the Vienna Diary, the returnee appears to carry the role of introducing a necessary moral corrective into the lives of the Viennese. However, already in the following entry, also dated in the second month after his arrival in Vienna, Anders is far more doubtful of his approach when he asks himself whether returnees do “not see everything from the wrong time angle and therefore judge it unjustly”.222 Anders explains: For us, who have just arrived and only now stand in front of the ruins, this is postHitler and postwar Europe. We do not want to believe in the time period that already separates this part of the world from the days of collapse; again and again we forget about it; again and again we demand of the locals that the long since died away catastrophe should be painted on their faces. – The boy who is playing under my window in the orchard is already a little five-year-old man who has never or never again heard of Hitler.223 While the earlier imperative of planting passion in the Viennese could be said to still belong to the effort of moral and political reeducation of postwar society, Anders had envisioned during his years in exile, it is the latter expression of doubt about how to judge 219 ibid., 116. ibid., 117-118. 221 ibid., 117-118. 222 ibid., 118. 223 ibid., 118. 220 48 and approach those people whose perception of time and space seems to differ so vastly from that of the returnee that will indeed become formative for the rest of the Vienna Diary. Vienna of 1950 is not the place that Anders once imagined to open his suitcase in, not only because Vienna was not Germany but because the Viennese turn out not to signify that society of immediate postwar Europe he had thought to arrive in. In an entry from four months later in October 1950, Anders notes that Viennese society has already chosen a path by which to deal with the past catastrophe and which has thoroughly shaped who the Viennese are now. According to Anders, there are only two paths to get out of a situation in which millions had made themselves guilty through participation in the National Socialist regime and these paths are “[e]ducation and forgetting”.224 And it is the easier, second path, that Viennese society has chosen and that will lead Anders to the sobering conclusion that “today’s situation lies at its end”.225 This implies that the chance to any longer address the Viennese at the moment Anders had thought to find them, in a period in which the normality of day-to-day life would be suspended in the immediate aftermath of the war, is already missed. Those people that Anders has never known due to his absence in exile are already gone. The people that Anders comes to know are those shaped by the progression of time since the end of the war, in which the appearance of everyday Viennese life appears to triumph everywhere over those moral abysses that nevertheless open themselves up to a more attentive gaze. 2.5 Surface and Sound of Vienna How will Anders then approach the Viennese? Most of the works that Anders is today most known for, such as his two volumes of Die Antiquiertheit des Menschen and his antinuclear writings can be distinguished by a particular apocalyptic dictum and a form of moral didactics he thought to be necessary in the wake of the beginning of the nuclear age. In the Vienna Diary, however, Anders’ moralistic and sharply judging tone does not predominate. As the previous sections demonstrated, Anders’ diary does of course register the many shocks he experiences upon his confrontation with Vienna but nevertheless the diary is also full of attempts to try and understand the perspective of the Viennese. In 224 225 ibid., 162. ibid., 162. 49 order to find the right language and tone for his future writing, Anders seemed to have suspected that it would first be necessary to know who the people of the present are and this task required him to attempt to almost mimetically try to understand how the Viennese of 1950 interact, remember and forget. Even though Anders’ apocalyptic dictum is already part of his earlier works, one could suspect that it found its particular urgency once Anders had undergone the process of grappling with Viennese society, which had experienced the events that had constituted those unprecedented and irrevocable caesuras of his own life through an entirely different perspective. In the diary, Anders does not transcribe attempts at morally reeducating the Viennese, of planting his hatred and passion in them but instead transcribes his observations of the city and his attempts at sounding out the voices of those people that seem to find themselves on an entirely different plane of time and experience than he had initially expected. 226 Despite his stupefaction and disbelief, Anders pays close attention to the surface of that postwar city, which seems to omit everywhere the war years and listens closely to the sound of the speech of the morally deplorable appearing Viennese as a way of registering the contradictory elements that constitute that particular post-postwar reality. Dawsey writes that Anders’ Vienna Diary “critically examines subjectivities ‘on the ground’ in Vienna as the victim myth solidified into an official state ideology” while “[m]ost of the entries involved him [Anders] probing the opinions, anecdotes, memories and mannerisms of others”.227 What Anders is interested in is what buildings, landscapes, newspapers, magazines, theatre performances, literary evenings, cafés, people’s stories, their speech and the way they interact on a day-to-day basis can tell him something about the discrepancies between history and experience that are formative for their experience as well as his own. For that reason Anders will not simply treat the sound and surface of postwar Vienna as a false appearance but as a site of knowledge that tells him something about the state of the present. Dawsey describes his method as “the fusion of phenomenological attention to quotidian comments, memories, gestures, silences, objects and spaces with sharp but terse critical analysis of the bigger pathologies these micro-phenomena revealed”.228 However, this kind of attention and labor will also change Anders’ attitude toward what he sees in Vienna. The diary could thus be said to also track the process from Anders’ disbelief when 226 As Dawsey remarks, the émigrés and the Viennese in Anders’ diary appear as having “inhabited fundamentally different cognitive worlds with distinct temporal frames of reference”. See Dawsey, “Where Hitler’s Name is Never Spoken: Günther Anders in 1950s Vienna”, 222. 227 See ibid., 220. 228 Dawsey points out that Anders had already developed this method during his years in exile. See ibid., 220. 50 confronted with postwar Vienna toward making ever greater attempts at understanding the city and the people that he has before his eyes. 2.5.1 Historical Referents Before attending to the way in which Anders’ own reaction toward Vienna and the Viennese changes through the progression of the diary, we will first attend to Anders’ more general observations of the city and then examine Anders’ efforts at speaking to the Viennese. How will Vienna of 1950 come to appear to Anders? Already in the first months after his arrival, upon visiting local bookstores and reading local papers in cafés, Vienna strikes him as a very narrow and anachronistic world in which people live selfenclosed lives that they do not call into question. “What global problems there are today, is unknown to most of the Viennese”, Anders notes.229 Even though Vienna, still occupied by the victory powers of the war, is in one sense the “center of the world” where films and the selection of newspapers seem to reflect the entire world, reading those local newspapers that repeat expressions such as “the wide world” and make use of old racist stereotypes such as portraying the Chinese with a long braid will signify to Anders Vienna’s isolation from the rest of the world.230 For Anders this anachronism and isolation can somewhat be comprehended by the fact that Austria had no colonies and “[w]hile the English, Portuguese, Spanish, French boy went to the sea to ‘get out’, the Austrian made his ski tour, which also ‘took him out’, but back to Ottakring on Sunday afternoon”.231 And while other cities aspire to be like other seemingly more modern cities, e.g. Brussels like Paris, Vienna strikes Anders as aspiring to be like its own past self during the time of the empire. 232All these observations become more concrete and find their representation in the appearance of the city as well as their embodiment within people. Anders suspects that Vienna’s anachronism serves the city as a veil that it can cast over its National Socialist past. Schönbrunn castle is rebuilt to resemble Vienna’s shinier years. That it has once served as a base for the National Socialist protection and military police or that bombs had partly destroyed its main building, its annex and garden is no longer visible. Anders, who only writes about what he sees, does not mention this but will instead write that when he looks at the “park, the flower beds, the castle and the city expanding to the 229 Anders, “Wiedersehen und Vergessen”, 119. ibid., 119-200. 231 ibid., 120. 232 ibid., 127. 230 51 horizon” he feels like an “astronomer in front of a telescope: he does not simply look into space but also back into time”.233 Next to the rebuilt castle, a literary evening with Peter Altenberg imitations on the program strikes Anders as an imitation of the year 1912. It appears to offer people an entrance into a world in which all that still confronts the eyes with any ruins left of the war years can be comfortably shut out. What such evenings offer is the entry into what Anders calls “a ghost society”.234 Indeed, Vienna appears to Anders as a place for the summoning and imitation of those ghosts from more glorious times, in order to keep those others from the more recent period of history at arm’s length. In this sense, Anders’ diary registers the discrepancy between the visible appearance of the city and its past. It captures the way in which one historical referent has been made to live again in order to make another disappear. Even when appearances seem to testify such triumph, Anders, who tries to understand the perspective of the Viennese while also being very much cognizant of the horrors that had taken place in Austria in the years of National Socialism, will very much question people’s exaggerated courtesy that they claim to be rudiments of the Habsburg era. As one would assume that such rudiments were made to disappear by “concentration camps” and “bomb cellars”, people’s courtesy strikes Anders as a response to that very Nazi past, not only the city’s appearance and cultural events but also people’s gestures wish to cover it up.235 He suspects the Viennese’s manners to be a means by which to cover “the reality of the Hitler intermezzo” as well as resulting from the want to no longer be part of world history and mistrust about the future, “caution with regard to strangers”. 236 It designates to Anders Viennese’s increasing distance from politics and retreat into privacy: “One is unpolitical in order to demonstrate tomorrow that one has been unpolitical yesterday”. 237 Vienna’s seemingly unhistorical appearance imitating its own past self is for Anders always related to Vienna’s Nazi past and what has resulted from it. What Anders’ arguments seem to imply is that Vienna’s efforts at resurrecting its own past self cannot be understood as a simple repetition of history or the result of historical heritage but ought to be understood as a new effort that responds to a concrete historical situation. 233 ibid., 108. ibid., 137. 235 ibid., 168-169. 236 ibid., 168-169; Dawsey, “Where Hitler’s Name is Never Spoken: Günther Anders in 1950s Vienna”, 223. 237 Anders, “Wiedersehen und Vergessen”, 169. 234 52 2.5.2 Silence But not only what Anders sees in Vienna is for him the result of a historical situation, but also what he hears and doesn’t hear. That Anders finds that Hitler’s name is almost never spoken out loud, even though this man shaped generations to their inner core, leads him to ask whether people are not in the midst of turning Hitler into a mythical figure and into an “object of private reverence”.238 Anders suspects that the omission of Hitler’s name from speech could also be a form of keeping Hitler very much alive. He suspects a similar process to take place when people avoid speaking of their relatives who died in the war. Speaking of the war dead would task them not to remember the war dead as “war heroes” as this would imply to openly affirm the cause of their death.239 One can suppose then that this interpretation of the soldiers’ death nevertheless lives on in silence and that silence is the result of an inability to accept that so many underwent a senseless death.240 In this sense, Anders’ diary grasps silence not as a result of forgetting but as the result of a need for preservation and a conscious or unconscious wish to not give up ideologies.241 2.5.3 Reversal of Victims and Perpetrators Anders also observes the survival of ideology in other instances. He observes how each time when former property owners who survived the Shoah return to Vienna and try to get their property back, they are “punished” for their survival and for making a claim to their property. 242 Either they have to pay a compensation fee to the “Aryanizer” of their property or the neighborhood gladly testifies to the claimant’s “unreliability” and “moral 238 ibid., 179. Dawsey, “Where Hitler’s Name is Never Spoken: Günther Anders in 1950s Vienna”, 224. 239 Anders, “Wiedersehen und Vergessen”, 180-181. 240 ibid., 180-181. 241 At the same time, it should be mentioned that soldiers and those who had stayed put during the war years also largely shaped “public memory” in Austria. “The memory of the Wehrmacht generation came more and more to be the dominant force and was kept alive through the politics of history as orchestrated by associations of veterans from the 1950s onwards”, writes historian Oliver Rathkolb, “It formed a layer of remembrance that all but stifled the memory of the victims and the survivors of the Holocaust”. See Oliver Rathkolb, The Paradoxical Republic. Austria 1945-2005, translated by Otmar Binder, Eleonor Breuning, Ian Fraser and David Sinclair-Jones, New York, Oxford: Berghahn 2014, 238. 242 On the situation of restitution in postwar Austria, see A Heavy Legacy and Wiedergutmachung. Compensation and Restitution in Austria. The final balance of the Schüssel government, edited by Stefan Karner and Walter M. Iber, Innsbruck, Wien, Bozen: StudienVerlag 2019. 53 disqualification” in order to help the “Aryanizer”. 243 However, also those who do not make any claim on their former property, do not earn the sympathy of the Viennese but are instead suspected to be communists when those who do fight for it, are seen as thieves.244 “‘Please, Herr Doctor, hand on the heart, was Hitler really so completely wrong here?’”, a woman says to Anders, her speech exemplifying “the common word of praise for Nazism”.245 The entries testify to the way in which the victims of National Socialism continue to be presented as perpetrators by former perpetrators, supporters and bystanders who continue to present themselves as the victims. The diary also testifies to a similar reversal when Anders records how a local waiter insists that in times of peace “one ought to forgive each other” and when he records reading an article from an author who claims that some people hadn’t yet been taught the Christian virtue of forgiveness.246 That author, Anders notes, “knows that nobody needs to be told who is meant by the ‘non-Christian’, that everybody is themselves capable of calling out: ‘Hold the Jew!’”.247 Here Anders’ observations capture the way in which the surviving victims are antagonized. In this context, Dawsey aptly writes that “Anders’ vituperative comments on the Austrian scene anticipated the much-quoted statement that the Germans will never forgive the Jews for Auschwitz”.248 2.5.4 Philistines of the Apocalypse Next to the dynamic of omission and survival of the National Socialist past in Vienna, Anders will also point to a way of dealing with the past that appears to him equally problematic and that he finds embodied in the people of Hietzing. They appear to him as having had neither been active “anti-Nazis” nor as having “adopted Nazism as their cause” during the years of the “Third Reich”. 249 To Anders, they designate conservative “philistines of the apocalyptic time” who have been “drained by moral-, cultural and religious goods from other epochs and classes”.250 To him, they signify descendants of the conservative Austrian statesman Klemens Metternich. Through this association, Anders 243 Anders, “Wiedersehen und Vergessen”, 148. ibid., 148-149. 245 ibid., 149; Dawsey, “Where Hitler’s Name is Never Spoken: Günther Anders in 1950s Vienna”, 220. 246 Anders, “Wiedersehen und Vergessen”, 162-163. 247 ibid., 163. 248 Dawsey, “Where Hitler’s Name is Never Spoken: Günther Anders in 1950s Vienna”, 236. 249 ibid., 234. 250 Anders, “Wiedersehen und Vergessen”, 172. 244 54 recalls, as Dawsey writes, “a period of renunciation by the masses in political participation”. 251 According to Anders, these descendants continued to see a virtue in “steadily declared non-opposition [...] whereby it did not matter whom they did not oppose”. 252 And when during the dictatorship, this cherished non-opposition gained attention, they felt bitter towards the “Reich”. What differentiates these Metternichians from Anti-fascists in 1950 is, according to Anders, that they continually “emphasize their own fundamental innocence” while the latter will always “emphasize, next to the enemy’s guilt, their own because they had ‘done’ too little”. 253 As Dawsey suggests, Anders’ observations imply that “[a]n Austrian anti-fascist Left could absolutely not depend, [...] on the inheritors of Metternich’s worldview”.254 Anders was deeply frustrated by those who continued to insist upon their irresponsibility and demonstrated their ongoing ignorance of political problems in the present. One can suppose that they didn’t cause him frustration simply because he did not agree with their view on history but because they appeared to him as entirely unsuitable to fight against the ongoing and future forms of destruction marking the twentieth century. The gulf between their own lives and what had happened and was happening appeared insurmountable, given their strong wish for this gulf to be preserved. One such philistine of the apocalypse is personified in the first longer conversation partner that the reader of Anders’ diary is introduced to, namely the civil servant N.. N. speaks to Anders about his experience of the bombardment of Vienna, never once mentions Nazism or Hitler but continually makes false solidary gestures toward Jewish suffering with the goal of achieving Anders’ sympathy. What is startling about his war testimony is that he doesn’t tell a story of destruction, fear of death and hunger but instead the story of a neighborhood quarrel. Here the discrepancy between apocalyptic event and experience is acutely expressed. The story that N. tells Anders goes as follows: N. earned the scorn of his neighbors for arranging a burial outside the city after his old mother passed away peacefully during the bombings while his neighbors needed to bury their dead in the garden.255 “They were nothing but jealous”, N. concludes, “Like they were jealous of the Jews”.256 The readers of the diary might ask themselves what one is to do with such an 251 Dawsey, “Where Hitler’s Name is Never Spoken: Günther Anders in 1950s Vienna”, 234. Anders, “Wiedersehen und Vergessen”, 173. 253 ibid., 173. 254 Dawsey, “Where Hitler’s Name is Never Spoken: Günther Anders in 1950s Vienna”, 235. 255 Anders, “Wiedersehen und Vergessen”, 121. 256 ibid., 123. 252 55 absurd and seemingly banal story. N. and his neighbors may appear banal but for Anders calamity finds expression in such forms of banality. Anders entertains several possibilities but does not arrive at any definite conclusion about N.’s neighbors’ behavior. He entertains the possibility that they might have already detested N.’s old mother when she was still alive for being nothing but “‘an eater more’” and, according to the Nazi doctrine, economically unprofitable. 257 He also suspects that they might have detested a woman who “during the days of mutilated and buried people” died a natural death of old age and that N.’s arranged burial demonstrated his lack of solidarity with them. 258 However, conceding to the suspicion that the neighbors had likely felt jealousy, Anders asks himself if it is not horrific that feelings like jealousy, which usually play a role in day-to-day life, survive in the midst of bombings, prevail in a situation that would appear to call out for more appropriate affects.259 He thus raises the question if not the most horrible thing about horrific events consists in the “wide gulf between event and affect” and that affects remain the same even in times of total upheaval.260 What Anders likely thought to be horrific about the discrepancy between event and affect, is that even in the worst situations, the affect most dominantly felt is often not that which responds to the horror of the situation one finds oneself in, but those daily forms of scorn and coldness that survive even when everyday life is entirely suspended. Horrible situations are here shown not to be courses in morality, and do not produce better people. After “assessing the case a little more carefully”, N. himself comes to strike Anders as someone who did not bury his mother in the midst of a collapsing city out of respect for the dead, but out of obedience to custom next to which “world history, even the apocalypse, was an invalid, unbelievable, unreal intermezzo”. 261 “‘Had I known how common it already was to bury one’s relatives in the garden’”, N. says to Anders “‘how much could I have saved myself’”.262 It becomes clear to Anders that even though one might think of N.’s deed as heroic, he is no descendent of Antigone.263 Instead he will reveal himself as one of the late Metternichians when voicing the complaint: “‘That it had to hit us [...] when we had always kept so calm’”.264 “[T]he interruption [of world history] 257 ibid., 122. ibid., 121-123. 259 ibid., 123. 260 ibid., 123. 261 ibid., 125. 262 ibid., 124. 263 ibid., 124. 264 ibid., 126. 258 56 is outrageous and scandalous, because you didn’t ‘deserve’ it, because you didn’t provoke it with anything”, writes Anders imitating the logic of N.’s thought.265 One could thus say that N.’s speech expresses the kind of apolitical ignorance of history and insistence of irresponsibility that Anders will find so common among the Viennese. These entries of the Vienna Diary could be said to already express a concrete form of “apocalyptic blindness” – a term Anders will later use to designate people’s attitude toward the bomb – stemming from a so common rigidity in thought and imagination.266 In this case, a form of apocalyptic blindness is shown to have been formative of past apocalyptic experiences as well as to continue to be formative for the way in which such experiences are remembered. At the same time, however, one could defend the jealousy of N.’s neighbors and N.’s obedience to custom as common forms of denial in an apocalyptic situation and admit that one cannot simply judge from outside what would be the proper way to react and behave in apocalyptic situations that one has oneself not experienced. However, cataloguing such discrepancies were for Anders significant as the inability of adequately responding to and recognizing apocalyptic situations and the incapability of feeling in accord with danger would later come to designate to him the elements ensuring the continuity of a history of catastrophes. 2.5.5 Distorted Recollection Not only in N.’s speech, Anders registers discrepancies between history and experience. Let us move to another entry in the diary. There Anders writes about a homeowner in Vienna’s city center who gets angry at him when he mentions London, Rotterdam, German and Polish cities being worse destroyed than Vienna as though he had taken from her the “honorary title” that is her own damaged house.267 “You with your foreign city names!” the woman objects to Anders while her son impresses upon him that those other cities hadn’t deserved it any better either, as though they got what they deserved. 268 “‘Thinking through’ models of wrong thinking is not easy”, Anders notes. 269 What appears to Anders to be the driving motor of the son’s argumentation is an inversion 265 ibid., 126. For Anders’ exposition of “apocalyptic blindness”, see Anders, Die Antiquiertheit des Menschen 1. Über die Seele im Zeitalter der zweiten industriellen Revolution, 307-327. 267 ibid., 135. 268 ibid., 135. 269 ibid., 136. 266 57 figure that follows the principle “Proximum, ergo primum”. 270 Through this principle, one’s own suffering always precedes and exceeds everyone else’s even when one’s own destroyed city is the result of the destruction first committed by Nazi Germany elsewhere. According to Anders, the son does not thereby employ a “conscious trick”. 271 This, however, does not exonerate his distorted recollection for he appears to Anders to be “clever enough to know where it is advantageous not to know; and cautious enough to be able to decide where it pays off to remain ‘unconscious’”. 272 What Anders seems to suspect here is that the defensiveness by which the son reacts to Anders’ “relativisation” of Vienna’s destruction points to the way reason, which he can very well employ in other matters, is in this matter suspended and that it pays off for him to employ ignorance when the demand to insist on one’s sole status as victim and irresponsibility has become a primary need. Anders will, however, come to detect many more such distorted forms of recollection. In a later entry of the diary, Anders will transcribe a conversation with a shoemaker who selectively recalls the “good times” of his prewar employment but is unwilling to see any connection to the war and the war preparation that had made those “good times” possible.273 For Anders, his mode of remembrance points to the greater problem of the prevalence of insular memory images that appear disconnected from all that has preceded and proceeded them by which memory becomes no sign of intelligence but the perpetuation of ignorance. However, Anders suspects that the gulf between cause and effect that now exists in the shoemaker’s memory also results from the fact that the shoemaker’s labor of producing soles before the war had existed for him even then without any connection to the preparation of war.274 Here the shoemaker serves as the micro-example for those Austrians who Anders suspects to have of course witnessed the preparations for war everywhere, in factories and parades but erased the imagination of the consequences of what they saw and instead returned to a form of perception that is also a form of “blindness” for the future.275 This analysis of a form of “blind perception” and lack of consciousness in what causes and effects one’s own labor is embedded within, already points to what Dawsey calls those “bigger pathologies” that Anders regarded to 270 ibid., 136. ibid., 136. 272 ibid., 136. 273 ibid., 176-177. 274 ibid., 177. 275 ibid., 182-183. 271 58 characterize contemporary society.276 These observations could be said to relate to what Anders will later call the discrepancy between what people are capable of producing and the imagination of consequences as well as an imperative that Anders later held to apply to workers: “You should not ask after the meaning of that which you produce, and after the effects that you might cause through that which you produce; you should not even recognize those effects, much less spread such knowledge!”.277 The detected discrepancy as well as the imperative should not be understood as exonerating people of responsibility or pronouncing anything definite about their second nature but instead point to prevalent elements that structure experience. This, however, does not mean that living in accord with this structural element is not one’s own choice even when it is of course easier and almost inevitable to forget than to constantly remind oneself of the ways in which one’s own life participates in engines of violence and destruction. 2.5.6 Survival of a One-Armed Time Sense Even though Anders finds little evidence of the effort to consciously and critically reflect upon the years of war and fascism among the Viennese, upon closer scrutiny of their behavior he will also find how they are fundamentally shaped by those years. One of Anders’ diary entries captures a form of blunt coldness. There he writes about an evening at a dance hall, in which a young man shoots a young woman. After a five minute long cigarette break and after the blood is wiped from the parquet “like spilled gravy”, Vienna’s youth is dancing again on the very same spot that the woman had just laid there dead. For Anders, the young Viennese that appear to heartlessly dance away the night despite being eyewitnesses to the murder of a girl, designate people who had been brought up in a time in which they had to take violent death for granted everyday, “whose timetable stipulated that someone would be lying in the rubble” but despite this had to learn to go back to business.278 And even though five years had passed since the end of the war, Anders suspects that this youth’s time sense is still dictated by the catastrophic situation in which the goal had been to always make it alive to the next moment. Thus, he suspects that the murder of a girl leaves no impression because this youth’s time 276 Dawsey, “Where Hitler’s Name is Never Spoken: Günther Anders in 1950s Vienna”, 220. Günther Anders, “Sprache und Endzeit (III)” in FORVM, No. 428/429, August, 1989, 51, accessed 19 September 2022, URL: http://forvm.contextxxi.org/sprache-und-endzeit-iii.html. On the “promethean discrepancy”, see Anders, Die Antiquiertheit des Menschen 1. Über die Seele im Zeitalter der zweiten industriellen Revolution, 296-300 278 Anders, “Wiedersehen und Vergessen”, 189. 277 59 consciousness is “one-armed”, only pointing in the immediate future as it had been during the perception of disaster situations.279 “What can we expect from you today?” Anders will ask, “You are certainly not guilty. But you are mean now, even if you became it through the meanness of others. And I hardly believe that we will still be able to help you”.280 Even though he here voices resignation, it should be said that changing people’s time consciousness would in his later writings become one of his most important demands. However, one could add that the time consciousness of those young Viennese does not simply appear to reflect the time consciousness of catastrophe but also illustrates both the knowledge of the insignificance of individual life that world history has demonstrated over and over again as well as the more general phenomena of radical indifference to the suffering of others, which is not an exception but one of the most prevalent phenomena.281 2.5.7 As Though Nothing Had Happened While many of the episodes discussed so far are concerned with the distortion of history in Austrian recollection, the survival of Nazism and anti-Semitism as well as the discrepancies between experience and history, other episodes attend to the apparent nonsurvival of the past in the appearance of Viennese daily life. Not only do the war years appear forgotten due to Vienna’s efforts at resurrecting the monarchy as the dominant historical referent but also because Vienna’s society appears to Anders as one in which victims and perpetrators live along side each other as though nothing had ever happened. When talking to the actor M. who again works together with the same colleagues who had denounced him and whose denunciation had brought him years in a concentration camp, Anders will find that M. only speaks of his present situation in neutral and positive terms. To Anders, M. appears as someone who does not have the strength to lead a “double life” meaning that he is incapable of constantly thinking of his colleagues as enemies and that such a thing is likely only capable for people that are “virtuosos of abstraction”.282 In other words, living on, going back to one’s prewar occupation required for many forgetting and erasing the spite that would likely make working alongside these men unbearable. Anders’ 279 ibid., 189-190. ibid., 190. 281 For a study that engages with the problem of radical indifference to the suffering of others, see Stanley Cohen, States of Denial. Knowing about Atrocities and Suffering, Cambridge, Malden: Polity 2001. 282 Anders, “Wiedersehen und Vergessen”, 187. 280 60 interpretation of M.’s behavior appears to be no moral judgment but an observation of how the acceptance of absolutely unfathomable constellations of people creates the reality of postwar Viennese society. The already mentioned civil servant, N. will tell Anders that his neighbor had denounced him for not having waved a flag upon a Nazi victory but does not hold his denunciator’s deed against him. Instead, he appears glad that they both agree to forget what had happened. Therein N. appears to Anders as having transformed the war years and the deeds of his neighbor into something “morally unreal”, in other words, one could say, as something that bears no consequences. 283 And in a more general way, Anders barely sees in people any retrospective blame of Hitler and National Socialists for having sent their children to death and for leading to the destruction of their city. The sight of those numerous war invalids seem to inspire no anger in people. Instead they are treated with a somewhat neutral “indefinite half cynical, half compassionate ‘such is life’ gesture”, which the war invalids have taken up towards themselves as well.284 Nowhere does Anders find, what he calls, a “‘such was Hitler’-gesture”.285 Thus, Vienna will appear to Anders as a city in which people forgot “the causes of catastrophes” as well as “the catastrophe itself” like the no longer starving forget former hunger, the healthy their time of sickness. 286 And this dire situation in which no one feels the need, strength or the responsibility to remember anything, in which there exists no critical consciousness of the past and the role one had oneself played in it, no speech that tries to preserve the bombardment, denunciation by one’s colleague or the losses suffered, drives Anders to the urgent question: “Who for God’s sake should now preserve what had happened, who draw the conclusions, who formulates the warnings when the neurotics no longer know anything and the dull likewise nothing? Maybe we who were absent? Impossible”.287 It is in those questions that one can hear the desperation in Anders’ tone about not having found what he likely hoped to find in Vienna, that is people who had preserved what had happened to them and had the words to tell him something about the years of war that he himself had only experienced from far away. Even though the diary does register the Viennese as transformed people, one could say that it also captures how a specific form of inexperience of catastrophes has materialized in them. Anders’ examination of the Viennese, their speech and behavior shows that the elements that constitute what we earlier called a post-postwar society are indeed multiple and contradictory. Upon 283 ibid., 147. ibid., 182. 285 ibid., 182. 286 ibid., 177. 287 ibid., 178. 284 61 examining Vienna’s surface, Anders registers how the city creates prewar historical referents in order not to signify its National Socialist period and how people appear to interact with each other as though nothing had ever happened. But upon closer scrutiny of Vienna’s surface and attention to the speech of the Viennese, his diary also registers how this apparently buried past has also survived in people, not through conscious and critical retrospection but instead in a youth that seems to dance past the dead, in stories about the bombardment of Vienna that testify to the discrepancy between experience, affect and apocalyptic situation, in people’s silence, in their pervasive anti-Semitism, in their reversal of the roles of victim and perpetrator and in distorted forms of historical recollection. By attending to the city’s surface, by listening closely to the often dire, banal and cruel speech of the Viennese, the diary registers the way in which the city’s seeming unreality is in fact historical and real because it constitutes the Vienna of 1950. What consequences will Anders draw from this? What will the experience of such a postwar society mean for someone who intends to write against the history and future of atrocities? Before attending to the question how the Vienna Diary can be read as a propaedeutic for Anders’ later writing explicitly dedicated to warning as well as discussing the end of the diary, it appears necessary to first examine the changes that the returnee himself undergoes. The phenomena of forgetting, transformation and inexperience are not only singular to the Viennese of 1950 but also materialize in the returnee himself. 2.6 The Returnee The diary’s temporal character becomes palpable when one tracks how Anders’ own reactions to Vienna and its people change over time. One of the ways in which this becomes evident is in the returnee’s changing reactions to the city’s unreal appearances. In a diary entry from a month after his arrival, Anders’ comments express resistance toward what he sees. There he writes for instance that the view from the Gloriette appears to him as though he is confronted with “light sources that now pretend to shine [but] have long since gone out”.288 He thereby underscores the apparent unreality of the city that he now has in front of him. In an entry from the same month, this resistance continues. There, Anders will note that Schönbrunn with its “lonely bank” and “never-ending lilac-and laburnum bushes” is of course exhilarating after “the garbage and shrieks of Columbus 288 ibid., 108. 62 Avenue” but nevertheless he “smells cheating”.289 It is this early entry that registers the very real effect of Vienna’s seemingly unreal surface, namely letting the returnee momentarily forget what had happened. It is as though the diary in which Anders recalls the image of Odysseus, who, according to him, ought not forget his Odyssey after having returned to Ithaca, that offers Anders the chance to voice the words of resistance against the very real effects of returning to Europe and to write against the forgetting interlocked with it.290 In an entry from four months later, however, Anders’ voice appears far less critical when he notes that it seems to him as though in Vienna all senses “‘breathe a sigh of relief’”.291 It is Vienna, the city he expected to bear the appearance of a ruined world, that Anders has the sense that his eyes are on “holiday” after they had been over many years confronted with the “supersensible” unreality of America. 292 America, with its multiple neon signs in one field of vision, multiple booming typewriters and huge bridges, cities and companies, offered a landscape that testified to the discrepancy between what people produce and what can be absorbed by the senses. Vienna, by contrast, in which houses, streets and the city itself can be overlooked, appears to Anders as a place that is made for the senses. This leads him to ask if Vienna’s streets aren’t already “museum pieces of today’s world”.293 In these later entries, Anders’ voice bears no longer the same desperation and the initial urge to protest against Vienna’s appearance. Shortly afterwards, finding himself in the rural landscape of Goisern, a town in upper Austria, Anders will note that he there often forgets that he is “back” but feels simply to be there, like a twenty year old floating in the sun.294 In this entry, protest is no longer articulated. In an entry from a month earlier, Anders expressed his disappointment when arriving at the Wirtshaus he had once written poems about and had longed for during his years in exile. The real place seemed to him to be only a copy of his “original image of longing”.295 A month later when confronted with Goisern, he writes: “Be happy, to be back. But don’t keep up illusions. Not only the power of language finds its end in return, also its right”.296 He there implies that the time in which the words of poetry had the function to transport something 289 ibid., 110. ibid., 110. 291 ibid., 128. 292 ibid., 128-131. 293 ibid., 131. 294 ibid., 132. 295 ibid., 119. 296 ibid., 132. 290 63 of those disappeared places is now over. 297 But not only the perception of landscapes changes for him over time, also words that had once instilled pain and longing in him, do so no longer. In November, upon reading the name “Cherbourg” in a local newspaper, Anders will note that while half a year earlier upon his arrival this name had designated a growing line on the horizon that had meant Europe to him, it now is nothing but a “a port city in a different country” to him.298 And while he had felt pain in the United States, when someone would tell him that they would leave for France as though they had touched an unhealed wound, now upon hearing such news such pain is no longer felt.299 What is striking about the diary with respect to Anders’ own registered changes is that it tracks the pace by which returning initiates the ebbing away of affects that had orientated his life in exile and the ebbing away of the voice that resists Vienna’s appearance. But in the midst of this, what remains as prevalent as during his years in exile is the recognition of the discrepancy between history and experience, the felt necessity to confront history and the recognition of one’s own incommensurability to truly grasp atrocities. “I doubt that there is a human heart whose capacity suffices to even only ‘grasp’ several millions gassed [...] Yes, often I cannot even despise what has happened, because I cannot grasp it”, Anders writes in October 1950.300 It is for this reason that he also feared that what had happened would become forgotten “[b]uried under its own size”.301 But one could also make the argument that not only Anders’ reaction toward the appearance of Vienna and its effects changes with the progression of time but also his reaction toward the Viennese. In October 1950, Viennese society consisting of perpetrators and victims who now live along side each other had struck him as a society that resembled the dead of the earlier mentioned legend of Lucifer and N.’s conviction that his neighbor has changed back into the fine man he had been before Hitler had appeared unfathomable to him. That the way in which people had behaved during the Nationalist Socialist period is no longer a topic of discussion but is instead a topic buried under the layer of Viennese daily life disturbed him and the diary entries capture this. In May 1951, however, a year after Anders’ arrival in Vienna, he will ask himself whether this unfathomable unreality does not actually depict the result of a process people had 297 On the function of poetry in Anders, see the subsection “Zweierlei Dichtung heute” in Anna Pollmann, Fragmente aus der Endzeit. Negatives Geschichtsdenken bei Günther Anders, Schriften des Dubnow-Instituts, Volume 32, Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht 2020, 235-244. 298 Anders, “Wiedersehen und Vergessen”, 165. 299 ibid., 171. 300 ibid., 163-164. 301 ibid., 163. 64 undergone. As already noted earlier, the scene of the idyllic looking Austrian families of whom Anders suspects to have at least a few people among them who had been complicit in committing atrocities although they now appear invisible, will lead Anders to ask whether these people that he sees now in front of him are really “so different from the people, they used to be”, that is different to the people they were prior to the years of National Socialism.302 Even though Anders’ diary does testify to the ways in which the Viennese of 1950 are changed people of a specific period in postwar history, the apparent irreconcilability between the appearance of the Viennese as good family members and the knowledge that they had been perpetrators, leads Anders to pose questions whether after the end of the fascist regime these people are not “changed back” into the people who they had been prior and whether under present circumstances actually could no longer commit the atrocities formerly committed and whether they had only been inhuman for as long as they “had to do inhuman things”.303 Anders is himself conscious of the fact that these questions sound like “white washing”.304 What these questions seem to suggest is that former perpetrators had been entirely produced and transformed by the situation they found themselves in as though they had entirely been what Anders elsewhere calls “variants of their situation”.305 And it appears here almost as though he considered the appearance of these Austrian families to say the truth about who they are now and as though he reconsiders N.’s conviction that people can change back into the fine people who they had been before Hitler. In the later entries of the diary, Anders introduces a theory to support his suspicion, which relies on his early philosophical anthropology. Because this theory seems to proceed equally from the appearance of this family scene and what one might here call the “variant thesis”, without taking into account the versatile and differentiated analyses that the diary previously produced, one could criticize it for proceeding at once both too much and too little from the experience. And it is perhaps in this regard that Anders’ focus on the experiential and on the surface, without taking into account contemporary politics, without more closely scrutinizing those prevailing myths of the time and without having more in-depth discussions with people, could be argued to also bear problematic features.306 While Dawsey, the only one who has so far extensively 302 ibid., 193. ibid., 193 304 ibid., 193. 305 ibid., 198. 306 For a critical history of postwar Austria, the construction of the victim myth, Austria’s anticommunism, postwar Austrian politics, the years of occupation, the development of Austrian “Heimatkultur” and Austria’s anti-communism, see Oliver Rathkolb’s The Paradoxical Republic. Austria 1945-2005. 303 65 discussed the Vienna Diary, is of course right when he argues that Anders defended “the critical properties of the émigré’s old hatefulness” and argued it to be “an act of strength, fidelity and reason” and that this would appear as the corrective to the perspective of Viennese of 1950, it needs to be also taken into account that the diary does not end with a defense of the formerly exiled hatefulness.307 Dawsey’s rigorous analysis of Anders’ diary does not discuss the end of the diary and the philosophical debates there introduced. 2.7 The End of the Diary Following the entry that contains his observations of the idyllic Austrian families, Anders stages figures representing different positions regarding the question of how to make sense of people’s commitment in the atrocities of the Second World War. These positions might also be seen as representative of Anders’ own historical positions that have changed over time but nevertheless continued to shape his work: his prewar position of philosophical anthropology; his pre-1945 position in which he revised his anthropology based on his reading of Marx and started to conceive of the working class as well as the unemployed as people “without a world”; his position of hatefulness during his years in exile; as well as the position of the returnee who witnessed the way in which no critical consciousness of the past manifested in postwar Viennese society. One position that Anders introduces is represented by the figure K., someone who had stayed put in Vienna during the war years but had not been involved in committing atrocities.308 It is evident that he had been a witness to the war in a way that Anders hadn’t been. K. thereby also represents those locals who had the sense that former exiles cannot understand what had really happened during the war years due to their absence. However, in K., Anders finds someone who shares his hatred about what had happened and who made the atrocities “the zero point of his time reckoning; thus dated his life and his image of man backwards and forwards from them”.309 For K., the atrocities of camps revealed man’s amoral nature. “Only once should you have seen with what ease people set out for mass executions”, Anders records K. saying, “how casually they did this work; and how indifferently they came back”. 310 While both K. and Anders are attentive to the observed indifference with which people 307 See Dawsey, “Where Hitler’s Name is Never Spoken: Günther Anders in 1950s Vienna”, 237. To the reader of the diary it remains unknown whether K. had been a local bystander who had been opposed to the regime or had been a resistance fighter or victim himself. 309 ibid.,194. 310 Anders, “Wiedersehen und Vergessen”, 194. 308 66 emerge from such situations, K. stresses that this indifference is part of the evidence that people had finally revealed their evil nature. What Anders introduces as a counter position to K.’s “exaggerated credo” are his own “exaggerated” suspicions.311 He argues that those who had been inhumane found themselves in a situation in which they could no longer recognize people as people and many of them seem today “changed back” because in the present situation they could recognize people as people again and would not commit those crimes again.312 He argues that those whose task it had been to scream and treat other people “like cattle from morning to evening”, soon felt in accord with their actions and soon regarded those people as “‘things of a different order’”. 313 While K. argues that people finally had the license to be inhumane, Anders argues that people became inhumane in their situation. While one might be doubtful of any speech making a claim to the real nature of man, Anders’ own position appears equally problematic. For even if it is doubtlessly true that there are situations in which people become more inhumane than in others, to present the perpetrators as though they had no agency and were the sole products of their situation will necessarily strike the reader as an exoneration. Here he does not thoroughly analyze the complexity of the situation in which people found themselves in the “Third Reich” or take into account racial fanaticism or the systematic nature of the murders. And it appears as no surprise that K. will provide the necessary objection to this position and will ask him bitingly whether he has “only come here to think up apology ticks? And to defend the terrible?” 314 But perhaps, one could also understand K. as a figure who represents Anders’ own self-criticism and self-doubt. Anders takes into consideration that there had likely been thousands who were entirely transformed, corrupted and ruined by the atrocities they had committed. However, he suspected that there were also thousands who are in today’s situation no longer the inhumane people they had been and not entirely ruined. 315 For Anders, what is so disheartening about the latter possibility is to know that one lives among people “that are nothing but the respective variants of their situation”.316 This of course implies that in a new situation, people transform again and this suggests that the potential for people to become inhumane again is always given. While one could criticize the position Anders seems to adopt as too undifferentiated, its strength is that it does not merely stamp people 311 ibid., 194; On Anders’ method of exaggeration, see Dries, Günther Anders, 17-19. Anders, “Wiedersehen und Vergessen”, 195-196. 313 ibid., 195. 314 ibid., 203. 315 ibid., 198. 316 ibid., 198. 312 67 as good and evil. It reflects upon the necessity to not judge people from a position in which one adopts an entirely abstract moral position of innocence and to consider who one might have oneself become and what one might have oneself done. “To be morally at home, grasping people there as people, is no merit”, writes Anders.317 And it appears as no surprise that in a later diary about the TV series “Holocaust”, Anders will underline the importance of a young boy telling him that he is afraid of becoming like Dorf, the character who in the beginning of the show appears as an unpolitical lawyer and in the course of the series becomes a successful SS Mann, the chief strategist of Reinhard Heydrich. 318 The task that Anders formulates in the Vienna Diary is indeed a counterintuitive one for it is, according to him, the end of the necessity of moral achievements, for the world one ought to wish for is one in which the “‘temptation’ to be inhumane” has reached its minimum. 319 “Its existence [morality] only proves that the organization of society is one of a kind that can make people permanently guilty, one that makes morality necessary”, writes Anders. 320 One could thus argue that behind all of Anders’ formulations of the moral tasks necessary in today’s world actually hides the wish for a society in which such formulations would no longer be necessary. K.’s friend introduces another position. Anders and K. again disagree with each other when Anders tries to impress his position upon K. when they see a fish out of water flapping about on a table on a market at Wienzeile. Anders argues that one cannot say that the agitated fish reveals his true nature when taken out of his natural element, just like one cannot argue that people had revealed their true nature under Hitler.321 K.’s friend remains silent during the entire discussion. With Anders he discusses the difference between an animal’s natural milieu like water for the fish and man’s freedom to create an “artificial world” for himself, implying that humans cannot make the claim to a natural or unnatural world and thus also not to a false or true world.322 It is striking that K.’s friend does not interfere in the actual dispute between K. and Anders. His position appears to reflect Anders’ notion of “the human without a world” during his unpolitical “intermezzo” 317 ibid., 199. Anders, “Nach ‘Holocaust’ 1979” in Besuch im Hades. Auschwitz und Breslau 1966. Nach ‘Holocaust’ 1979, 190. Anders stresses that the importance of the show is its ability to disturb its audience. He critically addresses the demand to “cope” and do away with the past. To the contrary, he argues that “[d]isturbance [Die Verstörung] is in fact the condition of possible moral ‘health’”. “Not ‘cure’ is the name of today’s task, but ‘wound’”, he writes. See ibid., 189. 319 Anders, “Wiedersehen und Vergessen”, 199-200. 320 ibid., 200. 321 ibid., 202-203. 322 ibid., 203-205. 318 68 between 1920 and 1927.323 In the second to last entry of the diary, Anders engages with his own early anthropological theory that is introduced by K.’s friend and will criticize it in the form of a letter. The position that he adopts in the letter is reflective of his pre-1945 change in the understanding of the term “worldlessness” based on his studies of Marx and the production process.324 What he will criticize is that the proclamation of man’s freedom to create different worlds is blind to class difference, relations of power and economy.325 Anders’ letter is thereby an attempt to formulate a critique by registering the insufficiency of his early engagement in philosophy to truly grasp the present as historical and societal. The letter develops Anders’ notion of worldlessness, which was his primary concern before warning about “a world without humans” in the nuclear age.326 Although Anders concedes in the letter to K.’s friend that one cannot make the distinction between artificial and natural worlds, he argues that among those worlds that man has created, there are, nevertheless “false worlds”.327 He argues that one cannot say that the different worlds created in different epochs of history had equally become man’s “element” when one substitutes “man” with society as a whole.328 A world may suit the ruling class [“herrschende Klasse”] like a tailored dress but the dominated ones [“Beherrschten”] only provide the instrumental part of this world. 329 “World” is here, according to Anders, understood as substituting the “tangible fact of production with a speculative expression”.330 Elsewhere Anders describes the state of worldlessness as an “extension of Marx’s basic thesis that the proletariat does not own the means of production with the help of which it creates and runs the world of the ruling class, a world which the proletariat does not itself possess”.331 And according to Anders, a world is false “that consists exclusively of objects that belong to the world of others”.332 “[E]ven if the 323 See Anders, “Einleitung” in Mensch ohne Welt. Schriften zur Kunst und Literatur, XIV. Ludger Lütkehaus notes that the argument of K’s friend appears as the conclusion that would follow from Anders’ early philosophy of contingency. See Ludger Lütkehaus, Philosophieren nach Hiroshima. Über Günther Anders, Frankfurt am Main: Fischer 1992, 90. 324 See Dries, Günther Anders, 54-55; Dawsey, The Limits of the Human in the Age of Technological Revolution: Günther Anders, Post-Marxism and the Emergence of Technology Critique, 258; Anders, “Einleitung” in Mensch ohne Welt. Schriften zur Kunst und Literatur, XIXII. 325 Anders, “Wiedersehen und Vergessen”, 205-209. 326 Anders, “Einleitung” in Mensch ohne Welt. Schriften zur Kunst und Literatur, XI. 327 Anders, “Wiedersehen und Vergessen”, 206. 328 ibid., 207. 329 ibid., 208. 330 ibid., 210. 331 Anders, “Einleitung” in Mensch ohne Welt. Schriften zur Kunst und Literatur, XII. 332 Anders, “Wiedersehen und Vergessen”, 209. 69 slave succeeds in attaching himself to that world A, to rule A so excellently that he believes he is living in his element, the decisive factor is that in this state he no longer ‘grasps’ himself as a human being, but rather as a device”, he writes.333 While a world can designate for the ruling class a framework in which all possible things, experiences, decisions and expectations have their place, the dominated ones, according to Anders, do not participate in the meaningful schema although production lies in their hands.334 Due to this situation, however, their perspective is distorted, “like the perspective of an actor who from his position can only perceive the composition of the stage set in a distorted way (although he plays in it, or because he plays in it)”.335 The dominated ones seek for a worldview [“Weltanschauung”] because they fight to have a world. 336 Quite abruptly, Anders will conclude: For our initial topic this means: I am firmly convinced that under Hitler millions of people, yes, including millions of his followers, had been finally displaced [herausgerückt] from the “world” into which they were anyway already inserted without perspective; that many of those who were involved in the atrocities had “no world” any longer; that in their worldless situation they actually no longer recognized anything; that they no longer grasped people as people, [...] and that finally actions that had previously seemed impossible to them became possible because in this worldless situation everything seemed equally possible and impossible.337 Therefore, the moral task of today is, according to Anders, to fight against those powers and worlds that make people worldless and inhumane. 338 While it appears essential to examine the relationship between capitalism and fascism to understand the emergence of National Socialism, one could argue that Anders’ exposition of the very general state of worldnessness that continues to structure contemporary society appears to not be able to account thoroughly for the historical complexity of the rise of the National Socialism as well as the phenomenon of anti-Semitism, the psychology of the perpetrators and the masses as well as the minute illustrations of the paradoxes that Anders had found within postwar Vienna.339 And while it is of course true that the dominated class and the ruling 333 ibid., 209. ibid., 210. 335 ibid., 210. 336 ibid., 211. 337 ibid., 212. 338 ibid. 212. 339 One could argue that in “Nach ‘Holocaust’ 1979”, Anders develops a more differentiated position. While he will emphasize that the importance of the show “Holocaust” consists in its portrayal of the way in which people become inhumane, he will also write: “Of course, there are 334 70 class do not share the same experience of the world, one needs to ask here, whether the ruling class not equally regards reality and people from a distorted perspective. It must be kept in mind, however, that the letter did not primarily intend to provide a theory for the rise of fascism, but a critique of Anders’ own earlier philosophical position as articulated by the figure of K’s friend, and an expression of the suspicion that the relationship between people’s tendency toward inhumanity must be understood in the context of the production process of which they are a part. The strength in the letter’s generality could be said to consist of the fact that it asks about the way in which the structure of society itself supports society’s turnover into barbarism. While one can claim that Anders here integrates what he had witnessed in Vienna, in the sense that he tries to account for how seemingly good people can become monstrous and how formerly monstrous people can appear good again, his most theoretical attempt nevertheless appears somewhat disconnected from the many paradoxes that the diary had registered in postwar Vienna. While most of the entries present a lens that sharpens one’s perception of a reality of contradictions, it appears that Anders’ “exaggerated” position moves the reader further away from the concrete historical situation analyzed. 2.8 From Diary Eyes to Eyes Closed: The Vienna Diary as a Propaedeutic for Anders’ Philosophy of Warning The letter, dated in June 1951, is followed by the final entry of the diary, dated in July 1951. There, Anders notes that even though he does not experience fewer new things, he no longer perceives his surroundings through what he calls his “diary eyes”.340 “Perhaps no longer”, he writes, “because the opportunity given by foreignness is already missing”.341 Here Anders again tracks the process of returning and forgetting. One can assume that a year after having returned to Europe, the strange phenomena he witnesses still thousands and thousands who live among us in an unequivocal, age-old sense: namely as direct brutes, sadists, humiliators, thugs, torturers and murderers. [...] And there had been thousands upon thousands for whom National Socialism granted an opportunity for unpunished inhumanity that had never existed on such a scale [...] As wrong as it is to see the victims exclusively as a mass of people, it is equally wrong to see the murderers exclusively as ‘machine parts’ in the colossal murder machine”. See Anders, “Nach ‘Holocaust’ 1979”, 185. In this text, one can also find a self-critical remark in which Anders claims that, when going through his notes, it appears to him that he thought of Auschwitz and Hiroshima as two forms of mass murder too closely linked together, see footnote 415. 340 ibid., 213. 341 ibid., 213. 71 no longer strike him in the way they did in those moments of initial foreignness but have instead become habitual. Elsewhere Anders also remarks that habit is not to be understood as “the daughter of memory, but obliviousness”.342 Anders’ diary eyes appear to have been those eyes that had been held open by initial stupefaction when confronted with the unreality of the appearance of the present. They are the eyes that register that there must be something fundamentally false and disastrous about the way in which reality comes to appear unhistorical, the dead appear forgotten and the recent atrocities appear to be buried under an impenetrable layer of everyday life. The strength of those eyes could be said to lie in their distrust of and protest against appearances. In the case of the Vienna Diary, however, “diary ears” that have the capacity of registering the paradoxes in people’s speech appear equally pivotal. These “diary senses”, which capture moments of disbelief, disappointment and disillusionment, create the unique language of the Vienna Diary. And because such diary senses have the ability to sense the catastrophic in those taken for granted appearances of the present and the disastrous in the banal, the Vienna Diary appears to have played a formative role for Anders’ occasional philosophy and the development of a form of philosophy attentive to the complex ways in which historical phenomena find their concrete expression in the present. And it had perhaps been those diary senses dedicated to registering discrepancies in the sound and the surface of postwar Vienna that served Anders as a propaedeutic for his later writing explicitly dedicated to warning about the nuclear threat because they had so strikingly demonstrated to him that reality does not necessarily preserve a form of memory of a catastrophic past that is able to serve as a sufficient warning image for the present. The Vienna Diary registers a dynamic of loss and survival and tracks the way in which the apparent non-appearance of the past is the form in which it appears. It registers the way in which loss can become an index for survival, silence an index for mythicization, memory an index for forgetting, and forgetting an index for coldness but also a necessary means for self-preservation. It captures that the experience of an apocalyptic situation does not necessarily produce a critical consciousness to that past. The Vienna Diary’s diary eyes, which perceive the unreality of Paris and Vienna, could be said to have demonstrated to Anders what he will later continue repeating, namely that one has to distrust and close one’s eyes in order to actually see today: to imagine in it all that is no longer visible to the eyes and to imagine in it what is not yet visible but is in the midst of being prepared for by 342 Anders, “Ruinen heute” in Tagebücher und Gedichte, 238. 72 the present.343 At the same time, however, the diary eyes could be said to change through the course of the diary as the diary tracks the temporal process of disillusionment, whereby that very unreality is shown to be all that is left in the present and in another sense what is most real today. And through the diary senses’ attention to the present, the diary does not inscribe the past into the present but instead captures the very real process by which the present appears to triumph relentlessly over the past and the form in which the past survives in this triumph. In this sense, the Vienna Diary could be said to constitute the necessary counter piece to Anders later imperative to close one’s eyes to really see today, namely to first open them and throw a piercing gaze upon the appearance of the present in order to recognize what it preserves as well as what it does not preserve and does not render visible. The reason for ending the diary is, according to Anders, not only that he can no longer perceive the city through diary eyes but that he has the sense that he can get on with his work again and that decisions await him, which makes him no longer “the right man” for reporting on the state of things. 344 “My reaction to what I see has also completely changed. I no longer answer the stimuli with the questions ‘So that’s how it is?’ and ‘Why is it like that?’, but with the question ‘What position do I have to take on this?’”, Anders writes.345 The end of the diary could already be said to point implicitly toward a call to practice and the necessity to respond to what Anders had seen in Vienna. Vienna could be said to have demonstrated to Anders that his own felt discrepancy between history and experience was a phenomenon that he had shared with others. As Paul van Dijk writes, once Anders returned to Europe, he “went in search of things that might help him imagine something of what had taken place during his absence,” and “[w]hen that turned out to be practically impossible, he was disoriented but at the same time it stimulated his thinking”.346 This experience led Anders to the more concrete formulation of what he had understood to characterize his experience as well as that of others. However, he would now turn to the threat that he thought to concern most acutely the present: the bomb. In the early 1950s, following the development of hydrogen bombs in the United States and the Soviet Union and American nuclear tests, the nuclear disarmament movement gained a 343 See for instance Anders, “Der Mann auf der Brücke. Tagebuch aus Hiroshima und Nagasaki (1958)”, 66. 344 Anders, “Wiedersehen und Vergessen”, 213. 345 ibid., 213. 346 Paul van Dijk, Anthropology in the Age of Technology. The Philosophical Contribution of Günther Anders, Amsterdam, Atlanta: Rodopi 2000, 14. 73 new momentum.347 According to Elisabeth Röhrlich, research on Anders has so far not answered the question why Anders only started writing on “the nuclear question” in the 1950s. 348 While Röhrlich argues that there is reason to suppose that Anders had been “impacted by the emerging civil society movements of the time”, the Vienna Diary, which captures Anders’ experience of disillusionment upon his return to Europe, in which he found that the present could not serve as an adequate warning for future catastrophes, offers an additional answer.349 According to Anders’ own statements, it was in the early 1950s that he could first find the words to write about the bomb. He recalled that even though he had immediately realized that the atomic bombing of Hiroshima in 1945 had introduced a new era in which mankind has become capable of irrevocably destroying itself, he could not write about this matter for years.350 After a failed attempt in the United States, he could first bring himself to write something in 1950 or 1951, only once he had returned to Europe. “What there resulted, was the chapter of Die Antiquiertheit des Menschen on the ‘roots of our apocalyptic blindness’ and on the discrepancy between that which we produce and that which we are able to imagine”, he recalled.351 He believed that this discrepancy characterized “the human condition of our age and all following ages”.352 In the chapter on the bomb, Anders notes that apocalyptic blindness results from the discrepancy between the capacity to produce and the capacity to imagine, the discrepancy between the capacity to produce and the capacity to feel as well as the discrepancy between the capacity to know and the capacity to understand. 353 The consequences of 347 See Elisabeth Röhrlich, “‘To Make the End Time Endless:’ The Early Years of Günther Anders’ Fight against Nuclear Weapons” in The Life and Work of Günther Anders. Émigré, Iconoclast, Philosopher, Man of Letters, edited by Günter Bischof, Jason Dawsey and Bernhard Fetz, Innsbruck, Wien, Bozen: StudienVerlag 2014, 46. 348 ibid., 57. 349 ibid., 57. 350 Anders, “Wenn ich verzweifelt bin, was geht’s mich an?”, 42. 351 ibid., 43. In his Japan Diary, which we will discuss later, Anders recalls his first attempt at writing about the bomb, when expressing his own disbelief about joining a protest march against the nuclear threat: “Hard to believe that this is me. The real me probably sits somewhere in Austria and produces some esoteric text about the atomic danger. That’s how it started, after all. There I sat – it has been four years now – out of despair about the situation and not knowing what could be said about it or against it, under a nut tree in Styria and tried my first words about ‘apocalyptic blindness’ and my first formulations of the ‘nuclear strike’. Of course without the hope of ever being able to build any bridge to reality. And now this bridge is here. And now there is, fed from thousand sources, a movement; the foolish-solipsistic protest under the nut tree is replaced by a world movement; the woman from Hiroshima is linked with my arm as an ally”. See Anders, “Der Mann auf der Brücke. Tagebuch aus Hiroshima und Nagasaki (1958)”, 28-29. 352 Anders, “Wenn ich verzweifelt bin, was geht’s mich an?”, 42. 353 Anders, Die Antiquiertheit des Menschen 1. Über die Seele im Zeitalter der zweiten industriellen Revolution, 296-300. 74 what we can produce today with the means of destruction cannot be adequately imagined nor felt. Anders acknowledges that these discrepancies are as such not “defects” but he insists that one has to recognize that the gulfs between them threaten to become insurmountable given the means of destruction possible today.354 Anders explicates this by writing: That we “know” what the consequences of a nuclear war would be cannot be disputed. But we “know” it only. And this “only” means that our “knowledge” remains in the neighborhood of ignorance, at least in the neighborhood of incomprehension; remains much closer to it than to comprehension. [...] With which it is said then that there are no competent people here; and that the power over the apocalypse lies fundamentally in the hands of incompetent ones.-355 And it appears to be the recognition of this very dire situation, his earlier experience of the failure of philosophy to recognize threats before it is too late as well as his experience of postwar Vienna, which would now translate into his writing. In the introduction to the first volume of Die Antiquiertheit des Menschen, as explicated earlier, Anders claims that his occasional philosophy consisted of philosophical investigations when grappling with concrete phenomena of the epoch. At the very beginning of the last chapter on the bomb, however, he states that his essay on the bomb will largely remain non-academic since the subject matter confronts him with the task to find “an idiom [...], that will not only be understood in specific buildings: at the universities” and that it ultimately will not matter to him whether his observations will be classified as “philosophical” given the importance of his task.356 The urgency of the subject matter and his intention to address people he believed did not comprehend their situation are now reflected in his writing. Anders writes: There are topics that one already fails by addressing them wrongly. Since the bomb does not hang over our university buildings, but over all of our heads, it would not be appropriate to philosophize about the possible apocalypse in a field specific idiom in front of a specialized group. Moreover, academic philosophy seems to me to be the least “interested” in this “topic”, since it usually only then gets comfortable to transform the blows that reality throws at us into “problems”, when the victims of these blows are not only already dead, but also already forgotten.357 354 ibid., 299. ibid., 299. 356 ibid., 264. 357 ibid., 263. 355 75 In contrast to a philosophy that could be accused of “coming too late”, Anders’ philosophy of warning in the nuclear age always appears to come too early. In an age in which weapons of mass destruction can be mobilized in minutes and in which nuclear tests and accidents at seemingly innocent nuclear power plants produce deaths through invisible radiation, there seems to be no moment when warnings can be dispensed with. Anders demanded of his addressees that they cease to continue being what he called in the Vienna Diary “philistines of the apocalypse” and “variants of their situation”. He instead demanded of his readers to reject their situation as well as to attempt to break the spell of those various discrepancies between history and experience. He demanded of them to break with the appearance of the present that triumphs over the past and remains so silent about the future and to break with that everyday perception of the present, which he held to make people blind. He insisted that they respond to what they know and live in accord with the consequences of their knowledge. The experience of Vienna could be said to have spurred Anders to dedicate himself to the project of trying to instill in people what he thought to be absent among postwar Viennese society, that is a critical consciousness of the past and their present situation with which the future is interwoven. And before engaging with Anders’ writing more explicitly dedicated to warning than the Vienna Diary, we will first discuss Anders’ concept of the diary and why he understood his diaries as warning images. 76 3. Anders’ Diaries as Warning Images As our analysis of the Vienna Diary has shown, Anders’ writing in the diary form does not conform to those writing practices that one might perhaps most immediately associate with diary writing, such as engaging in lengthy monologues about one’s private relations and interior life, which are not meant to be accessible to the public or minute and daily recordings of one’s undertaking. In his essay on Anders’ exile diary Lieben gestern [To love, Yesterday], Wendelin Schmidt-Dengler rejects placing Anders’ diary among a typology of the diary or approaching his texts through theories on the diary.358 However, it should be noted that Anders’ diaries bear qualities that can already be found within the tradition of diary writing, such as being written with the intention to be published, which also characterized the diaries of the brothers Goncourt who rejected the thesis that the diary ought to be a solely individual concern and instead offered a controversial chronicle of Parisian society in the mid to late nineteenth century. 359 Ralph-Rainer Wuthenow places Anders’ diaries among political diaries because of their intent to “mobilize forces of resistance” – an intent that appears most evident in his Japan Diary.360 However, one can also situate Anders’ diaries within the lesser-known tradition of the philosophical diary. If one assumes that philosophy operates via arguments and proceeds through the forms of systems, essays and treatises, it might appear counterintuitive that philosophy could proceed through autobiographical writing and diary writing in particular. Yet, there were actually many philosophers whose writing was indeed autobiographical and proceeded via the diary form. As Dieter Thomä has shown, many writers in the history of philosophy actually produced autobiographical texts next to their more theoretical works, even though Francis Bacon’s dictum “De nobis ipsis silemus” [“about ourselves we are silent”] appears to have been the dictum many philosophers such as Gottfried Leibniz, Immanuel Kant, Hegel, Husserl and Heidegger abided by.361 Philosophers such as Michel de Montaigne, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Kierkegaard and Friedrich Nietzsche are evidently much more opposed to this dictum. One could also include Simone Weil, Simone de 358 Wendelin Schmidt-Dengler, “‘Hoch die Metapher! Hoch unsere Verdrängungen!’ Zu Günther Anders’ ‘Lieben gestern’” in Günther Anders kontrovers, edited by Konrad Paul Liessmann, Munich, C.H. Beck 1992, 139. 359 Rüdiger Görner, Das Tagebuch, Munich, Zurich: Artemis 1986, 19. 360 Ralph-Rainer Wuthenow, Europäische Tagebücher. Eigenart · Formen · Entwicklung, Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft 1990, 160. 361 Dieter Thomä, “III. 3 Autobiographie” in Handbuch Literatur und Philosophie, edited by Andrea Allerkamp and Sarah Schmidt, Berlin, Boston: De Gruyter 2021, 322. 77 Beauvoir, Jean-Paul Sartre and Benjamin within this list. According to Thomä, on the one hand, there appears to exist the orthodox position that doing philosophy means making general statements about man as such and the world as a whole and not the vicissitudes of life.362 Here autobiographical writing appears to serve as philosophy’s counter image. This orthodox position is contradicted by the heterodox position claiming that one never confronts man as an idea and instead always as someone living a particular life and thus man cannot be described without consideration of man’s particularity and individuality, which makes autobiographical writing a methodological necessity.363 “This position also extends to philosophical speaking and writing itself: The neutralization with which philosophers declare themselves to be the mouthpiece of the general is rejected”, writes Thomä.364 In the case of Anders, this statement appears to be both true and false. At once, it is evident that his practice of occasional philosophy within the diary form has an impact on his voice inasmuch as his writing always proceeds from a specific position and place e.g. the position of the exiled in the United States, the position of the returnee in Paris, Vienna and Berlin or the position of the traveler and activist in Japan. The diary form appears to then serve Anders as an instrument of analysis and orientation in periods in which he is confronted with unfamiliar or changed surroundings. Though Anders’ voice is always characterized by his position and experience at different time periods, his diaries nevertheless seem to wish to make a claim to generality, inasmuch, as they try to capture something true about different forms of experience and sentiments at specific moments in history. What appears indispensable to such a project then, is the inclusion of the voices of others. This could already be seen in the Vienna Diary. Those to whom these voices might have belonged to are often only shortly introduced and identified by an initial through which those voices also somewhat lose their particularity and instead take on an exemplary character illustrating different forms of experiences within Anders’ societal collage. When reading Anders’ diaries, one comes to quickly notice that they are not so much concerned with solely private questions but questions that spring from attempts at grappling with historical situations and societal problems, especially those that have shaped Anders’ own life. This of course disallows for making too simple distinctions between the private and the societal as concerns the diary. According to Daniel Costello, 362 ibid., 322-323. ibid., 322-323. 364 ibid., 323. 363 78 “Anders’ attention to the diary as a form must be considered as crucial in enabling him to conduct his philosophy as an anthropology that is concerned with grasping, rendering, and interpreting human behavior”. 365 “[M]aterial, technical and cultural processes” always shape such behavior.366 More specifically, one could say that the diary is a crucial tool for registering the responses to such processes within specific historical contexts. The questions that Anders’ Vienna Diary pursues most evidently are: how does the returnee respond to his return and how do the Viennese respond to what they have witnessed? One of the aims of Anders’ Vienna Diary appears to lie in a study of responses to the postwar world. What makes the diary form a powerful tool to conduct such a study in is that it enables to conduct a collage of heterogeneous elements and the ability to begin again and to revise one’s prior theses about what one has seen or heard. According to Beck, “the envisaged knowledge” of Anders’ diary “is not irrefutable, but one that always remains open to experience”.367 In this respect, one could say that Anders’ diary practice shares affinities with Arendt’s Denktagebücher, inasmuch as she attempts to preserve a form of mobility in thought that allows for detours and that does not need to fulfill the demand of reaching a final judgment.368 And even though Anders’ and Arendt’s forms of writing of course differ from another – Arendt’s notebooks contain many more reflections and commentaries on the literature she read e.g. Plato, Kant, Marx and Heidegger and were not intended for publication – one could say that each of their specific forms of the diary offered them a ground for writerly experimentation. It offered both a place to question concepts, to draft fictive dialogues and to experiment with the fragmentary form and poetry. However, not only between Arendt’s and Anders’ writing projects can one find affinities. One can also set Anders’ diary practice in relation to the writing practices of other writers that had been influential for his work such as Adorno, Benjamin and Kafka. We will briefly discuss these potential points of affinity when discussing Anders’ concept of the diary in the following chapter. The chapter intends to shed light on Anders’ aim behind his practice of writing within the diary form as well as the aim behind his literary philosophical work more generally. 365 Costello, Daniel C., Publishing Words to Prevent Them from Becoming True: The Radical Praxis of Günther Anders, unpublished dissertation, University of California 2014, 72. 366 ibid., 72. 367 Beck, Günther Anders’ Gelegenheitsphilosophie, 93. 368 See Ingeborg Nordmann, “23 Denktagebuch” in Arendt-Handbuch, edited by Wolfgang Heuer and Stefanie Rosemüller, Stuttgart: J.B. Metzler: 2022, 157-158. 79 First of all, it needs to be noted that Anders’ diaries all concern themselves with different societal phenomena even when concerns, problems and analyses often overlap. Lieben gestern comprises entries on the way love has changed over the course of history and for couples during exile. “Leichenwäscher der Geschichte” [“Washers of the Corpses of History”] are entries resulting from Anders’ work at a costume palace in Los Angeles. “Ruinen heute” [“Ruins Today”] deals with ruins, memorials, memory and forgetting im postwar Berlin. “Post festum” are reflections on life as an exiled. “Vertigo Temporis”, “Die beweinte Zukunft” [“The Lamented Future], “Der Überfall” [“The Invasion”] and “Über Gedichte” [“On Poems”] although captioned as diaries in the volume Tagebücher und Gedichte, range from short stories to reflections on poetry. 369 Der Mann auf der Brücke is a diary from Japan in which Anders confronts Hiroshima and Nagasaki and records conversations with victims. Besuch im Hades comprises recordings from the time after Anders had been to Auschwitz and visited Breslau, the city he was born in. The style of the entries in many of the diaries varies substantially. Some entries engage more strongly with philosophical questions than others, some consist of parables, others of letters, some perform language criticism, and others are topographical reflections on cities. Some record dialogues while others record memories. Anders’ language alternates from being at times more literary or philosophical while at other times more activist or personal. In this sense, there exists no entirely uniform style or method that Anders employs in his diaries. What, however, seems to be unique to most of Anders’ diaries is that they record responses to specific times and places as well historical events. And they do not only capture Anders’ own response but that of others as well: be it the responses of the Viennese to their past, the response of Anders’ father to both world wars, the response of exiles to not having the life, the career or family many might have expected at a certain age, the response of the victims of the atomic bombings to what they had witnessed and suffered or the response of his contemporaries to the nuclear threat. And what one might say unites them appears be their focus on different forms of discrepancies: be it the discrepancy between history and experience that expresses itself in various forms; the discrepancy between language and phenomena; or the discrepancy between the potential of destruction possible in the nuclear age and our capacity to grasp such a potential. In order to better understand Anders’ concept of the diary and his intention behind diary writing, it is helpful to examine Anders’ short text called “Warnbilder” [“Warning 369 In her dissertation from 2015, Javorka Finci-Pocrnja analyzes “Post Festum”, “Leichenwäscher der Geschichte”, “Vertigo Temporis”, “Die beweinte Zukunft” and “Der Überfall”. 80 Images”], which was published in the volume Das Tagebuch und der moderne Autor [The Diary and the Modern Author] in 1965. The text starts with a dialogue in which Anders tries to explain to a friend why he is keeping diaries although he appears to be uninterested in his own interior life and his primary concern has remained something as general as the nuclear threat. The text ends with a few exemplary entries from the Vienna Diary in which Anders records his conversation with the civil servant N. and comments on N.’s apparent inexperience of the disastrous situation of a war. While it appears counterintuitive to the friend that Anders would keep a diary when his concerns are Auschwitz and Hiroshima, these concerns are for Anders precisely what makes keeping a diary necessary.370 The goal of Anders’ writing within the diary form is not to preserve the integrity of his own biography but in fact to analyze general phenomena that he knows to share with his contemporaries. What Anders is concerned with in his diaries are not his most private experiences but instead those experiences that are as he writes “although mine [Anders’], not only mine [his]”.371 “Whoever keeps a diary chooses a certain form of time- and selfexperience”, writes Rüdiger Görner in his introduction to the diary form, “[t]hey recognize [...] the intermingling of subjective and objective (social) happenings”.372 In Anders’ case, one could say that he examined his own experiences because he held them to be able to provide a form of knowledge about objective social reality. Anders regarded himself and every individual as a “barometer” from which one is able to read what he called the “weather condition of the epoch”. 373 Anders regarded every individual as a prism of society: “whoever stares into himself, finds there others and finds there the world”.374 The reason for keeping a diary is, according to Anders, that one’s own experience, meaning “not only what happens to us, but also how we do react or not react to it”, is characteristic of what people experience more generally.375 As Anders will note, the experience of being deprived of rights is something he had shared with millions of his contemporaries and which has thus become an experience he wrote about.376 What he also emphasizes to have shared with his contemporaries and is a phenomenon he continually deals with in his diaries is the very discrepancy between history and experience, more precisely the apparent “inexperience” of and indifference toward atrocious events. He writes: 370 Anders “Warnbilder”, 71. ibid., 74. 372 Görner, Das Tagebuch, 22. 373 Anders “Warnbilder”, 74. 374 ibid., 75. 375 ibid., 72. 376 ibid., 72. 371 81 – Or for instance it can happen to us (“can” is of course a humble expression, because this happens to us all every moment) that we remain indifferent toward events that would need to concern everyone because they can effectively hit everyone [weil sie effektiv jedermann treffen können] – you see: I again speak of Auschwitz and Hiroshima –; and precisely for the reason, because these events are too far away from us, they take place outside the periphery of our actual life; or because they are simply too big in order for us to grasp them, to react to them or to preserve them in memory. And about this disinterestedness, which is not only absolutely characteristic for contemporary man, but simply fatal and of which likely no single contemporary would be allowed to say that he does not participate in it – in my diaries, I have repeatedly made recordings about this defect.377 From our prior illustration of the ways in which Anders analyzed how much of the war years remained outside the scope of his own experience as well as the experience of the Viennese, even though it nevertheless of course changed them, it should have become evident how recording this defect is also one of the main concerns of the Vienna Diary. According to Anders, one could speak of those entries concerned with this defect as belonging to the practice of keeping a “negative diary” concerned with “the scandal that things have not become experiences”.378 And it is this very defect and that very scandal that is for Anders more important to record than any of his far more “original” experiences.379 “[W]hat is interesting or original ought not to interest us; today what is ordinary is what decides”, Anders writes. 380 In this sense, one could say that the discrepancy between history and experience is something that Anders considers necessary to analyze because it perpetuates inaction and indifference to past, present and future atrocities. In addition to the extent of real powerlessness in alleviating threats and suffering, Anders saw the general defect described above as a driver for perpetuating the history of atrocities. In other words, he was aware of the fatal consequences that would occur if individual and collective disinterest were not recognized and counteracted. It is no surprise then that Anders claimed that all the diary entries found in Die Schrift an der Wand, his first published collection of diaries, which includes the Vienna Diary, have to do with “the destruction of our world and the devastation of our contemporary existence”. 381 Writing allowed Anders to create a critical distance toward those phenomena he also knew to participate in, to approach what often appears banal in 377 ibid., 72-73. ibid., 73. 379 ibid., 73. 380 ibid., 73. 381 Anders, “Nachbemerkung” in Die Schrift an der Wand. Tagebücher 1941 bis 1966, Munich: C.H. Beck 1967, 427. 378 82 everyday life such as the defect mentioned above from a critical perspective. “Through the glasses of self-observation and that of others, which the diarist makes his own, what appears as self-evident cannot be taken for granted, the mundane is no longer mundane,” writes Kerstin Putz about Anders’ diaries.382 In other words, what often appears not worth engaging with because it is so familiar, the diary actually has the capacity to defamiliarize and to illustrate how it relates to a process of destruction. Anders again and again emphasized that it is today’s task to develop a moral phantasy through which one at least tries to imagine what one otherwise cannot or does not even attempt to, e.g. the people killed in the world wars one does not otherwise lament or to imagine the consequences of a nuclear war. 383 The function of a negative diary, by contrast, appears to consist in reflecting upon the limits of ordinary perception and imagination and to demonstrate how much such discrepancy phenomena actually structure society, people’s reactions and actions. However, by reflecting upon discrepancies, the diary has the ability to already create a break within ordinary perception and has, as Costello points out, the ability to teach “new practices of observation and thinking”.384 For example, it can lead one to the question of how one’s own inexperience of catastrophes and often prevalent disinterestedness in events that one knows should concern one and one’s own lack of an apocalyptic consciousness when one knows one would have every reason to entertain it, point to a general problem. By exploring these questions, one can look more deeply into the paradox that the thought of the threat of a nuclear apocalypse and the increase in climate catastrophes – which are already occurring in the present, rather than in an apocalyptic scenario in the distant future – often fail to elicit a felt response. What should also be taken into account is that Anders stated that his diaries were edited. However, he argued that this process of editing did not change their degree of “authenticity”.385 According to Putz, this implies that Anders’ entries are not “the result of spontaneous chronicles or daily notes on the ephemeral but always literary forms, 382 Kerstin Putz, “Bild als Beute* Günther Anders’ Florenztagebuch.” in Wiener digitale Revue. Zeitschrift für Germanistik und Gegenwart, 2020, No 1: Tagebuch, https://doi.org/10.25365/wdr01-02-05. 383 See for instance Günther Anders, “Die Toten. Rede über die drei Weltkriege (1964)” in Hiroshima ist überall, Munich: C.H. Beck 1982, 361-394. 384 Costello, Publishing Words to Prevent Them from Becoming True: The Radical Praxis of Günther Anders, 72. 385 Anders, “Nachbemerkung” in Die Schrift an der Wand. Tagebücher 1941 bis 1966, 427. 83 philosophically narrated, essayistic texts”. 386 Beck notes that Anders’ diaries are “documentary” but transcend the limits between “the reproduction of fact, literary fiction and philosophical reflection”.387 In the 1967 afterword to Die Schrift an der Wand, Anders writes about the process of editing and the selection process of the entries that finally made it into the volume: Conversely, I have only recorded experiences or incidents when they seemed to demand to be thought through to the end, experienced to the end and formulated to the end. For this reason, the subsequent occupation with the first sketches, thus also their elaboration and reworking, did not represent a task extraneous to these sketches that could have made these sketches ‘inauthentic’. Conversely, I believed that only such snapshots [Momentaufnahmen] proved to be legitimate, if one wants: ‘genuine’, which only gained their full truth during the elaboration and reworking, which they were in need of.388 One can suspect that Anders held those sketches to be legitimate when their reworking allowed for the registration of a societally and historically relevant form of truth. Anders’ process of reworking might also be better understood through his concept of the diary as a “Nächtebuch” [“book of the night”] rather than a “Tagebuch” [“book of the day”] for its intent is to render an account [“abrechnen”] of the day.389 In this sense, the diary practice becomes a writing process by which to express and critically question what one has actually experienced during the day. The diary can also be understood as a tool for registering moments of bewilderment, which might otherwise quickly enter into oblivion, and for following their cues through writing. Coming back to the Vienna Diary, it should be noted that although one knows from Anders’ letter to Mann in 1952 and his letter to his friend Jonas in July 1950 in which he describes his current project as a “philosophical diary on the postwar psyche” that he already worked on the Vienna Diary in the early 1950s, one does not know to what extent Anders edited the diary upon its publication in Die Schrift an der Wand.390 Were one to assume that Anders heavily reworked his initial sketches, one could also conceive of the Vienna Diary as Anders’ creation of a retrospective propaedeutic for his later work of warning. At the same time, however, the way in which Anders writes about the diary in 386 Putz, “Bild als Beute* Günther Anders’ Florenztagebuch”, 2. Beck, Günther Anders’ Gelegenheitsphilosophie, 93. 388 Anders, “Nachbemerkung” in Die Schrift an der Wand. Tagebücher 1941 bis 1966, 427. 389 Anders, “Warnbilder”, 72. 390 Anders as cited in Putz, “Günther Anders’ Remigration nach Österreich”, 316. 387 84 the letters already suggests a quite deliberate intention of what he wanted to achieve by this project in the early 1950s and supports the reading of “Wiedersehen und Vergessen” as a propaedeutic for his later apocalyptic writings. In his understanding of the process of editing, Anders shares affinities with Benjamin whose writing also transcends the limits between literature, philosophy and autobiography. In his 1911 “Tagebuch von Wengen” [“Diary of Wengen”], Benjamin notes that for him diary writing is no continuous process but occurs in retrospect. The diary that first exists in excerpts then experienced a careful reworking.391 Dissatisfied by his work, Benjamin once wrote to Herbert Blumenthal that there is no literary task more difficult than a diary. 392 This claim is perhaps better understood if one takes into consideration that a year later young Benjamin would set himself the task of making his educational journey to Italy actually arise out of his diary.393 In this sense, the difficult task of the diary appears to lie in the demand that it ought to create the experience of the journey through expression, a form of experience that only comes into being through linguistic expression. In Benjamin’s later work Denkbilder [Thought-Images], which does not take the form of a diary but of literary-philosophical fragments that often proceed from what he saw in different cities, he writes: “Finding words for that which one has before one’s eyes – how difficult this can be. But when they come, they bang against the real with small hammers until they have driven the image out of it like out of a copper plate”.394 To find words for that which he is confronted by is not only Benjamin’s but also Anders’ project. In both projects, writing is often tied to biographical situations and experiences but ultimately also to formulating something to be set against the reality and experience that initially called forth those words. This makes a new form of seeing possible. For both Anders and Benjamin, to understand what one has in front of one’s eyes 391 Walter Benjamin, “Tagebuch von Wengen” in Fragmente vermischten Inhalts. Autobiographische Schriften. Gesammelte Schriften VI, edited by Rolf Tiedemann and Hermann Schweppenhäuser, Frankfurt: Suhrkamp 1885, 235, 241; as cited in Manfred Schneider, “Aufzeichnungen” in Benjamin Handbuch Leben – Werk – Wirkung, edited by Burkhardt Lindner, with the assistance of Thomas Küpper and Timo Skrandis, Stuttgart, Weimar: Metzler 2011, 664665. 392 Walter Benjamin as cited in Manfred Schneider, “Aufzeichnungen”, 665. 393 Walter Benjamin, “Meine Reise in Italien Pfingsten 1912” in Fragmente vermischten Inhalts. Autobiographische Schriften. Gesammelte Schriften VI, edited by Rolf Tiedemann and Hermann Schweppenhäuser, Frankfurt: Suhrkamp 1885, 252, as cited in Manfred Schneider, “Aufzeichnungen”, 665. 394 Walter Benjamin: “San Gimignano” in Kleine Prosa. Baudelaire-Übertragungen. Gesammelte Schriften IV, edited by Tillman Rexroth, Frankfurt: Suhrkamp 1972, 364; as cited in Manfred Schneider, “Aufzeichnungen”, 665. 85 and to actually experience, as Anders writes, “to the end”, the process of writing and the creation of images through language appears indispensable. And similar to Benjamin’s thought images, which “combine pictorial thinking with conceptual thinking”, Anders often tends to create specific images, such as the parable found in the Vienna Diary, that aim at illustrating an insight as well as producing cognition.395 Another affinity between Benjamin and Anders can be found in the way they treat memories. In Benjamin’s Berliner Kindheit um 1900 [Berlin Childhood around 1900], a fragmentary literary text that is autobiographical, literary and critical, as well as in Anders’ diaries Besuch im Hades and “Ruinen heute”, memory episodes are not presented in a chronological order but are presented as arising through the confrontation with places and objects. What Anja Lemke says about Benjamin’s text is also true for Anders’ writing: “Space takes the place of temporal extension and functions, in a sense, as a threshold between individual memories and sociocultural imprints”. 396 In Besuch im Hades, in response to walking through his birthplace in 1966, Anders’ memories of his mother and father as well as his father’s former student, the philosopher Edith Stein, could be seen as aiming at finding a form through which societal tendencies of prewar times are illustrated and through which one is able to exemplify the intertwinement of individualand collective history. And like Benjamin, Anders frequently addresses the act of memory itself. The unbroken way in which objects and smells in postwar Berlin conjure up involuntary childhood memories of his aunt’s apartment from prewar times, is for Anders no longer a form of memory to be idealized but instead one that covers up the caesura that made the prewar past of childhood appear infinitely detached from the present. “Proust might have been able to make such things fruitful”, writes Anders, “for us, such resurrection is only revolting”.397 Nevertheless, the intention typically associated with diary writing is that “a diary is kept by those who want to remember one day”, as Görner writes.398 For his practice of diary writing however, Anders rejects the intention to preserve past experiences for nostalgic 395 Roger W. Müller Farguell, “Städtebilder, Reisebilder, Denkbilder” in Benjamin Handbuch Leben – Werk – Wirkung, edited by Burkhardt Lindner, with the assistance of Thomas Küpper and Timo Skrandis, Stuttgart, Weimar: Metzler 2011, 626. 396 Anja Lemke, “Berliner Kindheit um neunzehnhundert” in in Benjamin Handbuch Leben – Werk – Wirkung, edited by Burkhardt Lindner, with the assistance of Thomas Küpper and Timo Skrandis, Stuttgart, Weimar: Metzler 2011, 653. 397 Anders, “Ruinen heute”, 236. 398 ibid., 236. 86 reasons or to save the past in order to immortalize it.399 He makes it clear that the motive of “saving” the past does not interest him. In most cases, he would wish instead to make the past undone. 400 “But as I cannot do this”, he writes, “my recordings ought to at least contribute something to making something undone in the future, saving something in the future: namely to prevent that which I describe from happening again”. 401 The aim of recording past experiences is thus directed against the realization of certain futures that already exist latent within the present. Anders understood his diaries as “visual depictions of catastrophes” like pictured warnings placed along highways. 402 By comparing his diaries to warning images, Anders formulates their aim: to prevent catastrophes in the future. At the same time, however, what Anders describes in his diaries, are actually not the catastrophes themselves but society in the aftermath of catastrophes. One could say that, similar to Adorno and Benjamin, Anders understood the present to already be a form of catastrophe, and thus not simply aimed at preventing catastrophes in the future. When Anders claims then that he wishes to prevent that which he describes from happening again, it implies that his writing is directed against the present. An inherent wish behind his writing appears to be to break the perpetuation of the gulf between history and experience and those prevalent discrepancies structuring everyday life. And the wish to interrupt such a perpetuation is of course linked to the wish to saving something in the future. One could say that Anders’ diaries create collages of images that are not to be simply understood as warning images of a far away future but instead as a “constellation” of images through which the present is more thoroughly recognized and through which the notion of catastrophe does not present itself through the image of a catastrophic scenario but instead through imagines that attempt to capture the contemporary world in the state of what Anders called “end time”, a state in which the end of time is certain and can only be postponed. 403 In this sense, one could, like Van Dijk, borrow Benjamin’s notion of “constellation” or “literary collage” in order to understand Anders’ diary practice, for it appears that, in his diaries, Anders assembles constellations of poems, theoretical reflections, dialogues, parables and in which an “idea becomes evident without requiring definition”, to a certain degree in accordance with Benjamin’s dictum: “I needn't say 399 Anders, “Warnbilder”, 76. ibid., 76. 401 ibid., 76. 402 ibid., 76. It is noteworthy that Anders thereby chooses an image that already entails the consciousness of the failure of his own attempts at warning. Warning images that are placed alongside highways are often barely registered by those who they are intended for and those who drive past them. I want to thank Anatol Heller for this hint. 403 See Anders, “Die Frist”, 204-205. 400 87 anything. Merely show”. 404 Van Dijk has emphasizes this affinity to Benjamin, with regard to the way Anders “detaches concepts in the philosophic tradition from their original context” and “applies them to a new phenomena that must be clarified”.405 This practice, however, appears to be more strongly part of his two volumes of Die Antiquiertheit des Menschen and his anti-nuclear writings in which Anders also detaches concepts such as “apocalypse”, “end time” or “reprieve” from their theological tradition in order to elucidate the unprecedented character of the nuclear age. Another writer that Anders dealt with and whose diaries and work more generally might thus be seen as a possible point of reference for him is Kafka. What one today knows as Kafka’s diaries is, as Clayton Koelb pointed out, Max Brod’s selection of the notebooks in which Kafka wrote drafts, letters, stories, novellas and sometimes dated observation and experiences from his daily life.406 The assembly of the twelve notebooks from Kafka’s estate that later editors grouped as “diaries” make clear that he used these notebooks as a “literary laboratory [literarische Werkstätte]”. 407 They contain for instance Kafka’s famous short story “Das Urteil” [“The Judgement”] as well as drafts of letters, descriptions of dreams and the beginnings of an autobiography. In the diary entry following “Das Urteil”, Kafka writes about the time at which the story was written and the physical problems, but mental satisfaction, that resulted from the process.408 Similar to Kafka’s diaries, when one thinks of the parable, the dialogues and the excerpt of the letter in the Vienna Diary, Anders’ diaries contain more literary and philosophically crafted parts than one might expect to find among diary entries. Also the way Kafka embedded “Das Urteil” within his diaries might be seen as similar to the way Anders embedded his Noah story within his Japan Diary through which, in each case, the sense is created that work and life are closely connected. 409 While Anders’ described his own work as “occasional philosophy”, Clayton argues that Kafka’s work is a “poetry of experience” 404 Walter Benjamin, The Arcades Project, translated by Howard Eiland and Kevin McLaughlin, prepared on the basis of the German volume edited by Rolf Tiedemann, Cambridge, Massachusetts, London: Harvard University Press 2002, 460; as cited in Van Dijk, Anthropology in the Age of Technology. The Philosophical Contribution of Günther Anders, 97. 405 Van Dijk, Anthropology in the Age of Technology. The Philosophical Contribution of Günther Anders, 97. 406 Clayton Koelb, “Kafka als Tagebuchschreiber”, in Kafka-Handbuch. Leben - Werk - Wirkung, edited by Bettina von Jagow and Oliver Jahraus, Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht 2008, 9798. 407 ibid., 98. 408 ibid., 99. 409 ibid., 99. 88 [“Erlebnisdichtung”], which is an expanded term of the earlier discussed term occasional poetry and implies a form of poetry that processes and objectifies personal experiences.410 When one reads Anders’ “Über Kafka. Kafka, pro und kontra. Die Prozeß-Unterlagen ”, in which Anders actually begins his preliminary remark by citing Kafka’s diaries, one can find elements that he analyzes in Kafka’s work that appear to be of equal importance to his own work. For instance, Anders argues that what astounds in Kafka is that the bewildering is not able to bewilder anyone. “It is not the objects and events as such that are disturbing in Kafka’s work, but the fact that his beings react to them as to normal objects or events – that is, unexcited”, writes Anders.411 Anders calls this “mundanity of the grotesque”, which comes to the fore in “Die Verwandlung” [“Metamorphosis”] through the principle of a “negative explosion”. 412 Where one would expect a “Fortissimo”, the world continues in the same volume.413 In a similar fashion, one could describe the way in which Anders captured his return to Paris: where he – and the reader of the diary – expects to find a post-apocalyptic city, almost everything appears to be the same as in prewar times. What Anders points out in Kafka’s work is what he is himself concerned with, namely finding a form of writing that is able to illustrate the nonappearance of responses that would appear adequate to the object or the experience, in other words, to illustrate such negative explosions.414 Indeed, to present the bewildering as innocuous is for Anders a realistic depiction of reality. He writes: This mixed product of horror [Grauen] and coziness [Gemütlichkeit] that appeared to the first readers [of Kafka] as incredible has of course lost its strangeness [Befremdlichkeit]. We all know about the “good rooms” [“guten Stuben”], which the extermination camp leaders had furnished with upholstered furniture, gramophones and bedside lamps wall to wall with the gassing installations. K.’s living room in the gym of the “castle” is no more fantastic than the “good rooms” in the gassing camps [...] But since the complete discrepancy between the “spheres of life” is socially taken to be self-evident, and since bewilderment or horror cannot be perpetuated as a mood of life for the average person, Kafka’s method of presenting the bewildering as non-bewildering is completely realistic.415 In this sense, one could argue that Kafka and Anders approach these negative explosions in a different way. While Anders argues that Kafka illustrates the bewildering as 410 ibid., 99. Günther Anders, “Über Kafka. Kafka, pro und kontra. Die Prozeß-Unterlagen” in Mensch ohne Welt. Schriften zur Kunst und Literatur, Munich: C.H. Beck 1993 [1984], 50. 412 ibid., 50. 413 ibid., 50. 414 ibid., 50. 415 ibid., 51. 411 89 innocuous in order to point out that what is taken as self-evident is actually appalling, Anders does not use the method of “inversion” of what he wants to say.416 While his work is also dedicated to illustrating negative explosions, he focuses on the most prevalent forms of discrepancies that structure everyday life and illustrates the way in which we remain indifferent toward those things about which something in us likely tells us we would need to “explode”, but despite all, do not or are not even capable of. Moving away from affinities between the Anders’ diaries and the work of Benjamin and Kafka, it might also prove fruitful to set Anders’ conception of the diary in relation to Adorno’s Minima Moralia. Reflexionen aus dem beschädigten Leben [Minima Moralia. Reflections from Damaged Life], in which conceptual thought takes flight from experience and in which experience is grasped as a microscope for general, yet time-specific phenomena of life under capitalism. While Adorno and Anders had their personal difficulties, when Anders won the Adorno-prize in 1983, he emphasized their shared experience of American exile and belonging to the generation “of those who had not been able to cope with the fact of those destroyed [Fertiggemachten] in Auschwitz and who could never cope with the undeserved favor of not being among those destroyed themselves”.417 Both belonged to a generation that, for years, tried to understand what had happened, to warn about its repetition, being certain that what once happened could happen again.418 In the speech, Anders also makes it evident that he held Adorno’s work to be of high importance and understood both of them as following similar aims: “Adorno’s and my account of the damage, dehumanization, and possible obliteration of the human being could together probably form something like an encyclopedia of the apocalyptic time”. 419 What Adorno’s Minima Moralia, a collection of fragments and aphorisms from 1944, 1945 and 1946-47, shares with Anders’ work of occasional philosophy, in particular his diary written during his time in exile, “Leichenwäscher der Geschichte”, and his reflections upon life as an exiled in “Post festum”, is both its fragmentary and experimental form as well as the attempt to arrive at critical thought by proceeding from individual experience. Adorno there starts out, as he writes, from “the narrowest private sphere, that of the intellectual in emigration” but also includes “considerations of broader social and anthropological scope” and finally, aphorisms that 416 ibid., 52. Günther Anders, “Gegen ein neues und endgültiges Nagasaki” in Günther Anders antwortet. Interviews und Erklärungen, edited by Elke Schubert, Berlin: Tiamat 1987, 169-174. 418 ibid., 170. 419 ibid., 174. 417 90 “lead on thematically also to philosophy, without ever pretending to be complete or definitive”.420 What Adorno and Anders appear to share is the notion of the individual as a prism of society and generality. In his dedication to Horkheimer in Minima Moralia, Adorno writes that “in an individualistic society, the general not only realizes itself through the interplay of particulars, but society is essentially the substance of the individual”. 421 Although it remains unknown whether Adorno ever commented on Anders’ diaries, one could suspect that Adorno would have raised an objection to Anders’ diary form inasmuch as it might too much create the semblance of an autonomous subject. “Fidelity to one’s own state of consciousness and experience is forever in temptation of lapsing into infidelity, by denying the insight that transcends the individual and calls his substance by its name”, warns Adorno. 422 Among the aims of Minima Moralia is to illustrate experience and commercialized relations as reified, to demonstrate the dissolution of the subject through an overwhelming objectivity and to point ways toward possible points of resistance. Shierry Weber Nicholson has pointed out that an important notion that Adorno deals with in Minima Moralia is “malignant normality”, a term coined by Robert Jay Lifton to designate “a social actuality that is ‘presented as normal, allencompassing, and unalterable’ but is nevertheless conducive to inhumanity”. 423 Nicholson argues that for Adorno “it is precisely the decayed—but not yet fully eliminated—status of the individual that allows the malignancy of contemporary normality to be read in his experience”.424 The way in which Adorno addresses malignant normality is by examining the brutality in social norms, by examining man-made products such as doors that no longer provide privacy, as well as compliant thought, corporate jargon and language “infected with social control”, serving “the purposes of denial through stupefaction”.425 And it is perhaps in this demonstration of malignant normality that Anders’ and Adorno’s aim and thought most closely come to intersect. The introduction of this thesis was prefixed by a quote from Minima Moralia in which Adorno writes that there is “nothing innocuous” left and that those moments exempt from thought and that blossoming tree too become compliant in a normality that perpetuates suffering and brutality. Anders is everywhere acutely aware of this phenomenon. His Vienna Diary 420 Adorno, Minima Moralia, 18. ibid., 17. 422 ibid., 16. 423 Shierry Weber Nicholson, “Adorno’s Minima Moralia: Malignant Normality and the Dilemmas of Resistance” in Critical Theory. Past, Present, Future, edited by Anders Bartonek and SvenOlov Wallenstein, Huddinge: Södertörns högskola 2021, 259. 424 ibid., 260. 425 ibid., 261, 263, 266. 421 91 could equally be called a document testing to malignant normality that finds its expression in the appearances of cities that are silent about the atrocities, the many moments of forgetting, possibilities of thoughtless relaxation and in the violent speech that denies the suffering of others and rejects responsibility. What Anders appears to sense acutely as an element of malignant normality is the way in which individual experience often appears so inadequate to past and ongoing catastrophes and the way such experience is so often indicative of indifference. Anders would likely have agreed with Adorno’s words: “The logic of history is as destructive as the people it brings to prominence; wherever its momentum carries it, it reproduces equivalents of past calamity. Normality is death.”426 After discussing Anders’ diaries as collections of warning images and briefly illustrating the way in which Adorno, Benjamin and Kafka can be conceived as points of affinity for Anders’ diary project, we will now return to the aim behind his diaries. In his 1984 preface to Lieben gestern, Anders emphasizes the didactical aim of his diaries when he states that he hoped that his recordings would tempt his contemporaries to insights or at least the right form of practice.427 The diary as a collection of warning images that ought to make people more cognizant of the way in which they let discrepancies structure their lives could be said to provide the corrective image to the Vienna Diary’s image of the best of philosophy being a delayed scream. While the latter image discussed in the previous chapter could be said to consist of the recognition of the failure of philosophy to prevent atrocities, it is the former image that illustrates the idea of a form of writing that sets itself the task not to come too late again. However, many of Anders’ diaries contain elements of both images. Anders wrote his Vienna Diary as well as his Japan Diary in the aftermath of catastrophes. Both could thus be understood as Anders’ responses to the registration of the failure of philosophy to anticipate threats and to hearing a delayed scream in his former intellectual production. Although the Vienna Diary is not an explicitly didactical or activist text, the diary could nevertheless be characterized as a warning image in the sense that it illustrates how, in the aftermath of a catastrophe, the past appears already overwritten by the triumphant layers of the present and no critical historical consciousness has emerged in society. In another sense, however, one could say that registering the failure of such a consciousness to become material is another way of continuing to write a catastrophic history. As already indicated, Anders’ practice of writing in the diary form as 426 Adorno, Minima Moralia, 56. Anders, “Vorbemerkungen über die Geschichte des Fühlens” in Lieben gestern. Notizen zur Geschichte des Fühlens, Munich: C.H. Beck 1997, 8. 427 92 the creation of warning images becomes much more explicit in his 1958 Japan Diary. One might even go so far as to call this diary an activist diary in which Anders’ philosophical and activist voice, his practical imperative and moral aim come to the fore. However, Fetz has rightly pointed out that for Anders, the question whether an “interventionist philosophy” should be prioritized over literature or poetry wasn’t necessarily important to him.428 Instead it was “the question of what good writing would entail: good meaning exact, exact meaning true”.429 Under these circumstances, writing might have an effect and reach its addressees.430 However, it is evident that Anders was convinced that writing well is only possible if one bears one’s addressees in mind. This points back to the question that occupied Anders once he came to Vienna and when he was doubtful of his former writing adequately addressing the people of postwar Vienna. And while the Vienna Diary could be said to find an expression for the discrepancies between history and experience without explicitly addressing the reader, Anders will do so in his Japan Diary. However, one should add that even though it is apparent how the Japan Diary can be understood as a collage of warning images, the diary also reflects upon of its own failure at warning. It is thus perhaps no coincidence that Anders would draw up an analogy between his diaries and those very warning images next to highways that one typically drives past without actually recognizing them. We will discuss this dynamic between warning and its failure in the following chapter. In the next chapter, we will first shortly outline the way in which the Japan Diary is, like the Vienna Diary, concerned with illustrating the unreality of the present, this time, however, in Japan in 1958, in the aftermath of the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. In the Japan Diary Anders makes use of an activist language of warning, attempting to break the spell of the discrepancy between history and experience. The Japan Diary takes up an idea from the Vienna Diary, namely that one can only truly see the discrepancies structuring experience if one has one’s eyes and ears pay close attention to the appearance and the voices of the present. However, as already mentioned, this diary introduces the idea that one can today only sufficiently see with one’s eyes closed, that is to say, if one no longer merely relies on perception. Both of these ideas are reflected in Anders’ Noah parables, one of which can be found in the Japan Diary and reflects the way 428 Bernhard Fetz, “Günther Anders’ literarische Moral der Philosophie” in Das unmögliche Ganze. Zur literarischen Kritik der Kultur, Munich: Wilhelm Fink 2009, 248. 429 ibid., 248. 430 ibid., 248. 93 in which warnings about future threats fail. In a rewritten version of the Noah parable from 1961, Anders introduces many important aspects of his project of warning such as his idea of prophylactic apocalypticism and the reprieve. This rewritten version illustrates Anders’ literary attempt at presenting an actual time sense of catastrophe and to thereby elicit more adequate responses to contemporary threats. In this sense, one could say that Anders’ second Noah parable could be read as a response to the discrepancy between history and experience that plays such a prevalent role in both Anders’ Vienna Diary as well as his Japan Diary. 94 4. Attempts at Breaking the Spell of the Discrepancy between History and Experience 4.1 Japan Diary When reading Anders’ Japan Diary “Der Mann auf der Brücke” it becomes clear that by the late 1950s, Anders had not only become a radical thinker of the nuclear apocalypse but also a disarmament activist who was dedicated to practices against the nuclear threat and travelled to the cities that were destroyed by the atomic bombings in the Second World War. During his visit to Japan, in the context of the “Fourth World Conference Against ABombs and H-Bombs and for Disarmament” in 1958 in Tokyo, Anders presented a “moral codex in the nuclear age”, gave several speeches on the nuclear threat at different occasions, participated in marches, visited the family of Akichi Kubuyama, a victim of nuclear fallout that resulted from the testing of nuclear bombs at Bikini Atoll, attended a memorial ceremony in Hiroshima and spoke to hospitalized victims of the atomic bombings then suffering from radiation sickness.431 However, Anders’ activism did not only consist of his journey to Japan.432 Together with the Austrian physicist Hans Thirring and the futurologist Robert Jungk, Anders was one of “the three major anti-nuclear weapons educators of Vienna”.433 Anders and Jungk founded the Austrian Easter March Committee in 1963.434 Anders was in contact with many of the leading figures of the disarmament movement such as Bertrand Russell, with whom he participated in the Vietnam War Crimes Tribunal alongside Beauvoir and Sartre. 435 He later spoke to members of the Students’ Congress against Nuclear Armament in West Berlin, supported the Pugwash Conferences and published his exceptional correspondence with the 431 Anders participated in the anti-nuclear congress in Tokyo as a delegate of the “Kampfbund gegen Atomschäden” without any “ideological or institutional binding”. See Günther Anders, “Einleitung 1982” in Hiroshima ist überall, Munich: C.H. Beck 1982, XV-XVI. 432 Röhrlich rightly points out that Anders’ involvement in anti-nuclear activism is an understudied topic. See Röhrlich, “‘To Make the End Time Endless:’ The Early Years of Günther Anders’ Fight against Nuclear Weapons”, 45. 433 ibid., 54. 434 ibid., 50. 435 ibid., 50. For more details on Anders’ involvement in the Vietnam War Crimes Tribunal, see Anna Pollmann, Fragmente aus der Endzeit. Negatives Geschichtsdenken bei Günther Anders, 136-148. 95 American pilot Claude Eatherly who had been involved in the mission of dropping the atomic bomb over Hiroshima in 1945.436 Eatherly, an Air force pilot who had checked the weather before the bombing of Hiroshima, became a decisive figure for Anders because he had made himself guilty by being what Anders would call “a piece in the apparatus”.437 He became “the Anti-Eichmann”, “his great hope-inspiring antipode”, “[n]ot the man who passes off machinery as a pretext for renouncing conscience, but, on the contrary, the man who recognizes the machinery as the fatal danger to conscience”.438 For Anders, “this insight into becoming guiltlessly guilty, into the indirectness of today’s entanglement is the decisive, indispensable insight of our age”. 439 Due to his state of health, Anders became increasingly more restricted to writing against the nuclear threat rather than taking part in anti-nuclear activism that required his physical presence. In his 1982 introduction to Hiroshima ist Überall, which contains his Japan Diary as well as his correspondence with Eatherly, he emphasizes that he has felt that his task consisted in finding a language that would seek to be a more adequate expression of the contemporary world and could approximate the threat that was otherwise ungraspable. He writes: If I was assigned a special task, it consisted solely in trying to overcome the widespread speechlessness, more precisely: to use the prior philosophical and literary education [...] in order to find or invent a reasonably appropriate vocabulary and a way of speaking worthy to the enormity for the totally new and outrageous situation that contemporaries, understandably, even forgivably, could not adequately name and formulate (also today they cannot yet, and this is true from the best down to Reagan).440 While the Vienna Diary could be said to have marked a period in Anders’ life where he had been unsure what language would be the right one to address his contemporaries, it appears that by the late 1950s upon writing the Japan Diary two years after the publication of Die Antiquiertheit des Menschen, he had a more certain idea of what language would be necessary. It would be a language that could approximate the enormity of destruction possible today and one that unmasks outdated vocabulary no longer adequate to describe the contemporary situation. “Since one cannot even imagine what one cannot master linguistically, no: one cannot even perceive it correctly, I considered the task of 436 ibid., 50-54. Anders, “Einleitung 1982” in Hiroshima ist überall, XVIII. 438 Günther Anders; Eatherly, Claude, Burning Conscience. The Guilt of Hiroshima. New York: Paragon House Publishes 1989, 108. 439 Anders, “Einleitung 1982” in Hiroshima ist überall, XVIII. 440 ibid., XI. 437 96 formulating to be absolutely necessary”, writes Anders.441 In this sense, one could say that Anders continued an effort of writing that already occupied him during his years in exile, that is to find a language for that which one cannot truly grasp and which in day-to-day life is not experienced. And even if some consider such an effort to be somewhat utopian and to imply a demand that language cannot fulfill, it appears necessary when one rejects the idea that discrepancies structuring people’s everyday life are natural and instead holds on to the possibility that they can become subject to change. The effort of finding a more adequate language to illustrate the contemporary world, to find a language that would not speak past the problems of its own time, led Anders to continue his literary and philosophical experiments, one of them being the Japan Diary. The following will provide an impression of some of the elements found in the Japan Diary before moving on to a discussion of its own immanent criticism. In the entry on his visit to Yaizu, where Anders met Kuboyama’s mother, widow and daughter, he includes his own speech that he gave at the occasion. In the speech, Anders voices the demand to distrust expressions. Kuboyama, who had found himself 130 km away from the nuclear tests at Bikini Atoll but subsequently died, taught the contemporary world that to speak of “tests” and “experiments” is not suitable when the resulting nuclear fallout collapses distances, becomes today’s reality, harms the lives of many.442 Anders saw in such “tests” already a form of warfare: “What is today falsely called ‘peace’, is the continuation or the preparation of war by other means”.443 At the same time, however, also the expression “war” is for Anders unsuitable to describe nuclear “warfare”. The explosion of the bomb in Hiroshima, which caused the immediate death of over hundred thousand civilians, had been “pure slaughter” and excluded the possibility of resistance.444 In the diary, Anders pleads for measuring words up against the reality of technological destruction and points to the ways in which formulations conceal what has changed in the nuclear age. In the Japan Diary, Anders also captures the way in which the eradication that the bomb caused in Hiroshima is not immediately visible. Similar to the experiences he had in Paris and Vienna in the early 1950s, he realizes when confronted with the appearance of Hiroshima that the loss and destruction the city has undergone, is not offered up to the 441 ibid., XI. Anders, “Der Mann auf der Brücke. Tagebuch aus Hiroshima und Nagasaki (1958)”, 38. 443 ibid., 38. 444 ibid., 38, 60. 442 97 visitor’s eyes. The name of the hotel that Anders finds himself in is telling: “New Hiroshima”.445 As Van Dijk writes, Anders “did not find a ruin, but a cold and modern city”. 446 For Anders, this experience proved that “reconstruction is precisely the destruction of destruction, and thus the culmination of destruction”.447 Hiroshima does no longer represent the destroyed city that Anders feared every place on earth could resemble. Anders writes in an entry of the diary: No, I can’t see anything from what happened. The visible things: the new houses, they suppress what was, just like the newspapers or everyday conversations [Alltagsgespräche] do. Everything seems “time-neutral”, that is: everything looks as if it has always stood this way; the present disguises itself as “always been like this”; and what appears to have been [scheinbar Gewesene] overgrows what has actually been [wirklich Gewesene].448 And precisely because Anders felt so little of the effects of the fire ball that had hit the city thirteen years earlier, he held it possible that coming to Hiroshima would even hinder some people to experience knowledge, pain and outrage commensurate to the city’s history.449 And thus it becomes an imperative to distrust that form of perception, which is only able to perceive something harmless when compared to the past and the possible future of the nuclear age. “Anyone who restricts himself to the perception of what the moment offers in terms of visibility misses reality [...],” Anders writes.450 According to him, the only way to reject the unreality of the present is the use of imagination and to resist forgetting what ground one walks over.451 Addressing himself, Anders thus writes: “[C]onsider where you wander, and over what, and over who! And remember that nothing you see is real; but that the real fact is that you no longer see the real [...]. Close your eyes and rely on your imagination”.452 Here Anders captures the tension so prevalent in his work more generally. At once, his work registers the way in which the unreality of the present is in fact what’s prevalent and most real in the sense that it structures people’s experience. On the bus entering Hiroshima, Anders’ travel companion R. will start singing to himself, so unaffected does the appearance of the city leave him.453 At the same time, 445 ibid., 61. Van Dijk, Anthropology in the Age of Technology. The philosophical contribution of Günther Anders, 15. 447 Anders, “Der Mann auf der Brücke. Tagebuch aus Hiroshima und Nagasaki (1958)”, 61. 448 ibid., 62. 449 ibid., 63. 450 ibid., 48. 451 ibid., 65. 452 ibid., 66. 453 ibid., 61. 446 98 however, Anders’ work demands that one works against one’s own inexperience and such unaffectedness that is fostered and perpetuated. The Japan Diary is not only a text in which Anders voices such demands but also one in which he registers failures. In an entry from the train ride to Hiroshima, Anders notes that there had been 400,000 civilians, soldiers and foreigners in Hiroshima on the 6th of August.454 By 1950, 282,000 had died, half of them on the day of the bomb’s explosion. Anders also notes down a list of the diseases of those 158,000 survivors, such as leukemia or keloids through burnings. The entry ends with Anders writing that he cannot comprehend these numbers, even by copying and “scanning” them.455 He writes, “How horrible [is] the word ‘scanning’ [‘überfliegen’]. Because that’s how, without comprehending it, the bomber airplane flew over the victims that were left behind”.456 Here Anders registers how not being able to grasp fully the scope of the bombing had likely not only been the experience of those who lived through the event as well as the ones who try to comprehend it in its aftermath but also those on the bomber plane.457 The technology of the bomb requires distance and height. The technology of this means of destruction requires the people on the bomber plane to no longer perceive people and to have an alienated perspective on their “target”. 458 On the plane to Japan, it becomes graspable to Anders how people can carry out destructions at such heights. “And also I 454 ibid., 60. ibid., 61. 456 ibid., 61. 457 Anders recalls that when asking survivors about the moment of the flash of the atomic bomb in Hiroshima, one of them answered, “‘I didn’t experience it at all.’” “Equally, as the size of the crimes increases, the chance of imagining them decreases, and with it, of course, the chance of ‘coping’ with them”, Anders writes. See Anders, “Nach ‘Holocaust’ (1979),” 191. 458 In “Nach ‘Holocaust’ (1979)” Anders self-critically remarks upon the difference between Hiroshima and Auschwitz. These remarks could perhaps also be read as a self-critique of the position advocated at end of the Vienna Diary. In 1979, Anders writes: “No, in spite of the fact that the world will perish not by Auschwitzs but by Hiroshimas, Auschwitz was morally incomparably more horrible than Hiroshima. I emphasize this because, as I browse through my notes, I suspect that I approached Auschwitz with the prejudice that what was true of one form of mass murder was also true of the other. Next to the perpetrators of Auschwitz – and there were thousands of them – the Japan-pilots had been angels. Whether this was a “progress” is another question. In the case of Hiroshima – and this is even more true of today’s ‘nuclear missiles’ than of the bombs released over the crime scene in 1945 – there was to a certain extent only the ‘push of a button’: Men, namely, who remained far away from the effects of their actions (in this case: their single hand movement), namely as far away as today actually 99% of the workers remain away from the eventual effects of their work. Actually, since the invention of ‘missiles’ the term ‘crime scene’ has become meaningless.” See Anders, “Nach ‘Holocaust’ 1979”, 203-204. 455 99 would likely know no inhibitions”, he writes.459 The world perceived upon the heights of a flying plane – the image with which the Japan Diary begins – is already a world without humans. The diary thus sets out with a warning image against the possibility that the world will one day resemble what it looks like from the perspective of a plane. Here warning consists in pointing to the possibility that the view offered by technology will become an exact representation of the world and will one day signal all that is left. 4.2 Anders’ Noah 1: The Difficulty of Warning However, Anders’ Japan Diary is not only dedicated to the creation of warning images but also reflects on the possible failure of warning speech. In order to illustrate the failure and difficulty of warning about the nuclear threat, Anders chooses to draw on the story of Noah, the flood and the ark. Anders’ Noah parable is introduced in his 1958 Japan Diary, first published in 1959, then published in a rewritten form in 1964, and finally undergoes a self-critique following the Chernobyl disaster of 1986. Before discussing Anders’ diary version as well as his remaking of the parable, it is important to first consider how Anders conceived of the contemporary era as it is lived in the wake of the nuclear age. The bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, designate for Anders the introduction of an epoch in which the end of times is such an immediate reality that it cannot be undone but only delayed.460 The term Anders introduces in order to mark this time otherwise known as the atomic age is what he calls “die Frist” and which might be best translated as “the reprieve” that is to say, a momentary delay of what is otherwise inevitable.461 According to Günter Bischof, Anders’ understanding of the age in which we live following the advent of nuclear weapons could alternatively be rendered as “borrowed time”.462 The contemporary 459 Anders, “Der Mann auf der Brücke. Tagebuch aus Hiroshima und Nagasaki (1958)”, 13. It can only be delayed because we can never make the knowledge of how to build nuclear weapons undone. In “Commandments in the Atomic Age” from 1957, Anders writes: “Even in a thoroughly ‘clean’ world (whereby I understand the situation in which there doesn’t exist one single A- or H-bomb, in which we seem to ‘have’ no bombs) we still would ‘have’ them because we know how to make them [...] for the blueprints are indestructible like Plato’s ideas: as a matter of fact, they are their diabolical realization”. See Anders “Commandments in the Atomic Age” in Günther Anders; Claude Eatherly, Burning Conscience. The Guilt of Hiroshima, New York: Paragon House Publishes 1989, 19. 461 On the concept of “reprieve” see Anders, “Die Frist”, 170-221. 462 Günter Bischof, “Preface” in The Life and Work of Günther Anders. Émigré, Iconoclast, Philosopher, Man of Letters, edited by Günter Bischof, Jason Dawsey and Bernhard Fetz. Innsbruck: Studienverlag 2014, 7. 460 100 task is for Anders to ensure that this inevitable apocalypse is delayed for as long as possible. During his visit to Japan, one of the most striking signs of mankind’s destructiveness is for Anders signaled by a photograph seen in the Nagasaki Atomic Bomb Museum, where a wall is shown bearing the ashen outline of someone leaning against the wall when the nuclear explosion took place on the morning of August 9, 1945. This photograph is, for Anders, as he writes in the Japan Diary “the last image of the last human”, in other words, an image of what will be left of a generation he held to be the very last.463 By the end of his Japan Diary, after having recorded the many ways in which the past is no longer visible, Anders introduces his Noah parable in order to illustrate his own difficulties of warning against the nuclear threat. In order to provide the background against which Anders’ retelling of the story of Noah’s ark takes place, it can first be said that the story has for long served as an “emblem of salvation for the human race”.464 In the story of the biblical flood, God decides to reverse creation once he sees how the human world is filled with violence. And so God commands Noah to build an ark to save both his family, as well as a female and male representative of every animal species. After God sends the flood to sweep over the whole of his creation, Noah and his family, and thus also the human race as such, survive because Noah has built the ark. Anders’ retelling of the flood should be seen, by contrast, as a translation of his own experience of the catastrophes lying in wait within the contemporary world and the difficulty of warning others about them. 465 In the Japan Diary, Anders recalls telling this story to fellow passengers, on a flight from Pakistan to Egypt, part of his journey back to Europe, after having left Japan. These passengers were an Australian priest, his daughter and his son who had hoped that the plane would fly over the mountain Ararat where Noah’s ark had allegedly stranded.466 When Anders is asked to tell a story, he decides to report on “not exactly official details from the life of Noah”.467 His story goes like this: A month after Noah had announced the flood God would bring about, he takes a walk during which he meets a man who seems not to have heard Noah’s 463 Anders, “Der Mann auf der Brücke. Tagebuch aus Hiroshima und Nagasaki (1958)”, 132. On the history of representations of Noah’s story see Fiona J. Stafford: The Last of The Race. The Growth of a Myth from Milton to Darwin. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1994, 13. 465 For Anders’ first Noah story see Anders, “Der Mann auf der Brücke. Tagebuch aus Hiroshima und Nagasaki (1958)”, 177-180. 466 ibid., 176-177. 467 ibid., 177. 464 101 warning since he is now in the midst of building a house, rather than preparing for the flood. In Anders’ account, Noah is a figure who does not want to be the sole survivor of the flood but wants to instead warn others so that they too might survive with him, and so he asks the man if he hasn’t heard about the flood coming. In response, the man barks at Noah, tells him that he simply wants to be left alone, and doesn’t want to hear anything about the flood he can’t do much about anyway. Indeed, the man has no time for Noah because he cannot leave his work behind when he has to also think about the future. In the parable, there is a strange sense in which the man does indeed seem to believe Noah, but ultimately this belief does not bear upon his action or thoughts about the future. Confronted with the man’s stubbornness, Noah says to him: “if you have no time for the flood, you will soon have no time at all; not only will your work be left behind ‘halffinished’ [once the flood comes] but you will be left behind and your children’s future”.468 But Noah’s words make no difference to the man. That the flood would destroy the future he is now so dedicated to preparing does not leave the man startled or compel him to give up his efforts and to instead start thinking about how he might survive in times such as these. Instead, he simply ignores Noah’s announcement. Later, Noah meets the man a few more times and each time warns him of the flood, even though his words always fall on ears that do not want to hear him. At one point, the man even ridicules Noah by arguing that no individual will actually be hit by the flood but “only” as he says, “the entire world” – and this fact sends him and his family into hysterics of laughter.469 A month later, when the flood finally arrives, Noah sees the man and his family disappearing into the waves and is unable to help them onto the ark. Finally Noah starts to cry: “But not about the flood”, Anders says, “Also not about the evil of people. But about their stupidity”.470 And so the story ends. For Anders, the man’s stupidity seems to consist of a kind of blindness that is unable to fear and imagine the many ways in which an unseen threat might affect one’s future. At the heart of this stupidity lies the belief in a stable world no matter the circumstances that say otherwise, as well as the ability to forget that a threat to the entire world, once realized, does not hit an abstract world but always individuals. For Anders this kind of stupidity, and consequent failure to adequately respond to threats, was characteristic of the lived reality of individuals in the atomic age. And, in that sense, such stupidity was made 468 ibid., 132. ibid., 179. 470 ibid., 180. 469 102 all the easier by the fact that many rightly felt themselves to exercise little to no control or influence over nuclear weapons long since apportioned to governments become gods in their ability to dispose over the fate of billions. It is thus all the more striking when Anders’ Noah story reflects the way in which man-made threats do not seem to belong to an order of time over which they themselves possess control but which appear instead like the punishment of a god or a natural catastrophe they themselves cannot master. Seen from another perspective, however, Anders’ Noah story is not a story of stupidity but a story about the failure of Noah’s warning inasmuch as it does not impress upon the man the enormity of the situation and the consequences of his failure to act. Here one might pay particular attention to the story’s title: “Die falschen Antworten” [“The Wrong Answers”], it is called, and while one might first suppose the title to refer to the man who will later drown, that title might also be seen as referring to the fact that it is Noah who did not have the right answers for the man. Because Noah’s warnings are, in this sense, the wrong answer. The flood remains nothing more than an abstract threat for the man, something that will only hit the entire world but not him. In this way, one might come to see how the invocation of some generalized humanity that should meet its end in a catastrophic event does not maximize fear but actually takes the fear away – for one will then have the sense of dying as a species, rather than as an individual, and all such fates will inevitably appear to be in some very real sense out of one’s hands, far less an insult than to actually die one’s own death.471 One might also read the laughter of the man and his family as indicating the widespread inability to fear a disaster that would return the planet to a state unknown for billions of year: the state of a planet without humans. One could say that through the Noah story, the Japan Diary contains a warning image of how abstract warnings can fail. The diary itself, by examining Japanese cities in the aftermath of the atomic bombings, responds to this image by attempting to provide more concrete warning images that illustrate what happens when warnings about the future are ignored. In the Japan Diary, Anders says of his Noah story: “I have only described what happens everyday”. 472 Everywhere and daily, Anders emphasizes, for “Hiroshima is located everywhere” in the sense that what happened in Hiroshima could now happen anywhere.473 What is clear, then, is that Anders’ Noah story is told to emphasize the very 471 For Anders’ discussion of the discrepancy between individual death and the death of humanity, see Anders, “Die Frist”, 183-189. 472 Anders, “Der Mann auf der Brücke. Tagebuch aus Hiroshima und Nagasaki (1958)”, 181. 473 ibid., 181. 103 difficult problem of warning as it relates to nuclear threat and the inability to fear existential threats. And here one might agree with Anders inasmuch as global threats have long remained abstract and most do not live their lives in accord with such threats but instead lead lives utterly irreconcilable with them. But even if one agrees with Anders on this point, one might still shrug one’s shoulders upon hearing such a story since it really only illustrates an exceedingly simple, even a banal truth, a truism everyone agrees with, that turns no stomach, and that no one really wishes to change anyway. Indeed, there is something here essential about Anders’ very real sense for the banality of all such insight. Hannah Arendt, for instance, upon reading an essay of Anders on the atomic bomb, replied to Anders, telling him that his analyses are “actually all commonplace truths, even if nobody knows about them”. “In general” she adds, “things will depend on commonplace truths in the near future”.474 In the light of Arendt’s remark, one should perhaps emphasize that Anders’ work was in this sense unique precisely because it did not discard these banal truths witnessed everywhere. But neither did it shrink from them as though they were irresolvable problems unworthy of his attention. That many proceed in ignorance of disasters past, present and future was not the kind of discrepancy Anders could accept in either others or himself for he predicted this discrepancy to be the “cause of our demise”.475 For the mere fact that these truths were banal or commonplace does not mean that the danger of such banalities were ever accorded proper attention. As already demonstrated, Anders never approached such problems as though they were in fact familiar but instead tried to always treat them as problems necessary to grapple with in an age in which humanity has become capable of bringing about its own end at the same time as it lacked the sense that it could also stop that end from ultimately coming about. Anders knew this feeling of impotence, as well as the sense of disinterest that follows from it. But it is precisely this fatal kind of causality that he sought to understand and undermine. And so Anders rewrote his Noah story after presenting it in his Japan Diary in order to break this spell of disinterest, and to try to imagine some form of reconciliation between the otherwise irreconcilable relation between experience and history or more concretely, between lived experience and existential threats. As a result, he then decided to create a Noah who could correct the mistakes of his namesake by spurring others to necessary action. In order to better understand Anders’ concept of “prophylactic apocalypticism”, which could be said to be a response to those discrepancies structuring experience in his 474 Günther Anders; Hannah Arendt: Schreib doch mal ‘hard facts’ über Dich. Briefe 1939 bis 1975. Munich: C.H. Beck 2016, 64. 475 Anders, “Die Bombe hängt nicht nur über den Universitäten”, 105. 104 diaries, the following sections will discuss Anders’ rewritten Noah story, the criticism that it undergoes in the wake of the nuclear reactor disaster in Chernobyl as well as ask about the consequences of Anders’ thoughts for our contemporary situation. 4.3 Anders’ Noah 2: The Prophylactic Apocalyptic Anders published his rewritten Noah story upon the request of Gudrun Ensslin in the edited volume Gegen den Tod. Stimmen deutscher Schriftsteller gegen die Atombombe [Against Death. Voices of German Writers Against the Atomic Bomb], after having rewritten it in 1961. When Ensslin asked him to contribute to an anthology against the atomic bomb, he had not yet heard of her. This was before her work with the Red Army Faction. Anders’ contribution, published in 1964 alongside such writers as Nelly Sachs, Ludwig Marcuse and Hans-Magnus Enzensberger, now bore a new title: “Die beweinte Zukunft” [“The Lamented Future”], it was called. And it seems as though the book title of that edited volume Gegen den Tod. Stimmen deutscher Schriftsteller gegen die Atombombe had also found its way into Anders’ new account of Noah, for in this story Anders presents a Noah who finds far more radical forms of warning, which this time prove successful in meeting the need for the story of Noah to also serve as a hopeful account of human survival.476 There Anders presents a Noah that is able to find a form of 476 For Anders’ second story, see Günther Anders, “Die beweinte Zukunft (1961)” in Die atomare Drohung. Radikale Überlegungen zum atomaren Zeitalter, Munich: C.H. Beck 2003 [1981], 1-10. For a discussion of the story, see the following authors: Reinhard Ellensohn; Kerstin Putz, “Übermorgen. Streifzüge durchs Zeitgelände” in Günther Anders-Journal, Volume 1, 2017, special edition on the conference “Schreiben für übermorgen”, edited by Reinhard Ellensohn and Kerstin Putz in collaboration with the international Günther Anders Society, URL: http://www.guenther-anders-gesellschaft.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/12/ellensohn-putz2017.pdf; Jean-Pierre Dupuy, A Short Treatise on the Metaphysics of Tsunamis, Michigan: Michigan State University Press 2015; Ulrich Bartosch, “Die zweifach beweinte Zukunft – Günther Anders unter aktuellen Vorzeichen wieder gelesen” in Ideenpolitik. Geschichtliche Konstellationen und gegenwärtige Konflikte, edited by Harald Bluhm, Karsten Fischer and Marcus Llanque, Berlin: Akademie Verlag 2011, 529-543; Ulrich Sonnemann, “Das fatale Perfektfutur und das Andersartige in Noahs konterfatalem und die Fugen der Zeit. Zu Günther Anders’ ‘Die beweinte Zukunft’” in Günther Anders kontrovers, edited by Konrad Paul Liessmann. München: C.H. Beck, 1992, 240-251. In Anders’ collection of philosophical diaries, Die Schrift an der Wand, published in 1967, three years after the second Noah story, one finds a New York diary dated to 1946 that bears the same name as the second Noah story: “Die beweinte Zukunft”. Although Anders later claimed that he did not write about the atomic bomb until the early 1950s, his New York diary of 1946 already refers to the concept of “reprieve,” as well to that idea of shedding tears in advance, which plays a crucial role in his second Noah story. It should also be mentioned, however, that in Anders’ 1967 afterword to Die Schrift an der Wand, he claims that he had considerably reworked his diary entries afterwards because he regarded the process of editing and rewriting as essential for the diaries to win their truth. This suggests that although the New York diary is dated 1946, it is also likely interspersed with ideas Anders developed in the 105 warning that is no longer abstract but actually takes the form of semblance and is thereby able to change people’s time sense that catastrophe is something that lies far away in the future, which is ultimately not a time sense proper to that of catastrophe. The new Noah story goes as follows. On the hundredth day of warning his neighbors about the coming flood, after one hundred days in which no one took his warnings seriously, Noah is driven to such desperation that he invokes ever more unorthodox means of warning, tactics so taboo that he now warns even his God of his plans. Because God failed to give Noah instructions on how to properly warn his neighbors, Noah must now inform his God that in order for him to do what he has to do, he must now commit sacrilege. “Don’t play astonished,” he says, addressing his God, when you discover me among the comedians. [...] when you find me as a juggler, it is because it is you who has forced me to howl in a strange voice, and it is on your behalf that I will commit my iniquity. I am less afraid of being denied by you than of denying what I have to do. The rescue of my neighbor is closer to my heart than the self-righteous assurance of my obedience. The truth in make-up is better than modest secrecy. The shouted truth [is] truer than the truth that does not arrive. Desperate sacrilege is more virtuous than virtue that never despairs.477 And so the new Noah of Anders’ retelling dresses himself up in the garb of mourning, covers his face with ashes in an outfit otherwise reserved only for those who have lost a son or a favored woman. Noah then goes to the street and from all directions the townspeople start to surround him, looking out their window, standing on their balconies, everyone wanting to have the best view of the man in mourning. When they ask who it is he is mourning for, Noah answers that he has lost a great many. Where, when and how did it happen, they ask him. And when Noah answers “It happened tomorrow”, everyone starts to laugh.478 But soon thereafter they turn silent as Noah straightens himself up for only then can they see his ashen face and realize that “he looked like one who stood up from the grave”.479 The Noah the townspeople have in front of them now makes a motion, in answer to their questions, to indicate all those who will have disappeared the day after following years. See Anders, “Die beweinte Zukunft” in Die Schrift an der Wand. Tagebücher 1941 bis 1966, München C.H. Beck 1967, 26-63. 477 Anders, “Die beweinte Zukunft”, 2. 478 ibid., 6. 479 ibid., 3. 106 tomorrow.480 And then Noah startles them even further by announcing that “everything that was before the flood will be something that never was” because “when the flood comes tomorrow, it will be too late to remember and too late to mourn”.481 “And [...] there will be no one left who will remember us and no one who will mourn us”, Noah continues, for he alone knows that nothing would cause his neighbors greater fright than a death without “Kaddish” because “only this death meant real death to them”.482 And thus Noah announces: “Reverse time [...] anticipate the pain today, shed tears in advance!” and thereby commits the sacrilege of intoning a prayer for the dead for those who were still living. 483 And at the time there is no one who can stop Noah from his sacrilege by interrupting his prayer because to do so would be even more sacrilegious. And so once Noah’s Kaddish ends, what was thereby brought to an end can no longer be reversed. And those surrounding Noah no longer know on what plane of time they went astray, “in that of the day before yesterday or that of the day after tomorrow”.484 In this way, they no longer know whether they find themselves before the flood or after, whether they should any longer count themselves among the living or the dead. Instead, they find themselves in a state of shock in which time has suddenly come to a halt since the saying of the Kaddish announced the end of time, a state in which they cease to exist in the future, and, as a result, they finally come to feel a catastrophe so vast and miserable because there would soon come a time when no one would any longer exist to remember or mourn them. But then it is Noah who ultimately rescues them, uttering the words: “There is still time” and “It is today”.485 At the end of Noah’s performance, his neighbors begin to then knock on his door because they now all want to build an ark so that his Kaddish would become false.486 Before ending this rewriting of the Noah story, however, Anders first adds that it is we who are Noah’s great-grandchildren, and that it is we who would have no world to admire “if Noah hadn’t had the courage to wrangle, to play comedy, to present himself in 480 By pointing to all of his neighbors who will have disappeared in the flood, Noah makes a motion similar to that of André Malraux at a Paris-based mass meeting in 1936 Anders will later recall Die Toten from 1964. Malraux, at that time made desperate by the blindness of those who did not want to believe that Hitler meant war, is said by Anders to have then pointed his finger at every tenth person at the gathering and yelled: “Mort” – dead. See Anders, “Die Toten. Rede über die drei Weltkriege. 1964“ in Hiroshima ist überall, Munich: C.H. Beck 1982, 392-393. 481 ibid., 7. 482 ibid., 8. 483 ibid., 8. 484 ibid., 9. 485 ibid., 9. 486 ibid., 10. 107 sack and ash, to reverse time, to shed tears in advance and to speak the prayer for the dead for the living and the ones not yet born”.487 What distinguishes this Noah from the Noah of the Japan Diary is that he does not only warn his neighbors about the coming flood but instead shocks them into insight by reversing their time-sense and forcing them to imagine a future in which they will no longer exist. And how exactly does he create this time-shock? By mourning the living of today and the dead of tomorrow, Noah treats the future disaster as though its cause could be located in a present still open to change, and thus becomes a historian of the future who knows that mere words will not suffice. Through his sacrilegious stage play, Noah shocks his neighbors out of time in the sense that they must now occupy two otherwise opposed moments in time. One moment might be said to represent the time before the flood – 100 seconds to midnight in the language of the atomic scientists setting the Doomsday Clock – while the other moment is the time after the flood, that moment 100 seconds after the worst has already taken place. It is as though this second Noah speaks back through time to the Noah of the Japan Diary, and now wishes to communicate to him the fact that if his neighbors are indeed so stubborn in their refusal to recognize the situation, then their insistence upon doing nothing will ultimately mean that they might as well begin the process of mourning the death of themselves. In this way, the second Noah succeeds where the first had failed, and what was earlier only an imaginary, abstract threat has now become for them concrete. The story thus comes to demonstrate what was for Anders a necessary way of confronting the prevailing discrepancy between lived experience and the nuclear threat: to widen the imagination, in order to induce a far more exacting imagination so as to impress upon the mind what is otherwise only known abstractly.488 What is essential here, then, is that Noah now calls his neighbors out of their time-shock by reminding them that the future foreseen has as its condition a present whose disinterest will prepare that future if they do not act otherwise and prevent it by taking necessary action. By speaking from a position after the flood, Noah means to thereby demonstrate that the only past that can be revoked is the past belonging to the future. Noah thereby commits another sacrilege by compelling his neighbors to commit the sacrilege of 487 ibid., 10. On the imperative to “widen the imagination”, see Anders, Die Antiquiertheit des Menschen I. Über die Seele im Zeitalter der zweiten industriellen Revolution, 301-306 and Anders, “Rückblendung 1944-1949”, 39-40. As an additional corrective to this discrepancy, Anders encouraged the development of a “prognostic cognition” (the kind of imagination that envisions the future as already belonging to the present) to be the form of perception necessary today. 488 108 invalidating the Kaddish by changing the future it was said to mourn. The goal Anders wished to achieve is thus implicit in the Noah story: to undo the future, to buy humanity time and to extend the reprieve through action commensurate with the threat posed. In this way, Anders counted himself among the “prophylactic apocalyptics” inasmuch as he would prophesize doom, as Noah did, only so that the prophecy would never be realized but would instead be made false.489 As a result, the task of such apocalypticism is to find ways of warning capable of communicating those threats inbuilt to the present so that commensurate action might be taken and the worst effects promised thereby undone. By calling the readers of his parable the grandchildren of Noah, Anders assigns to them the perspective of those who have only survived thanks to a “prophylactic apocalyptic” made so desperate by the truth of the situation that he turned himself into a fool, adopted semblance and sacrilege so that he might induce people to act against their own destruction, and who thus owed their lives to warnings crafted by what one might call a “pessimism of the imagination”. One might say that the second Noah story points to what Anders hoped a more expansive kind of philosophical and literary production might achieve: that is, to find the language for the recreation of a world that could then be cognized in a manner different from how it is in everyday experience, where the discrepancy between history, abstract threat and experience otherwise prevails. Inasmuch as Noah’s words and actions mean to impress upon his neighbors the fact that the disastrous future has already happened at the same time as that very same future is only a single version of a past that can after all be changed, the story’s creation of a different time-sense of threat and response seems to align itself with Anders’ wish for language to achieve: to widen the readers’ imagination. 4.4 Self-Critique Toward the end of his life, however, Anders became increasingly more skeptical about this possibility. In “Sprache und Endzeit” [“Language and Endtime”] from 1989, for instance, Anders appears to have become appreciably more ambivalent about language’s ability to communicate the enormity of the effects mankind is now able to bring about in the nuclear age. While he argues there that if we fail to express this enormity through 489 Anders, “Die Frist”, 179. 109 language, “we could be lost”, he continues in the next line with the additional qualification, that “because we fail to do this [to express the enormity through language], we are lost”.490 In a certain sense, however, this skepticism can already be seen two years earlier, in a 1987 reading in which Anders read from his second Noah story. Here Anders’ language skepticism might be seen as an implicit critique of his own work as well. During that reading that took place in the wake of the nuclear disaster at Chernobyl, Anders provides a few short remarks before beginning to read out his story. The story’s title, “The Lamented Future”, he says, might have once struck people as odd but today, he continues, in 1987, it is now appreciably less strange that everybody recognizes just how mortal the coming generations will be. “Today the title is no longer striking. Unfortunately no longer striking”, Anders sighs.491 What Anders seems to imply here is that this story, written more than a quarter-century earlier at this point, has since then lost its capability to shock, now that the idea of existential threats that would endanger future generations has become all too familiar. In such a situation, the idea of mourning the future no longer seems quite so strange. However, one must also recognize that greater familiarity with this idea has not produced sufficient responses. Seen from this perspective, Anders’ late commentary on his second Noah story might now be regarded as a form of self-critique inasmuch as he now appears critical of how that story still imagined that a particular way of staging the future would result in the building of the ark, and a transformation of consciousness that would then result in the action absolutely necessary. For Anders, however, the last several decades have shown that this is not necessarily the case. And now, in 2022, we can witness a similar phenomenon. For while there are today hundreds of books and documentaries on the capitalist exploitation of nature, animals and people, each of which is at all times dedicated to envisioning the catastrophic future humanity is now preparing, none of this really affects that larger economic system of violence that is that future’s guarantee. At best, such visions of the disastrous future appear to affect one’s eating habits, plastic consumption, participation in demonstrations, or lead to new forms of selfbranding. And while these efforts are by no means to be simply cast aside, one has to also recognize that the synchronization of imagination and action Anders hoped for failed as well. To imagine a catastrophic future does not, in other words, necessarily lead people to action commensurate with the gravity of the threat as Anders once hoped. And so then one 490 Anders as cited in Konrad Paul Liessmann, “In der Schusslinie. Günther Anders und die Sprache der Philosophie” in Ganz Anders? Philosophie zwischen akademischen Jargon und Alltagsprache, edited by Rüdiger Zill, Parerga: 2007, 143. 491 Günther Anders, “Günther Anders – DIE BEWEINTE ZUKUNFT” (1987), uploaded by Medienwerkstatt in 2012, accessed 30 September 2021, URL: https://vimeo.com/37359723. 110 might have to ask whether the discrepancy between that which is produced and that which can be imagined, which Anders described in Die Antiquiertheit des Menschen, is any longer the primary discrepancy today or if, instead, that first discrepancy is not now joined by another, namely, one which is based on the fact that one cannot imagine taking commensurate action or simply does not act on the basis of what one is capable of knowing and imagining.492 In this sense, one would have to conclude that that greater realignment of the faculties of action and imagination did not in fact bring about the kind of action Anders once hoped for. In another sense, however, one might also say that it is perhaps impossible for such a realignment to take place before the actual onset of the disastrous event. At the same time, one might say that even real disasters had not shown themselves capable of widening the imagination or field of action due to the speed by which they are forgotten, which Anders had witnessed in the time following the Chernobyl disaster. And Anders himself then drew the consequences from this demonstrated ineffectuality of speech warnings, as well as those disastrous events that had not resulted in adequate action. In the same year that he delivered his reading of the second Noah story, Anders also gave a controversial interview in which he began to reconsider the use of political militancy and violence.493 There, Anders criticized the peace movement and their pacifist methods for not achieving enough. He argued that violence should be considered as a legitimate and necessary means for self-defense against technological structures that promise annihilation via nuclear weapons.494 It seemed to him necessary for movements to at least consider threatening those politicians who were themselves threatening everyone else via their control of nuclear weapons.495 In Anders’ critique of pacifist actions, he 492 In his recent book, Andreas Malm points to the discrepancy between being able to imagine the destruction of the world and acting upon what one is capable of imagining. “The climate crisis unfolds through a series of interlocked absurdities ingrained in it”, Malm writes, “not only is it easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism, or the deliberate, large-scale intervention in the climate system – what we refer to as geoengineering – than in the economic system; it is also easier, at least for some, to imagine learning to die than learning to fight, to reconcile oneself to the end of everything one holds dear than to consider some militant resistance”. See Andreas Malm: How to Blow Up A Pipeline. Learning to Fight in a World on Fire. New York: Verso 2021, 142-143. 493 This interview and a few short texts on the problems of pacifism were published together with responses from authors, journalists and readers in Anders, Gewalt – Ja oder Nein. Eine notwendige Diskussion, edited by Manfred Bissinger, Munich: Knaur 1987. 494 “Violence must never be our goal”, said Anders “But that violence – if non-violence is to be enforced with its help and can only be enforced with its help – must be our method, that probably cannot be not denied”. See Anders, Gewalt – Ja oder Nein. Eine notwendige Diskussion, 25. 495 ibid., 24. 111 charged those carrying out these actions with being people proud of transgressing theory, but as also remaining at the level of mere “actors” playing theatre, people afraid of true action and only capable of “creating a shock but not a shot [Schuß]”.496 And here one might hear such critiques as being not only directed at the peace movement but also at Noah, the prophylactic apocalyptic, since he too could only shock people with his performance, but in a way that does not ensure that this shock would be followed by necessary action. In this sense, one might say that Anders’ endorsement of violence appears to constitute a turn away from his earlier concern with forcing people to “wake up” and is instead now a call to actions he held commensurate with the threat. The Chernobyl disaster appears to have changed Anders’ conception of action’s relation to both threats and the time of threats since he was afterwards focused less on disastrous futures inbuilt to the present and instead began to conceive of this disastrous future as one that had already begun. 4.5 The Doomsday Clock, the Prophylactic Apocalyptic and Threats Today Doubtless one could argue that for Anders humanity has not only entered into a catastrophic future in the wake of Chernobyl but had done so already with the invention of the bomb that had for him transformed every place on earth into a potential Hiroshima.497 And as long as the nuclear free world would not be brought about, the threat posed by nuclear weapons had for Anders always remained constant and equally great despite all achievements of the anti-nuclear movement. If one recalls the image of the 2022 doomsday clock created by the Bulletin of the Atomic Sciences, for Anders that meant that it would not have mattered if the clock read 100 seconds to midnight as it does today or would read 200 seconds to midnight in the next years due to potential decisions to slow the modernization of arms. For Anders the nuclear threat always remained equally great as long as nuclear technologies could bring about humanity’s end. With regard to the threat today posed by climate change, however, one might say that the time that the doomsday clock displays does not relate to a stable and constant threat but one that instead only becomes all the more severe the more time passes in which nothing is done against it. The less that is done today to mitigate climate change, the sooner future generations will be 496 497 ibid., 24. See Anders, “Thesen zum Atomzeitalter”, 93. 112 sent into “midnight”. In this sense our current actions occupy two spaces in time simultaneously as these present actions already reach the future. While the outlet of emissions from the past equally determines our current climate, we now know that our emissions have a much stronger effect on the future’s climate than the past had on us. In this sense, the time displayed on today’s doomsday clock, 100 seconds to midnight, directly relates to the doomsday clock of the future. The closer our generation moves towards midnight, the closer we send future generations to doom. And each moment in which necessary action does not happen thus prepares a worse future and each passing moment in which business as usual continues weighs upon heavier on the future and has a greater effect than the preceding moment. To this phenomenon of compounding time the climate movement responds in various ways. The American urbanist Mike Davis, for instance, has argued that what is necessary today is to refute the fatalistic approach towards climate change that would appear reasonable to the intellect given the dire state of things. What’s instead necessary, according to Davis, is to show solidarity with the countries of the global South that will be most immediately affected by climate change. Davis thus argues for what he calls an “optimism of the imagination”, whose consequence would be the building of an ark from “insurgent communities, pirate technologies, bootlegged media, rebel science and forgotten utopias” through which it should become possible to imagine sustainable urban design for the entire planet, and not only for privileged countries.498 What is essential for Davis is that thought does not recoil before the necessity of imagining social change and that people become willing to fight for that change no matter how “unrealistic” its likely realization would seem from a fatalistic perspective. Another response to the increasing threat of climate change can be found today in the global environmental movement Extinction Rebellion (XR) which aims to communicate the urgency of the situation via nonviolent civil disobedience, e.g. via occupations within cities that should then draw the attention of the wider populace. XR’s nonviolent tactics, however, and its claim to continue the nonviolent tradition of the suffragettes and civil rights movement, were recently criticized by Andreas Malm who demonstrates how the successes of those older 498 See Mike Davis “Who will build the Ark?” in New Left Review, Issue 61, January/February 2010, 30. Davis’ opposition of an “optimism of the imagination” and a “pessimism of intellect” can be seen as a reference to Antonio Gramsci’s motto “pessimism of the intelligence, optimism of the will” which Gramsci adopted from Romain Roland. See Joseph A. Buttigieg, “Introduction” in Antionio Gramsci, Prison Notebooks Volume 1, edited with introduction by Joseph A. Buttigieg, translated by Joseph A. Buttigieg and Antonia Callari, New York: Columbia University Press 1992, 12. 113 movements owed much to forms of militancy that always complemented more nonviolent strategies. Malm’s response to both those in power not doing enough against climate change, as well as the strategies of the climate movement not achieving enough, is to argue that it is perhaps time that the climate movement consider the use of more militant tactics and to also break the taboo against property destruction. The success of such tactics could already be noticed a few years ago, according to Malm, when an activist group slashed the tires of SUVs in rich Swedish neighborhoods, thereby decreasing the number of SUVs subsequently sold.499 According to Malm, militant action would need to today occur in the immediate aftermath of climate disasters and also be clearly explained.500 At this point, one might return to Anders and ask what the figure of Noah might do today, and how the prophylactic apocalyptic might respond to the increasing threat posed by climate change? As a first response, one might consider contrasting Anders’ Noah and his performance of a “pessimism of the imagination” to Davis’ advocacy of an “optimism of the imagination” – in which case Noah might appear under the guise of those activists who today outfit themselves in the costume of the Grim Reaper in their environmental protests. But here one should mark a fundamental distinction. For such contemporary protest actions are at once entirely legal, produce little to no discernable shock and do not commit the same kind of sacrilege Noah did by invoking the Kaddish for those not yet dead. And so the question remains: What would be the contemporary corollary of Noah’s sacrilege in the contemporary world? And would not the sin Noah committed against contemporary mores be today identical with the violation of public property, as Malm suggests? In this sense, Anders’ Noah would perhaps seek to follow Malm’s recommendation of property destruction as a necessary way of warning to prevent the worst. Such a warning would, like Noah’s invocation of Kaddish, today transgress the realm of semblance and stage plays as the warning image itself becomes real. Spurred by a just sense of desperation, such actions might break the spell of pious worship and acceptance of that accumulation of property that contributes to the climate catastrophe. What such a contemporary prophylactic apocalyptic would above all intend would be to find the form of warning appropriate today, to find the taboos that would need to be broken, to aim at a way of changing people’s time-sense of those current threats that remain abstract even when they 499 500 Malm, How to Blow Up A Pipeline. Learning to Fight in a World on Fire, 82-84. ibid., 119-120. 114 are today both well-known and everywhere imagined. Certainly such a task has not lost its urgency today. 115 Conclusion According to Benjamin, the angel of history’s face is turned towards the past. Benjamin writes: Where we perceive a chain of events, he sees one single catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage upon wreckage and hurls it in front of his feet. The angel would like to stay, awaken the dead, and make whole what has been smashed. But a storm is blowing from Paradise; it has got caught in his wings with such violence that the angel can no longer close them. This storm irresistibly propels him into the future to which his back is turned, while the pile of debris before him grows skyward. This storm is what we call progress.501 Similar to the angel’s wish, Anders’ wish was to undo the past, to reverse time and to prevent suffering and ruin. It is a wish that Anders never gave up upon. However, he lived with the knowledge that the only past open to change is the past lying await in the future. Thus his writing became dedicated to warning and to devising a new way of seeing, namely to seeing the future in the present and becoming a “forward looking historian” in order to make the future prophesized undone. 502 Although it appears counterintuitive given the insistency of his apocalyptic dictum, the wish underlying Anders’ efforts was to be mistaken. He held the task of warning to be necessary in a world in which humanity’s time consciousness does not amount to the image of Benjamin’s angel of history. According to Anders, today’s humanity has its eyes shut during the storm or at best fixated solely upon the present moment. 503 History has become transformed into a “continual history of forgetting of the respective now”, an “unobserved succession”. 504 And against such a time consciousness that perpetuates apocalyptic blindness in a time in which humanity is confronted with its possible end, Anders sought to find forms of writing that could burst open that very succession. In this thesis, we have dealt with various attempts. Like Benjamin’s figure of the historical materialist, one could say that Anders, in his Vienna Diary, was not interested in devising an “‘eternal’ image of the 501 Walter Benjamin, “Theses on the Philosophy of History” in Illuminations, translated by Harry Zohn, edited by Hannah Arendt, New York: Schocken 1969, 257-258. 502 Anders, Die Antiquiertheit des Menschen 2. Über die Zerstörung des Lebens im Zeitalter der dritten industriellen Revolution, 480. 503 ibid., 331. 504 ibid., 332. 116 past” but creating “an unique experience with the past”.505 The Vienna Diary, although dealing with postwar Viennese society, analyzes those prevalent discrepancies between history and experience that are not only characteristic of the postwar Viennese society but also point beyond the analysis of a specific time period to the maxims of the epoch, to people’s inexperience of apocalyptic events more generally. Anders’ collection of diaries, which contained the Vienna Diary, was published in 1967, in the midst of the Cold War and in a year in which the United States conducted 38 nuclear tests, the Soviet Union conducted 17. In this sense, one could say that Anders’ diaries were published under another one of Benjamin’s historical materialist’s dictums: “[t]o articulate the past historically does not mean to recognize it ‘the way it really was’ (Ranke). It means to seize hold of a memory as it flashes up at a moment of danger”. 506 If one assumes the hypothesis that Anders’ experience of returning to Europe in 1950 had been a paradigmatic experience for his later apocalyptic anti-nuclear writing because it made him realize how quickly past catastrophes are forgotten and how quickly cities can come to strike one as though nothing had ever happened, one could suspect that Anders had likely later hoped that his diaries would elicit a response in the reader that would be a form of recognition of those versatile discrepancies between history and experience structuring the contemporary reader’s own life. The thesis intended to illustrate Anders’ attempt as well as his struggle with creating a form of writing that could warn against the future. The diary form was an important tool for Anders in order to register both a personal as well as a societal history of responses to past catastrophes and the prevalent threats of the contemporary world, which could finally translate into a collection of warning images. The discussion of the Japan Diary, which illustrates the discrepancies between concepts and phenomena, attempted to demonstrate how Anders arrives at the thesis that one can only properly see today with one’s eyes closed. With closed eyes, one ought not to resemble a contemporary humanity whose eyes simply remain shut during the storm. Instead, one ought to imagine the piling wreckage when the appearance of the present world is not able to guarantee a form of visual survival of the past that could impress itself upon the onlooker and thereby fails to burst open the history of forgetting everyone plays a part in. In our analysis of Anders’ Noah story, we discussed the difficulty of warning about existential threats as well as the time consciousness Anders there attempts to elicit. Already in the first volume of Die Antiquiertheit des Menschen, he argues for the expansion of the horizon by which we typically measure the present and our actions. In 505 506 Benjamin, “Theses on the Philosophy of History”, 262. ibid., 255. 117 light of the ruin promised by both the possibility of nuclear war and the certainty of climate change catastrophes, what Anders formulated sixty-six years ago, only continues to take on renewed relevance and urgency: Since the effects of what we do today remain, we therefore already reach this future today; by which it is said that it is already present in a pragmatic sense. [...] That with it a quite unusual relation to time is postulated is undeniable. For the future is no longer to lie “before us”, but is captured by us, “with us”, present to us. 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I am indebted to Gerhard Oberschlick, for permitting me to cite from the Günther Anders Nachlass and Andrea Hipfinger for her help at the Literary Archive of the Austrian National Library. My appreciation also goes to Kurt Appel, Arno Böhler and Arno Dusini whose thoughts left important impressions with me during my engagement with philosophy and literature. My special thanks go to Paul Makin for proofreading this thesis and Peter Schneider for his helpful suggestions. Finally, I want to express my gratitude to my mother, Anita Walker, and my grandmother, Maria Aron, for always providing me with unfailing support. I also want to thank my father, Christopher Walker, who shaped this thesis even when he will never be able to read it. Last but not least, I want to express my deepest gratitude to Melissa Augustin, Theresa Gillinger, Georg Harfensteller, Elodie Ritter and Michael Zangerl for being there, for their direct and indirect help and their continuous encouragement. I am very fortunate to have you in my life. 130 Abstract English In light of the nuclear threat and the catastrophic effects of human-induced climate change, Günther Anders’ mid-20th century analysis of humanity’s “apocalyptic blindness” takes on renewed resonance. This thesis deals with Anders’ postwar Vienna Diary “Wiedersehen und Vergessen” from 1950 in order to examine the way in which he illustrates prevalent discrepancies between history and experience structuring life in postwar Viennese society. In order to demonstrate how the Vienna diary might be seen as a “propaedeutic” for Anders’ later apocalyptic writings against the atomic bomb, the thesis discusses Anders’ conception of his diaries as collections of “warning images”. Anders’ later apocalypticism takes the form of what he calls a “prophylactic apocalypticism” that anticipates the future dead, laments their end in the present, and is written in such a way as to be proven wrong so that the goal achieved would be identical with the prophecy ultimately becoming false. To refine our understanding of this peculiar form of doom saying and to discuss Anders’ writing explicitly dedicated to warning, the thesis pays attention to Anders’ Japan Diary from 1958 (“Der Mann auf der Brücke”) and the story of Noah that Anders remakes for the contemporary world (“Die beweinte Zukunft”). It will be shown how he attempts to change the reader’s time sense of catastrophe and intervene within a present that is, according to him, characterized by an overwhelming blindness towards the past and the future. The thesis illustrates the way in which Anders continually sought to find forms of experimental writing in order to achieve more adequate responses to the threats of the present. German Angesichts der nuklearen Bedrohung und der katastrophalen Auswirkungen des menschengemachten Klimawandels gewinnen Günther Anders’ Thesen aus der Mitte des 20. Jahrhunderts über die “Apokalypse-Blindheit” der Menschheit an erneuter Bedeutung. Die vorliegende Arbeit beschäftigt sich mit Anders’ Wiener Nachkriegstagebuch “Wiedersehen und Vergessen” von 1950. Es wird dargelegt, wie Anders darin die vorherrschenden Diskrepanzen zwischen Geschichte und Erfahrung veranschaulicht, die 131 den Alltag der Wiener Nachkriegsgesellschaft prägten. In der Arbeit wird Anders’ Konzeption seiner Tagebücher als Sammlungen von “Warnbildern” diskutiert, um zu zeigen, wie das Wien-Tagebuch als “Propädeutik” für Anders’ spätere apokalyptische Schriften gegen die Atombombe gesehen werden kann. Anders’ Apokalyptik nimmt die Form einer “prophylaktischen Apokalyptik” an, die die zukünftigen Toten vorwegnimmt und ihr Ende in der Gegenwart betrauert. Diese Apokalyptik ist so geschrieben, dass sie sich als falsch erweisen soll und das erreichte Ziel identisch mit der letztlich falsch gewordenen Prophezeiung wäre. Um unser Verständnis dieser besonderen Form der Untergangsprophezeiung zu präzisieren und sich mit Anders’ explizit der Warnung gewidmeten Schriften auseinanderzusetzen, widmet sich diese Arbeit Anders’ JapanTagebuch von 1958 (“Der Mann auf der Brücke”) und der Geschichte von Noah, die Anders für die gegenwärtige Welt umschreibt (“Die beweinte Zukunft”). Es wird gezeigt, wie er versucht, das Zeitgefühl der Leser:innen für die Katastrophe zu verändern und in eine Gegenwart einzugreifen, die ihm zufolge durch eine überwältigende Blindheit gegenüber der Vergangenheit und der Zukunft gekennzeichnet ist. Die Arbeit veranschaulicht, wie Anders immer wieder nach Formen des experimentellen Schreibens suchte, um angemessener auf die Bedrohungen der Gegenwart zu antworten. 132