A-Infos (en) Italy, FDCA, Cantiere #35 - Totalitarianism in the history of the twentieth century: reading Gunther Anders - Roberto Manfredini (ca, de, it, pt, tr)[machine translation]

Gunther Anders is an author whose reflections and writings are little 
known, it is the pseudonym of Gunther Stern (1902-1992), a non-academic 
philosopher, journalist, writer, political refugee, member of the 
Russell Tribunal against war crimes. A distant cousin of Walter 
Benjamin, supported by Bertold Brecht, he was married from 1929 to 1937 
to Hannah Arendt. An anti-fascist militant, he was active in the 
movement against atomic weapons, in 1962 he published his correspondence 
with Claude Eatherly "the pilot of Hiroshima". ---- The philosophy of 
discrepancy developed by Anders, to separate metaphysics and nihilism 
and to recover history in understanding the effects of capitalism and 
technology, is the basis of the two open letters addressed to Klaus 
Eichmann, the son of the high Nazi official, contained in "We, the Sons 
of Eichmann". The first is from 1964, a few years after the trial in 
Israel of the Nazi criminal, which will also be the subject of one of 
Hannah Arendt's best-known works (The banality of evil. Eichmann in 
Jerusalem, Feltrinelli, Milan, 1997). The second letter entitled 
"Against indifference" is written twenty-five years later, with this 
letter Anders intervenes in the German historiographical polemic and 
reacts to the unlikely theses proposed by historical revisionism tending 
to present the extermination of the Jews as a sort of response to the 
massacres committed in the Soviet Union by the Stalinist regime.
Anders' analysis is profound, the reading he offers us of the 
catastrophes of the last century makes us reflect on the human condition 
in modernity. In the work the focus is not only on the person of Adolf 
Eichmann, but on the thousands of Eichmann servants and the millions of 
Eichmann passive; these people did not want to know and allowed the 
realization of the monstrous process of institutional and industrial 
destruction of human beings.
Anders uses the expression "Eichmann principle" which directly recalls 
the Nazi "Fuhrerprinzip", to name what inspired the behavior of all 
those who were cogs in the Nazi extermination machine; justifying their 
work based on the orders received and loyalty of service. In this way 
Anders intends to get to the roots of Eichmannian indifference, 
analyzing the results of the bureaucratic mechanism he does not show how 
Eichmann was a monster, but how Eichmann and his likes are the 
inevitable product of the current state of our world.
Then Anders analyzes the root of our "blindness in the face of the 
apocalypse", the insufficient human capacity to understand what goes 
beyond the capacity of representation of individuals, the possibility 
reached by humanity to exterminate itself. Faced with the monstrosity of 
the extermination of millions of people we become "emotionally 
illiterate" because our capacity for representation is limited by 
nature. To understand these events he hypothesizes the formation of a 
gap between the material productive capacity achieved and our capacity 
for representation, between what we can do and what we can make an image 
of. This general assumption imposes on Anders a strong opposition to the 
indifference and impotence that was used by criminal bureaucrats like 
Eichmann to cover up and de-responsibilize the monstrosities in which 
they participated.
... It might seem like a trivialization of the Nazi system to include it 
in a "mega-machine" model, but it is from this basis that Anders 
denounces how the attempts of "revisionist" historians, starting from 
the 1980s, tend to call into question the process of Nazi extermination, 
either by focusing on the singularity or unrepeatable uniqueness of the 
Auschwitz event, or by placing the "Catastrophe" in a past period, 
increasingly distant, in an era that seems every day more distant and 
different from the current one and that, ultimately, will remain 
unrepeatable in human history.
Instead, for Anders, the "Monster" is still before us, as an ever-open 
possibility, the "Terror" deprives us of those feelings of respect, pity 
and responsibility that are fundamental to the human condition.
The example of the nuclear arms race in the Sixties was a further sign 
of how the "Catastrophe" cannot only come from the return of political 
totalitarianism, but from the establishment of "a thousand-year-old 
empire of the machine", which views with suspicion all those who refuse 
to participate in it.
Anders' theses, his analyses and the keys to understanding mass society 
and modernity leave several questions open. Considering "the Auschwitz 
event" a profound historical caesura for the contemporary world and the 
identification of the "Eichmann principle", re-proposes its validity in 
the reading of the mechanisms of masking responsibilities in the 
bureaucratic structures responsible for the perpetuation of the "Terror".
A pessimism and a historical restlessness that places us in front of an 
unfixed, suspended human destiny.
BIBLIOGRAPHY:
Miguel Chueca, review of "Nous fils d'Eichmann", in Alternative 
Libertaire, number 81, Paris, December 1999; Gunther Anders, Man is 
Antiquated. Vol. 1 Considerations on the Soul in the Age of the Second 
Industrial Revolution, Bollati Boringhieri, Turin, 2010;
Gunther Anders,    We Children of Eichmann, Giuntina,    Florence, 1995; 
Gunther Anders, Descent into Hades. Auschwitz and Breslau, 1966, Bollati 
Boringhieri, Turin, 2008; Enzo Traverso, Totalitarianism: History and 
Aporia of a Concept, in "I viaggi di Erodoto", n. 38-39, June-November, 
1999, Bruno Mondadori, Milan, pp. 17-31.
------------------------------------------------------
In homage to one of the most extraordinary agitators in the history of 
labor, we publish the autobiography of Albert Parsons.
He was one of the five Chicago anarchists    who were tried in 1886-1887 
and executed in November 1887 for their role as agitators for the 
eight-hour work day and for being anarchist militants. This mock trial 
in the "land of the free" is one of the most shameful events in the 
history of labor throughout the world and has given rise to May Day 
commemorations around the world. The day was chosen because the 
repression that ended in the "legal lynching" of the Chicago Martyrs 
began after the general strike for the working day of 8 pre of May 1, 1886.

For requests: ilcantiere@autistici.org
contribution costs EUR 8 including shipping

http://alternativalibertaria.fdca.it/
_________________________________________
A - I N F O S  N E W S  S E R V I C E
By, For, and About Anarchists
Send news reports to A-infos-en mailing list
A-infos-en@ainfos.ca
Subscribe/Unsubscribe https://ainfos.ca/mailman/listinfo/a-infos-en
Archive: http://ainfos.ca/en