Günther Anders

His parents kept a diary of Gunther and his two sisters and from April 1900, the birth of their first child Hilde, until August 1912.

This record-keeping would span a combined 18 years in total.

The diaries were mainly an academic exercise in developmental child psychology however they were also a larger glimpse into the lives of the children growing up.

Günther Anders (born Günther Siegmund Stern, 12 July 1902 – 17 December 1992) was a German-born philosopher, journalist and critical theorist.

Günther Anders (then Stern) was born on 12 July 1902, in Breslau (now Wrocław in Poland), the son of Jewish heritage founders of child developmental psychology Clara and William Stern and cousin to philosopher Walter Benjamin.

The diaries were published in 1914.

Anders' sister Hilde was at one time married to the German philosopher Rudolf Schottlaender, who was also a student of Edmund Husserl, and later Hans Marchwitza, his other sister Eva would go on to be a part of Youth Aliyah and later worked for people with mental disabilities.

However Anders' own parents, arguably his father, was the most significant intellectual influence in his life.

Anders was an atheist, and although he did not become a member of the Frankfurt School, he did influence the thinking of some of its members.

In the late 1920s Anders studied with the philosopher Martin Heidegger at the University of Freiburg.

Trained as a philosopher in the phenomenological tradition, he obtained his doctorate under Edmund Husserl in 1923 and worked then as a journalist at the Berliner Börsen-Courier.

At that time, he changed his name Stern to Anders.

In 1923, Anders obtained a PhD in philosophy; Edmund Husserl was his dissertation advisor.

While Anders was working as a journalist in Berlin (Berliner Börsen-Courier ) he changed his nom-de-plume to "Anders" (meaning other or different) which would go on to become his official name.

There is more than one reason given in literature as to why he changed his name- one reason is that an editor did not want so many Jewish-sounding bylines in his paper, another reason for changing his surname was that his name would connect him to his popular parents.

He married, in 1929, a fellow student whom he'd met in Heidegger's seminar: Hannah Arendt.

Arendt had previously engaged in an affair with their common mentor.

They married in Nowawes and at the time lived on Babelsberg's Merkurstraße 3 in Potsdam.

He unsuccessfully tried to get a university tenure in the early 1930s and ultimately fled Nazism to the United States.

In 1930–31 he unsuccessfully attempted a habilitation under Paul Tillich in sociomusicology, and was advised by Max Wertheimer and Karl Mannheim to be patient.

In 1931 he started writing Die Molussische Katakombe ('The Molussian Catacomb').

In 1933, Anders fled Nazi Germany, first to France (where he and Arendt divorced amicably in 1937), and in 1936 to the United States.

In 1934 he gave a lecture on Kafka in Paris at the Institut d'Etudes Germaniques; he would go on to engage with Kafka in the coming years.

In the United States, he spent time in New York and California.

He spent his time in a multitude of activities, hired in the United States Office of War Information, as a writer for Aufbau (journal), as a reviewer for a philosophical journal, as a tutor in the house of a famous composer and songwriter, as a worker in a factory, as a costume and theatrical property boy in Hollywood, as a tour guide at Metropolitan Museum of Art, as a failed scriptwriter, among others.

He was a lecturer in The New School for Social Research.

Anders married a second time, in 1945, to the Austrian writer Elisabeth Freundlich, whom he had met in New York.

Back to Europe in the 1950s, he published his major book, The Obsolescence of Humankind, in 1956.

An important part of Gunther Anders' work focuses on the self-destruction of mankind, through a meditation on the Holocaust and the nuclear threat.

Anders developed a philosophical anthropology for the age of technology, dealing with such other themes as the effects of mass media on our emotional and ethical existence, the Illogic of religion, and the question of being a thinker.

Anders returned to Europe in 1950 with his wife to live in her native Vienna.

While Germany had been the first choice, the political situation was not appropriate and an academic post in Halle no longer a choice.

He often wrote for Merkur.

He and his second wife divorced in 1955.

There Anders wrote his main philosophical work, whose title translates as The Obsolescence of Humankind (1956).

He became a leading figure in the anti-nuclear movement and published numerous essays and expanded versions of his diaries, including one of a trip to Breslau and Auschwitz with his wife.

Anders' papers are held by the University of Vienna, and his literary executor is former FORVM editor Gerhard Oberschlick.

In 1957, Anders married a third time, to American pianist Charlotte Lois Zelka.

Gunther knew how to play the piano and violin.

He was awarded the Sigmund Freud Prize shortly before his death, in 1992.