The Molussian Catacombs is Anders’s anti-fascist novel, which he worked on and revised for over sixty years, and which was first published in a complete edition in 1992, the year of his death. He references the novel continually throughout his other works, as here. When asked about the novel’s conception, Anders said, “Molussia is an imaginary exotic country which I invented in a Swiftian manner to unmask the nascent National Socialism by means of disguised narratives and pseudo-documents.” Composed of a thematically connected series of parables, fairy-tales, songs, and poems, the novel takes place in the complete darkness of the catacombs beneath the imaginary country of Molussia. The catacombs are first and foremost a place of imprisonment for the pariahs of Molussia, and the narrative element of the novel is told through dialogues between two prisoners held captive there, Olo and Yegussa. Deprived of all light and therefore of the faculty of sight, the prisoners live a Grenzdasein, an “existence between life and death,” where they can rely on the power of the spoken word alone to execute their ethical imperative “to hand down the legacy of the truth.” This task is carried out by a chain of so-called “dispatch riders” (Meldereiter) which spans generations, and whose stories of both oppression and resistance must be communicated verbally from one prisoner to the next. So long as this chain of dispatch riders goes unbroken, the subterranean non-place that is the catacombs serves as a repository of truth, which will ultimately be brought back up to Molussia when a great revolution finally arrives and makes the last the first, the first the last. Since the truth is forbidden up above in Molussia, the catacombs are also a store of knowledge that would otherwise be lost forever.
Günther Anders, Die Antiquiertheit des Menschen, vol. 1 (C. H. Beck, 1961), 125. All translations mine unless otherwise noted.
Günther Anders, Die Antiquiertheit des Menschen, vol. 2 (C. H. Beck, 2013), 55.
Peter Sloterdijk has recently taken up Anders’s conception of Promethean Shame and linked it explicitly to industrial production in his book Prometheus’s Remorse, trans. Hunter Bolin (Semiotext(e), 2024).
Günther Anders, Die molussische Katakombe (C. H. Beck, 1992), 101.
Anders, Die Antiquiertheit des Menschen, vol. 1, 112.
Anders, Die Antiquiertheit des Menschen, vol. 1, 164.
Anders, Die Antiquiertheit des Menschen, vol. 2, 37.
Günther Anders, Tagebücher und Gedichte (C. H. Beck, 1985), 205.
Christian Dries, “Nachwort” (Postface), in Günther Anders, Die Weltfremdheit des Menschen (C. H. Beck, 2018), 468.
Sigmund Freud, “Neurosis and Psychosis,” in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, vol. 19 (1923–25), ed. James Strachey (Hogarth Press, 1953), 151.
Anders, Die Weltfremdheit des Menschen, 28.
Jacques Lacan, “Family Complexes in the Formation of the Individual,” 1938 →.
Günther Anders, Mensch ohne Welt: Schriften zu Kunst und Literatur (C. H. Beck, 1993), XV.
Jean Claude Milner, Le Périple Structural (Editions de Seuil, 2002), 28, e-pub version.
Anders, Die Weltfremdheit des Menschen, 257.
Tim Ingold, “’Tools for the Hand, Language for the Face’: An Appreciation of Leroi-Gourhan’s Gesture and Speech,” Studies in History and Philosophy of Science Part C: Studies in History and Philosophy of Biological and Biomedical Sciences 30, no. 4 (1999).
Anders, Die Weltfremdheit des Menschen, 262.
Anders, Die Antiquiertheit des Menschen, vol. 2, 33.
Anders, Die Weltfremdheit des Menschen, 273.
Anders, Die Weltfremdheit des Menschen, 372.
Jacob Blumenfeld, “Welcome to the Anderscene,” Brooklyn Rail, July–August 2024 →.
Anders, Die Weltfremdheit des Menschen, 404.
Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason (Cambridge University Press, 1998), 256 (B 151).
Heidegger notes that when Kant situates this transcendental object, it is never empirical, but only indeterminate or negative. Kant lists it as merely “X”: the object seems to have already been lost, and it is not this or that object in particular, but the structure which any object must take on in order for it to be apprehended by human beings. The object is not necessarily a positive something; it is instead a horizon—that is to say nonbeing—and its effects structure the place of human knowledge.
Anders, Mensch ohne Welt, 20.
Anders, Mensch ohne Welt, XIII.
Anders, Mensch ohne Welt, 32.
By stressing the failure of Biberkopf—a paradigmatic figure of the unworldly human—to take the reins of his own life, Anders can also implicitly be read as critiquing Max Scheler, for whom the spirit—precisely that which Scheler claims makes humans “world-open,” or that which grants them a world—“cannot mean more than directing or steering.” Those deprived even of the most basic form of human alienation in the form of labor are even more deprived of any opportunity to freely steer their own life than the worker. Max Scheler, The Human Place in the Cosmos, trans. Manfred S. Frings (Northwestern University, 2009), 27.
Susanne Fohler, Techniktheorien: Der Platz der Dinge in der Welt des Menschen (Wilhelm Fink, 2003), 152f.
Esther Leslie, Hollywood Flatlands: Critical Theory, Animation and the Avant-garde (Verso, 2002), 133.
Christopher John Müller, “Hollywood, Exile, and New Types of Pictures: Günther Anders’s 1941 California Diary ‘Washing the Corpses of History,’” Modernism/modernity 5, no. 4 (2021) →.
Bertolt Brecht, “Contemplating Hell,” The Collected Poems of Bertolt Brecht (Liveright, 2018), 838.
Andreas Oberprantacher, “The Desterification of the World: Günther Anders on Weltlosigkeit,” in The Life and Work of Günther Anders, ed. Günter Bischof, Jason Dawsey, and Bernhard Fetz (Studien Verlag, 2015).
Anders, Mensch ohne Welt, XI.
Anders, Tagebücher und Gedichte, 209.
Martin Heidegger, Being and Time (Blackwell, 1962), 80.
Anders, Die Antiquiertheit des Menschen, vol. 1, 188, emphasis in original.
Giorgio Cesarano, Manuale di sopravvivenza (Dedalo libri, 1974), §59.
Anders, Mensch ohne Welt, XV.
I owe this specific formulation of the multitasker as the epitome of Anders’s schizophrenic to Christian Dries.
Anders, Die Antiquiertheit des Menschen, vol. 1, 138.
Enzo Traverso, “Auschwitz and Hiroshima: Günther Anders,” trans. David Fernbach, Historical Materialism online, n.d. →. For an instance of its ancient Greek philosophical usage, see this moment in Plato’s Gorgias: “‘In fact, Callicles, the experts’ opinion is that co-operation, love, order, discipline, and justice bind heaven and earth, gods and men. That's why they call the universe an ordered whole (kosmos), my friend, rather than a disorderly (akosmosian) mass or an unruly shambles.’”