Günther Anders

Günther Anders (born Günther Stern in Breslau, 1902; died in Vienna, 1992) was a philosopher, journalist and critical theorist of Jewish background, trained in the phenomenological tradition. He is remembered as a pioneer in thinking about technology and the mass media, and as a voice against the threat of nuclear self-destruction. His work sits between philosophy, literature and political commitment.

The son of the child psychologists Clara and William Stern, he earned his doctorate under Edmund Husserl in 1923 and also studied with Heidegger. Working as a journalist in Berlin, he adopted the name "Anders", meaning "other", which he kept for life. He was married to Hannah Arendt from 1929 until their divorce. Unable to secure an academic post in Germany, he fled Nazism in the 1930s and settled in the United States, where he held a range of jobs before returning to Vienna in 1950.

His major book, The Obsolescence of Man, appeared in 1956 in two volumes. Its central claim is that human beings have fallen behind their own products: we can make more than we can imagine or take responsibility for. Anders spoke of a "Promethean shame" at the quality of what we manufacture. Starting from Auschwitz and Hiroshima, he developed a critique of the destructive power of technology, which he later linked to consumer society and the atomic state.

Anders never held a university chair and described his own work as "occasional philosophy". In the 1960s and 1970s he took part in the German peace movement against the deployment of US nuclear missiles. His influence can be seen in the philosophy of technology, in media studies, where his critique of television remains widely cited, and in later environmental and anti-nuclear thought.