2 Sustained scholarly interest in Anders only began in the late 1980s. For the most important general studies on Anders in German, see Micha Brumlik, “Günther Anders: Zur Existenzialontologie der Emigration,” in Zivilisationsbruch: Denken nach Auschwitz, ed. Dan Diner (Frankfurt am Main: Fischer, 1988); Jürgen Langenbach, Günther Anders: Eine Monographie (Munich: Raben, 1988); Gabriele Althaus, Leben zwischen Sein und Nichts: Drei Studien zu Günther Anders (Berlin: Metropol, 1989); Eckhard Wittulski, Kein Ort, Nirgends: Zur Gesellschaftskritik Günther Anders’ (Frankfurt am Main: Herchen, 1989); Werner Reimann, Verweigerte Versöhnung: Zur Philosophie von Günther Anders (Vienna: Passagen, 1990); Elke Schubert, Günther Anders: Mit Selbstzeugnissen und Bilddokumenten (Reinbek bei Hamburg: Rowohlt, 1992); Ludger Lütkehaus, Philosophieren nach Hiroshima: Über Günther Anders (Frankfurt am Main: Fischer, 1992); Konrad Paul Liessmann, ed., Günther Anders kontrovers (Munich: Verlag C. H. Beck, 1992); Margret Lohmann, Philosophieren in der Endzeit: Zur Gegenwartsanalyse von Günther Anders (Munich: Fink, 1996); Konrad Paul Liessmann, Günther Anders: Philosophieren im Zeitalter der technologischen Revolutionen (Munich: Verlag C. H. Beck, 2002); Christian Dries, Günther Anders (Paderborn: Wilhelm Fink, 2009); Raimund Bahr, Günther Anders: Leben und Denken im Wort (Vienna: Edition Art & Science, 2010). The only monograph on Anders in English is Paul van Dijk, Anthropology in the Age of Technology: The Philosophical Contribution of Günther Anders, trans. Frans Kooymans (Atlanta: Rodopi, 2000).
3 For some prominent examples, see Holger Nehring, “Cold War, Apocalypse and Peaceful Atoms: Interpretations of Nuclear Energy in the British and West German Anti-Nuclear Weapons Movements, 1955-1964,” Historical Social Research 29, no. 3 (2004): 150-70; Benjamin Ziemann, Introduction, in Ziemann, ed., Peace Movements in Western Europe, Japan and the USA during the Cold War (Essen: Klartext, 2007); idem, “The Code of Protest: Images of Peace in the West German Peace Movements, 1945-1990,” Contemporary European History 17, no. 2 (2008): 237-61.
4 The central text I analyze is: “Wiedersehen und Vergessen,” first published in its entirety in Die Schrift an der Wand: Tagebücher 1941 bis 1966 (Munich: Verlag C. H. Beck, 1967), and also available in Tagebücher und Gedichte (Munich: Verlag C. H. Beck, 1985), hereafter TG. In this piece, I have used the latter and supplemented it with materials from Anders’ Nachlass.
5 Die Antiquiertheit des Menschen, Volume 1: Über die Seele im Zeitalter der zweiten industriellen Revolution (Munich: Verlag C. H. Beck, 1956). The second volume was not published until almost a quarter-century later: Die Antiquiertheit des Menschen, Volume 2: Über die Zerstörung des Lebens im Zeitalter der dritten industriellen Revolution (Munich: Verlag C. H. Beck, 1980).
6 My own conception of post-fascism owes a great deal to the work of Theodor W. Adorno, especially his “The Meaning of Working Through the Past” (1959), and “Education After Auschwitz” (1965), both in Critical Models: Interventions and Catchwords, trans. Henry Pickford (New York: Columbia University Press, 1998). The full import of these two extraordinary pieces has not yet been absorbed by European historians. Also helpful for the framing of this chapter were the two excellent essays by Roger Griffin, “Europe for the Europeans: Fascist Myths of the European New Order 1922-1992” and “Fascism’s New Faces (and New Facelessness) in the ‘Post-Fascist’ Epoch” in his A Fascist Century: Essays by Roger Griffin, ed. Matthew Feldman (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008).
7 For some works addressing the victim myth, see Günter Bischof, “Victims? Perpetrators? Punching Bags of European Historical Memory? The Austrians and Their World War II Legacies,” German Studies Review 27, no. 1 (February 2004): 17-32; Peter Utgaard, Remembering and Forgetting Nazism: Education, National Identity and the Victim Myth in Postwar Austria (New York: Berghahn, 2003); Hella Pick, Guilty Victim: Austria from the Holocaust to Haider (London: I. B. Tauris Publishers, 2000); Meinrad Ziegler and Waltraud Kannonier-Finster, Österreichs Gedächtnis: Über Erinnern und Vergessen der NS-Vergangenheit (Vienna: Böhlau Verlag, 1993); Günther Bischof, “Die Instrumentalisierung der Moskauer Erklärung nach dem 2. Weltkrieg,” Zeitgeschichte 20, no. 11/12 (1993): 345-66.
8 The most detailed biographical treatment of Anders is Bahr, Günther Anders . See also Liessmann, Günther Anders, 14-29, as well as Paul Van Dijk, Anthropology in the Age of Technology, Ch. 2.
9 Elisabeth Freundlich, The Traveling Years, trans. Elizabeth Pennebaker (Riverside, California: Ariadne Press, 1999), 97.
10 See ibid., 98.
11 Elisabeth Young-Bruehl, Hannah Arendt: For Love of the World, 2nd Edition (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2004), 250. A sign of Anders’continuing good relations with Hannah Arendt, the lectureship was taken over by Arendt’s second husband, Heinrich Blücher.
12 TG, 95-106. Among the many sights that moved Anders so much upon his trip to Paris was a stop at the shop where he had last spoken to Walter Benjamin in 1936. For this, see ibid., 100. Freundlich indicated that their journey to Vienna also included stops in Frankfurt and Munich. Freundlich’s parents did not return to Vienna, however. Instead, they took up in residence in Zurich. Freundlich, Traveling Years, 98.
13 TG, 107.
14 Ibid., 108.
15 Margret Lohmann, Philosophieren in der Endzeit, 14.
16 Günther Anders to Karl Löwith, January 26, 1952, Österreichisches Literaturarchiv der Österreichischen Nationalbibliothek, Vienna, Nachlass Günther Anders 237/04, hereafter ÖLA-ÖNB, NGA 237/04. The original German is far better —“in der Stadt der Philosophie-, verlags-und Zeitschriftenlosigkeit.”
17 Günther Anders to Helmut Plessner, April 16, 1953, ÖLA-ÖNB, NGA 237/04..
18 Kafka — Pro und Contra: Die Prozess-Unterlagen (Munich: Verlag C. H. Beck, 1951).
19 Anders discusses his decision to refuse this offer in his 13 Oct. 1990 interview with Konrad Paul Liessmann, contained in Liessmann, Günther Anders zur Einführung, 2nd Edition (Hamburg: Junius, 1993), 162.
20 See his 1979 interview with Mathias Greffrath, “Wenn ich verzweifelt bin, was geht’s mich an?,” in Günther Anders antwortet: Interviews & Erklärungen, ed. Elke Schubert (Berlin: Edition Tiamat, 1987), 41.
21 The troubled relationship between Anders and Vienna was already thematized by Ursula Pastwerk in her foreword to Liessmann, ed., Günther Anders kontrovers, 13-14.
22 Günther Anders to Herbert Marcuse, January 27, 1967, ÖLA-ÖNB, NGA 237/04.
23 In 1979, Anders was awarded the Austrian State Prize for Cultural Writing. Thanks largely to the efforts of Konrad Paul Liessmann, Dirk Röpcke, and Raimund Bahr, Vienna has become, in the last two decades, the focal point for critical discussion, inside and outside the academy, on Anders and his legacy.
24 A similar complaint was made recently by Raimund Bahr in his “Annäherungen an die Biographie: Günther Anders im Blick,” in Zugänge: Günther Anders: Leben und Werk, ed. Raimund Bahr (Vienna: Edition Art & Science, 2007), 81. Subsequently, Bahr analyzed this period of Anders’life in his Günther Anders, 231-51. Although my treatment of Anders here goes into much greater detail about his journals than does Bahr, his approach is comparable. He also provides a great deal of interesting biographical detail about Freundlich. For some earlier attempts to integrate Anders’writings on the topic, see Hans-Martin Lohmann, Geisterfahrer: Blanqui, Marx, Adorno & Co.: 22 Portraits der europäischen Linken (Hamburg: Sammlung Junius, 1989), 110-12; Schubert, Günther Anders, 60-68.
25 Unfortunately, I can only deal briefly here with Freundlich’s memoir. I plan to write a longer piece on her place in these Austrian debates in the future.
26 Her marriage to Anders disintegrated shortly thereafter. They separated and divorced in 1955. After their split, Freundlich continued to write fiction. She participated with Anders in the Symposium on Research on Austrian Exile Literature in June 1975, an event which earned them both long-overdue attention in Austria. They reconciled and Anders drew close to her again when his third marriage ended that same year. He praised her “very important book on the devastation of Stanislau,” a project on the eradication of a Jewish community in Galicia. This book, Die Ermordung einer Stadt namens Stanislau: NS-Vernichtungspolitik in Polen 1939-1945 (Vienna: Paul Zsolnay Verlag, 1986), prefigured the recent “regional turn” in Holocaust studies.
27 Günther Anders to Thomas Mann, 23 Sept. 1952, ÖLA-ÖNB, NGA 237/04.
28 TG, 160.
29 Ibid.
30 Ibid, 112-113.
31 Ibid, 113.
32 Ibid.
33 See, for example, “Der Emigrant,” Merkur 16, no. 7 (July 1962): 601-622. The essay is also reproduced in TG under the title, “Post festum,” 64-93.
34 TG, 114.
35 Ibid., 114-115.
36 Ibid., 115.
37 Ibid.
38 Ibid.
39 Ibid., 119.
40 Ibid., 126.
41 Ibid., 127. Italics in the original.
42 Ibid. Italics in the original. In Anders’ view, Vienna, in fact, could not, at the time, compare, culturally, to many small cities or states.
43 Ibid., 131.
44 Ibid., 168.
45 Ibid.
46 Ibid., 169.
47 Ibid. Italics in the original.
48 Ibid.
49 Ibid., 179.
50 Ibid.
51 Ibid.
52 Ibid., 146.
53 Ibid., 146-47.
54 Ibid., 187. Italics in the original.
55 Ibid. Italics in the original.
56 “After All, I Was Only Seventeen: A Story,” trans. Francis Golffing, Commentary XIV (September 1952): 254-58. The German original can be found in TG, 150-60. The English translation omits, for reasons I have not been able to ascertain, Anders’ brief commentary on L.’s story. It can be found on pp. 159-60 of TG and my explication of the story includes this commentary.
57 “After All, I Was Only Seventeen,” 254-55. Most likely, Huber meant the Battle of Tobruk that occurred in eastern Libya in April 1941, where British, Australian, Polish, and Czechoslovak troops successfully held Tobruk against what was, actually, a series of attacks by German and Italian forces.
58 Ibid., 254. The story relates how the dragging of the foot was the result of a wound Huber suffered at Tobruk.
59 Ibid., 255.
60 Ibid., 256.
61 Ibid., 255.
62 Ibid., 257.
63 Ibid., 258.
64 TG, 160.
65 In the last ten years, there has been massive public interest in Germany in the air war and the suffering of German civilians. Works by W. G. Sebald and Jörg Friedrich contributed to the renewed fascination with Allied bombing. For Sebald, see his Luftkrieg und Literatur (Frankfurt am Main: S. Fischer, 2001). Friedrich’s most important contribution to this discussion was Der Brand: Deutschland im Bombenkrieg 1940-1945 (Munich: Propyläen, 2002). These books have also meant that this subject is no longer solely the terrain of the German Right. See the analyses by Lothar Kettenacker, ed., Ein Volk von Opfern? Die neue Debatte über den Bombenkrieg, 1940-1945 (Berlin: Rowohlt, 2003); Mary Nolan, “Air Wars, Memory Wars,” Central European History 38, no. 1 (2005): 7-40; Gilad Margalit, Guilt, Memory, and Suffering: Germany Remembers its Dead of World War II, trans. Haim Watzman (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2010).
66 TG, 117.
67 Ibid., 116.
68 Ibid., 116-117. Italics added.
69 Ibid., 117.
70 Ibid. Italics in the original.
71 Ibid. Italics in the original.
72 Ibid., 135.
73 Ibid.
74 Ibid, 135-36.
75 Ibid., 136
76 Robert Moeller coined this phrase as an alternative to the notion of collective amnesia in his War Stories: The Search for a Usable Past in the Federal Republic of Germany (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001).
77 TG, 136. Italics in the original. Afraid of misunderstanding, Anders also assured his readers that the use of the psychoanalytic vocabulary of the “unconscious” in no way was intended to exonerate the young man.
78 Ibid.
79 Ibid., 186.
80 Ibid. Anders made clear in this entry that “inspection tours” were “her words.”
81 Anders corresponded extensively with Eatherly and regarded him as a representative figure of the era. Their correspondence is available as Burning Conscience: The Case of the Hiroshima Pilot, Claude Eatherly, Told in Letters to Günther Anders (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1962).
82 Günther Anders to Hannah Arendt, 20 Feb. 1956, Correspondence File, 1938-1976, Hannah Arendt Papers, Manuscript Division, Library of Congress, Washington, D. C..
83 This distinction in German is difficult to render in English —“1938 beraubte Juden erwähnt man mir wiederholt; geraubte Juden kaum je.” TG, 111.
84 Ibid., 107-108.
85 Ibid., 148.
86 Ibid.
87 Ibid., 147.
88 Ibid., 148.
89 Ibid., 149.
90 Ibid.
91 Ibid., 112. Italics in the original.
92 Ibid, 170.
93 Ibid.
94 Ibid.
95 Ibid., 172.
96 Ibid., 173.
97 Ibid. Italics in the original.
98 Ibid.
99 Ibid.
100 Ibid., 162.
101 Ibid.
102 Ibid. Italics in the original.
103 Ibid., 136.
104 Ibid., 162.
105 Ibid.
106 Ibid., 163.
107 Ibid.
108 Ibid.
109 Ibid. Italics in the original.
110 Ibid., 164.
111 Ibid., 116.
112 Ibid., 118.
113 Ibid.
114 Ibid., 193.
115 Ibid., 117-18.
116 Ibid., 118.
117 For one recent assessment of Grass, see Nicole Thesz, “Dangerous Monuments: Günter Grass and German Memory Culture,” German Studies Review 31, no. 1 (February 2008): 1-21.
118 Besides “After All, I Was Only Seventeen, “see also “Vom Vergeben, Vergessen, Schuld, Sühne,” Aufbau, no. 20, 29 April and 13 May 1960, 30; “Vor elf Jahren: Aus dem Tagebuch eines Rückwanderers,” Merkur 15, no 6 (June 1961): 597-600.
119 My use of the term “politics of the past” echoes the title of a crucial book by Norbert Frei on the West German case. See his Vergangenheitspolitik: Die Anfänge der Bundesrepublik und die NS-Vergangenheit (Munich: Verlag C. H. Beck, 1996).
120 The essay, “Nach ‘Holocaust’ 1979,” along with his journals from his visit to Auschwitz and a long recollection of his childhood home in Breslau, is contained in his Besuch im Hades (Munich: Verlag C. H. Beck, 1979).