Living in Los Angeles, the “Weimar on the Pacific,” also allowed Anders to reconnect with the wider intellectual scene he had been part of in Germany-first, in the early 1920s, as a student in Freiburg, later as a researcher at the University of Frankfurt, and then, together with his first wife Hannah Arendt, in Berlin, the city he had been forced to leave just days after the Reichstag Fire. The move to California coincided with a short-lived liaison with the actress Eva Heymann (Eva Hyde), who had been cast in a Hollywood production of William Tell. Yet, in the early years of his exile in the United States, and particularly during a four-year spell in California from 1939–1943, film was regarded as having considerable political (i.e., anti-fascist) potential. By the time Anders published his central works, which are still only partially translated into English, film and television were presented as inherently destructive media that “disfigure” the human. For those familiar with Anders’s prolific postwar writings, especially the media theory advanced in the two uncannily prescient volumes of Die Antiquiertheit des Menschen ( The Obsolescence of Human Beings), these Hollywood aspirations might come as a surprise. One of the first ventures this involved was writing a script for a Charlie Chaplin movie, a script, as Anders adds, that “probably went straight into the bin of some Hollywood agent” (37). When Günther Anders arrived in New York in 1936, following three years of exile in Paris, he tried to achieve “‘a typically American’ breakthrough” ( Interviews, 37). Günther Anders, Carricartoons: A Suggestion for a New Type of Animated Pictures Wouldn’t it be ridiculous, always to keep.
Nothing is as merry as dange, nothing as agreeable as a tiger as long as he is kept behind bars. Günther Anders, Günther Anders antwortet: Interviews und Erklärungen Įvery sort of emotion, even fright or indignation can be “enjoyed.” The whole History of Art and Drama testify to this fact, not t speak of horror pictures.
Is it not absurd that at the edge of the quiet Pacific there was a group that gathered to discuss political, philosophical, and sociological questions, while at the same time Hitler was raging in Europe and millions were being burnt to ashes in Auschwitz? Published in conjunction with the author's translation of Günther Anders's “Washing the Corpses of History: The Hollywood Costume Palace," which can be read here.
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