German Philosophy

Günther Anders Günther Anders was born Günther Siegmund Stern in Breslau (then Germany, now Wrocław, Poland) on 12 July 1902, the son of the psychologists William Stern and Clara Stern, pioneers of developmental psychology, and a cousin of the philosopher and critic Walter Benjamin. He received his doctorate in philosophy under the supervision of Edmund Husserl at Freiburg in 1923, having also studied with Heidegger — of whom, decades later, he became a trenchant critic, publishing in 1948 the essay “On the Pseudo-Concreteness of Heidegger’s Philosophy” (in Philosophy and Phenomenological Research), in which he accused the existential analytic of Being and Time of ignoring the concrete materiality of human needs — toothache, hunger, sexual desire. Working as a journalist for the Berliner Börsen-Courier, he adopted the pen name “Anders” (“different” or “otherwise,” in German), which became his permanent name. In 1929 he married Hannah Arendt, whom he had met in Heidegger’s seminar; the marriage ended in an amicable divorce in 1937. With the rise of Nazism he fled Germany in 1933, passing through Paris and, from 1936, the United States, where he lived until 1950, when he returned to Europe and settled in Vienna, the city where he would live until his death on 17 December 1992. ...