Warnings (Selected Writings on Politics, Language, and Violence)

Political texts by one of the twentieth century’s preeminent thinkers on war crimes, technolgy, and fascism

Günther Anders—poet, philosopher, agitator, anti-fascist—was one of the most prolific writers on the disaster called the twentieth century, writing more than thirty books on technology, art, literature, philosophy, and politics. More a heretic than a hero, Anders placed Hiroshima and Auschwitz together in a single paradigm of catastrophe, warning that humanity, with the advent of the atom bomb, had entered a new epoch of history: It now possessed the technical capacity to destroy its own conditions of existence. Despite being close to some of the most important names in twentieth-century German philosophy and literature, his expansive body of work has only recently begun to be discovered by Anglophone readers. Now, for the first time in English, this volume brings together a selection of his texts written between 1933 and 1991: warnings, fables, reflections on violence, war crimes, education and resistance, interviews, speeches. To understand our burning world and apocalyptic present, Günther Anders’s work is indispensable.