The Parochialism of Intellectual History: The Case of Günther Anders

Abstract

The name of Gu« nther Anders, who was one of the first philosophers to try to contend with the meaning of Being, ethics, and philosophy in the atomic age, was absent from Anglo-Saxon discourse during his own lifetime and has continued to be so since his death in1992. He frequently wrote about the Holocaust and Hiroshima, about evil, the Vietnam War, Heidegger and the effects of technology, and its inherent destructive potential. However, the bulk of his writings has not yet been translated into English, and the studies that focus on him in the United States pale by comparisonwith those on other thinkers of his time. The reason he was marginalized is not only a matter of style or circumstances but also of language, location, and historical contextçit is embedded in the text and content of his writings, which placed Auschwitz alongside Hiroshima and located signs of totalitarianism in theWest as well. The purpose of this study is twofold: to locate Anders alongside other German-Jewish thinkers of the twentieth century and to provide an answer to the question of why historians, philosophers, and many scholars in the humanities and the social sciences in the United States have ignored his existence for so long. Gu« nther [Anders] is blissfully £oating in nuclear death. ^Hannah Arendt In his 2007 bookBeyond theBorder:TheGerman-JewishLegacyAbroad, Steven Aschheim deals with the question ‘Why Do We Love (Hate) Theodor Adorno, Hannah Arendt, Walter Benjamin, Franz Rosenzweig, Gershom Scholem, and Leo Strauss?’He shows how these thinkers have become icons of Western civilization in recent years, in particular in the Anglo-Saxon world, and in his attempt to ¢nd a common denominator asks: ‘Why, for instance, do Scholem and Rosenzweig Hannah Arendt,Within FourWalls:The Correspondence between Hannah Arendt and Heinrich Blu« cher, 1936^ 1968, ed. by Lotte Kohler, transl. by Peter Constantine, NewYork 2000, p. 326. Leo Baeck InstituteYear Book Vol. 62, 225^241 doi:10.1093/leobaeck/ybw022 Advance Access publication12 January 2017 TheAuthor (2017). Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of The Leo Baeck Institute. All rights reserved. For permissions, please email: journals.permissions@oup.com Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/leobaeck/article-abstract/doi/10.1093/leobaeck/ybw022/2898333 by guest on 25 July 2018 presently attract more respectful attention than, say, Martin Buber? Why are Arendt and Strauss so much more ‘‘audible’’ than, say, Ernst Cassirer? Why, for that matter, do we hear far more today of Adorno and Benjamin than Ernst Bloch and even Herbert Marcuse?’ This question is not an exercise in name-dropping but a challenge to the work of historians, philosophers, and other researchers regarding their self-consciousness and decisions. Thus, the discussion of the selection of study subjects, the possible arbitrariness of such selection, and cultural trends make the almost complete absence of Gu« nther Anders from scholarly research in general and the study of intellectual history in particular even more conspicuous. ANDERS ANDALLTHE REST Gu« ntherAnders, Hannah Arendt’s ¢rst husband andWalter Benjamin’s cousin, who was one of the ¢rst philosophers to try to contend with the meaning of Being, ethics, and philosophy in the atomic age, was absent from Anglo-Saxon discourse during his own lifetime and has been absent from it since his death in 1992. He frequently wrote about the Holocaust and Hiroshima, about evil, theVietnamWar, Heidegger and the e¡ects of technology, and the destructive potential inherent in it. However, the bulk of his writings has not yet been translated into English, and the studies that focus on him in the United States pale by comparisonwith those on other thinkers of his time, including those discussed in Aschheim’s book. According to Aschheim, there are a number of features that link the philosophy and lives of Arendt, Strauss, Adorno, Scholem, and others by a common thread, as ‘ideal types’ of the Weimar experience who have attracted scholarly attention during recent decades, and especially since the beginning of the twenty-¢rst century.They were all GermanJews.They all became leading players in the myth of theWeimar Republic and symbols of the ‘golden age’ of German Jewry during the decades of that fragile democracy. Almost all of them were forced to cross borders and escape Germany following the rise of National Socialism, and were obliged to live under the impact of ‘the traumatic years of the 1930s’. As Anders writes: Steven E. Aschheim, Beyond the Border:The German-Jewish LegacyAbroad, Princeton 2007, p. 89. See also Martin Jay, Force Fields: Between Intellectual History and Cultural Critique, NewYork 1993, pp. 167^179. Harold Marcuse, the grandson of Herbert Marcuse, bears nearly sole responsibility for disseminating information about Anders in the U.S. For more than a decade, Marcuse has collected every research publication about Anders in English and in other languages. In the absence of a biography or diverse secondary literature in English, Marcuse’s webpage serves as a central resource for the study of Anders. See http://www.history.ucsb.edu/faculty/marcuse/anders.htm, accessed 2 August 2016. Walter Laqueur, ‘The Arendt Cult: Hannah Arendt as Political Commentator’, in Journal of Contemporary History, 33, no. 4 (October 1998), p. 490. See also: Michael Brenner,The Renaissance of Jewish Culture in Weimar Germany, New Haven 1996; Amos Elon, The Pity of It All: A Portrait of the German-Jewish Epoch, 1743^1933, NewYork 2002. 226 A. Armon Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/leobaeck/article-abstract/doi/10.1093/leobaeck/ybw022/2898333 by guest on 25 July 2018 We who are talking to you here are the ‘last ones’, that is theJews who once upon a time and rightfully so, called themselves ‘German Jews’and who lived with the Germans in symbiosisçthere is no better than this questionable term. Measured by worldhistorical standards, this period did not last especially long, hardly 100 years, much briefer than with other nations. But for our parents and grandparents, this symbiosisç something that you my readers probably did not imagineçwas something matter-offact, so self-evident, as though it had existed from primeval times. There was even a German-Jewish philosopher, the neo-Kantian Hermann Cohen, who was convinced that there was, as it were, a God given a⁄nity between the two cultures. And when my father emphasizedçhe always did it whenJewish problems were being discussedçthat he felt in¢nitely more German than Jewish, then he surely told the truth. It is another thing, of course, whether the non-Jews in the ¢rst place regarded him as a fellow German or a Jew. For in that respect he did not rack his brain about it: he as well as many of his highly intelligent friends were blind, nay foolish. In dread in the year 1933, the men of his generation, those born some hundred years ago, had to unlearn, if they ever had the time to unlearn. They naively brought to the concentration camps their Iron Crosses won in the FirstWorldWar, because they did not doubt that such pieces of evidence would never [sic] lose their validity.Well, now we the sons know much better that we are the last ones in a line of GermanJews who have regarded Germany as their home, the German language as the language and German music as the music. As the last ones we look back at our ancestors: the Mendelssohns, the Heines, the Marxes, the Einsteins, and know: after us there will be no one whowill designate himself or feel as a German or even enter into German history. These thinkers tried to push the boundaries of liberalism and Enlightenment thought. They were in£uenced by Heidegger and Existentialism, Marx and Marxism, and had their reservations about them to varying degrees and from diverse motives. Their prior research was focused on a mysterious, original and purportedly pure, authentic past that was hidden and alien. They reinvented new areas of study or cast them in a new, idiosyncratic light that is almost impossible to classify.They were averse to the social sciences and positivism.They re£ected upon Judaism, Jewishness, and antisemitism, and evinced curiosity about and expressed an ambivalent attitude to Zionism. Those of themwho remained alive after the SecondWorldWar ultimately found themselves a place to belong to; some continued to live in the United States and Israel, while others returned to a divided Germany. In their new-old home, many of thembecame occupied with the reasons that had led to their uprooting, with the rise of totalitarianism, with evil, and the politics of the cold war. When these Gu« nther Anders, ‘My Jewish Identity’, inJewish Currents, 40, no. 10 (November 1985), p. 35. This essay was originally published in German and translated into English inJewish Currents in two short parts in November and December 1985. See Gu« nther Anders, ‘Mein Judentum’, in Hans Ju« rgen Schultz (ed.), MeinJudentum, Stuttgart 1978, pp. 65^66. See, for example: David N. Myers, Resisting History: Historicism and Its Discontents in German-Jewish Thought, Princeton 2010; Benjamin Lazier, God Interrupted: Heresy and the European Imagination between the World Wars, Princeton 2012; Steven E. Aschheim, In Times of Crisis: Essays on European Culture, Germans, and Jews, Madison 2001, pp. 13^23. Compare also: Richard Wolin, Heidegger’s Children: Hannah Arendt, Karl Lo« with, Hans Jonas, and Herbert Marcuse, Princeton 2003; and Dana Villa, Arendt and Heidegger:The Fate of the Political, Princeton 1996. The Parochialism of Intellectual History:The Case of Gu« nther Anders 227 Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/leobaeck/article-abstract/doi/10.1093/leobaeck/ybw022/2898333 by guest on 25 July 2018 thinkers passed away in the1960s and1970s, their deaths heralded the end of the last chapter in the history of GermanJewry in the twentieth century. Almost each and every one of these characteristics may also be fou