Introduction

Günther Anders, the German-Jewish philosopher of the catastrophe called the 20th century, has yet to receive his due in the English-speaking world. Perhaps this is because of his excessively negative diagnosis of the human condition. His main work, The Obsolescence (or Antiquatedness) of Human Beings, spread over 2 volumes and thirty years, captures the state of mankind incapable of comprehending its own capacities for destruction. Anders studied with Heidegger, but his critique of technology is closer to Marcuse’s, for it is a social critique of the organization of technical means for inhuman purposes. But differently than Marcuse, Anders emphasized the phenomenological experience of mortal subjects facing their own products, and feeling profoundly ashamed in front of them. This shame emerged from a failure to live up to the immense power of the products man himself has created. This gap between production and imagination becomes dangerously amplified in the construction of the atom bomb, the development and use of which Anders spent the majority of his life contemplating, most notably in his books The Atomic Threat and Hiroshima is Everywhere. Anders, the cousin of Walter Benjamin and first husband of Hannah Arendt, lived in exile during the ‘30s and 40s, and wrote volumes of poetry about survival, death, suffering, and torture, as news of the Nazi extermination of the Jewish communities of Europe trickled in. His poetry struggled to express in language a horror that exceeded words, similar to his later philosophical attempt to grasp in thought a destructive capacity that exceeded imagination. After living in exile in the US, he returned to Europe in 1950, living in Vienna for 40 years as a pessimistic gadfly of the Viennese intelligentsia. Active in the nuclear disarmament movement, the Anti Vietnam War movement, and others, Anders continued to write on mankind’s self-incurred estrangement in the technical development of what Marx once called, in contrast to productive forces, “destructive forces.” Near the end of his life, in 1982, in the midst of the Israeli invasion of Lebanon, Anders sent the following letter to the “Jewish Community” of Vienna. Like Fredy Perlman, who also wrote a critical and personal text on the Lebanon War of 1982, Anders was repulsed by the atrocities committed by the Israeli Forces in Lebanon, atrocities defended by members of his own community. He could not sit idly by while his own Jewish community stayed silent, or, even worse, supported Menachem Begin’s fascist reign of terror. That is why he decided to write this open letter, as a Jew against any use of Jewish identity or history to justify such actions. As Adorno once noted, in a similar vein, “the logic of history is as destructive as the people it brings forth: wherever its momentum inclines, it reproduces the equivalent of past disasters.” Anders knew this logic too well, and would not play the role of silent bystander.

Letter to the Jewish Community of the City of Vienna

Dear Sirs, June 17, 1982

Please do not take this letter and the step communicated in it lightly. For I am not only the taxpayer Günther Stern mentioned in your lists, but also someone else. My friend Friedrich Heer, who recently held a laudatio for me, asked in the last Jüdische Echo: “Who of Vienna’s Jews knows him?” In short: I am Günther Anders, internationally known, winner of the Cultural Prize of the State of Austria and the City of Vienna (of which only you have never taken note), probably the most internationally renowned Austrian Jew, apart from the Chancellor and Mr. Wiesenthal. Furthermore, unlike the former, I am a very conscious Jew who wrote about the Auschwitz “topic” so early (40 years ago) and so continuously as very few others have (most recently in Visit to Hades, Munich 1979). In a text published by a protestant publishing house (My Judaism, Kreuzverlag) you will find the following sentence by me: “Nothing fills me with such shame as meeting a fellow Jew who is ashamed of his Jewishness.” And at a congress in Warsaw, I succeeded in getting Arabs to lay a wreath for the Jewish dead on the steps of the ghetto monument where I was speaking.

So when I explain to you that I have decided to leave the local community, you cannot explain this step with “Jewish self-hatred” (which I detest). My family lives in Israel, by the way, and consists exclusively of Israelis. And my visit to Jerusalem remains unforgettable to me. (…)

Jews with whom I feel a sense of belonging, and of whom I would be proud, if one could be proud of others, are figures like Isaiah, Maimonides, and Spinoza. But under no circumstances do I mean those with unrestrained disregard for all human dignity and all human rights. You know who I am talking about. If this man—I almost said, this poor fellow—has become the way he is now, it is probably because the barbaric treatment of his own people has helped to barbarize him. You see: I am not being unfair. Nonetheless, what [Menachem] Begin has now done - and likewise, heartbreakingly, the Israeli people (who obey him as blindly as the German people obeyed Hitler when he exterminated 6 million of us) - what Begin has now done is beyond anything that could be defended as “reprisal” or “self-defense”. Begin has indeed managed to make me, the self-hating hater, blush at the thought of belonging.

It is completely undignified and an inexcusable moral imposition when you—men and women of the Jewish community—defend the bloody infamy that took place there, no: even call on us, as you have just done, to verbally defend the slaughter everywhere. I am ashamed to belong to such a community. As a nearly eighty-year-old, I do not want to see my dignity deteriorate along with my physical strength. That is why I am giving up my membership!

Of course, this does not mean that I am leaving Judaism. That is impossible. Even a completely faithless Jew like me cannot do that. And even if one could, I would declare, in a variation of the notorious Lueger sentence: “I decide whether I am a Jew or not.”

(…) Shalom!

Günther Anders, Das Argument 136 (1982), 847

Introduction and translation by Jacob Blumenfeld