Next morning Olo felt he owed Yegussa some distraction after the recent impositions. “If you like,” he said, “you can order up a story. What kind of story would you like?”
Yegussa was flabbergasted. “Well,” he said, considering, and tried to compile a recipe that would surely be beyond Olo’s powers “The story must be true, but like a fable, and scary, but amusing. Off you go.”
“If that’s all,” mused Olo, who probably had no clue yet what he was going to say, “it fits exactly the story of Bingo, who toiled in a Usalian silver mine, took life by the scruff, declared that the world posed no difficulties, always showed a merry and inviting face, and was loved by his superiors no less than by his comrades.”
WHAT IS THIS BOOK?
Günther Anders has already made two appearances on this site: with his
incisive response to Döblin’s
Babylonian Exile; and a
charming account of his first encounter with Döblin.
We now present, in English for the first time, a
substantial excerpt from his only novel,
The Molussian Catacombs, written in 1930-33 but first published a few months before his death in 1992. This is another of those works that fell victim to the sharp break (unparalleled in English literature) between the tumultuous but evolving culture of the Weimar years, and the post-1933 and post-War situation in the German-speaking lands.
(The journalist Jürgen Serke in 1977 produced a rather fine coffee-table book (
Die verbrannten Dichter (The Burned Writers), ISBN 3-407-80750-3) presenting nearly three dozen Weimar writers almost completely forgotten after the War. Döblin and Walter Benjamin are among the few names therein whose work and reputation still had some resonance.)
This Introduction aims to whet the reader’s appetite by providing background to Anders’ life and work; tracking the history of the novel and the 60-year gap between composition and publication; and noting the wider use Anders made of mythical Molussia in his other writings.
WHO WAS GÜNTHER ANDERS?
Günther Stern was born in the German city of Breslau (now Polish Wrocłav) in 1902, and died in Vienna in 1992. His parents were famous pioneer Child Psychologists; Walter Benjamin was a second cousin. He studied Phenomenology under Husserl, and also attended seminars by Cassirer and Heidegger. He was refused a doctorate in 1930; his mentors (Wertheimer, Tillich and Mannheim) consoled him with the naïve excuse: “Let the Nazis come in for a year or so, then once they’ve been seen off, you can have your degree.”
From the late 1920s he lived mainly by his contributions to newspapers. The editor of the
Berlin Börsen-Courier complained there were too many Sterns writing for him, so Günther responded: “Then call me something different (
anders).”
From 1929 to 1937 he was married to Hannah Arendt (his fellow student under Heidegger – with whom she had a passionate affair). In 1933 he fled to Paris on hearing that the Gestapo had seized Berthold Brecht’s diary, in which he was frequently mentioned. Hannah was less fearful, until she too was held for several days in a Gestapo cell. She fled via Czechoslovakia to join Anders in Paris.
In 1936 Anders sailed to the USA, where his father was now a professor in North Carolina. The authorities, suspicious of his anti-totalitarian views, delayed the naturalisation process. He taught at the New School of Social Research, and busied himself intensively with philosophy, focusing particularly on Heidegger, who notoriously had joined the Nazi Party soon after the seizure of power.
The atomic bombs on Japan brought a turning point in Anders’ thinking. After returning to Europe in 1950, he attacked the “Apocalypse-blindness” of a humanity whose technologies had grown beyond its control.
A note inserted in the MS of his novel, retrieved in 1990, reads: “Quite sovereign already then? Have I never matured? Empty time in the USA. Only after returning to Europe did I find myself again. Back there I would have perished.”
For three post-War decades he wrote extensively on violence, the atomic menace, pacifism, technological overreach, and cultural critiques. His major work of philosophical anthropology
Die Antiquiertheit des Menschen (
The Obsolescence of Humanity) appeared as two volumes in 1956 and 1980. (Volume 2 can be found online in English as a PDF translated from a Spanish translation of the original. No translator named.)
60 YEARS FROM CONCEPTION TO PUBLICATION
Anders began writing his fictional response to European totalitarianism in 1930.By early 1933 the MS was complete enough to be submitted (via Brecht) to the Kiepenhauer publishing house, just before the Nazis took over. The Gestapo grabbed the MS from the publisher along with other materials, but soon returned it, believing it to be a collection of South Sea folk tales. (The publisher had wrapped it in a map of Indonesia, with the island of “Molussia” drawn in.)
Anders was one of the earliest to recognise the menace of totalitarianism. He took
Mein Kampf seriously (unlike his “clever friends”: Brecht famously mocked Hitler as “the housepainter”), judging it a “mean, hatefilled, rhetorically enthralling, indisputably highly intelligent book … This man says what he means and means what he says. And says it in such a vulgar way that the already-vulgar will find it irresistible, and even the not-vulgar will be vulgarised and enthralled.”
The MS of the novel was left behind when he fled to Paris. Hannah Arendt bravely brought it with her, wrapped in a covering that had spent a winter in a smokehouse around preserved sausages and hams. Anders later claimed the smell provided a condiment for their frugal meals of plain baguette.
In Paris, Anders continued adding to the novel. His mythical land of Molussia (like Tolkien’s parallel world being imagined at the same time) provided almost endless opportunities for additional slogans, proverbs, anecdotes, fables and political reflections, and the writing provided relief from the fears and hardships of exile. His attempt to have the novel published by the only German-language publishing house in Paris was sabotaged by the firm’s Stalinist reader Manès Sperber, who branded it a deviation from the Party line. (Sperber denounced Stalin a few years later, and became a lauded anti-Communist. Anders found it distasteful that an earlier lack of morals could so easily be wiped away.)
In 1936 Anders moved to the USA; an amicable divorce from Hannah followed the next year. The 1939 PEN World Congress in New York provided an opportunity to introduce him to a wider public. The pacifist writer Arnold Zweig presented an evening of readings, with the support of a famous actress, Olga Fuchs. But hopes for early publication of the novel were again dashed. Anders then set the MS aside, but carried it with him on his frequent changes of address. Not until 1990, at the urging of his executor Gerhard Oberschlick, did he authorise publication.
The first edition appeared in 1992, happily shortly before Anders’ death. It had no editorial apparatus. The second edition of 2012 was augmented with almost a hundred pages of “Molussian Apocrypha”, a few other miscellaneous items, and a lengthy and heavily annotated recollection by Oberschlick of his conversations with Anders in 1990-91.
REFERENCES TO MOLUSSIA IN ANDERS’ OTHER WRITINGS
Although he had given up on the idea of publishing the novel, Anders frequently quoted “Molussian” slogans, proverbs, anecdotes etc in his other writings, to the bemusement of readers. He even referenced a couple of (spurious) scholarly works:
Molussic Studies: a Symposium, Princeton 1952, and the “standard work”
Molussic Proverbs, London 1949. His imagination was gripped no less tenaciously by this mythical land, than Tolkien’s by Middle Earth.
SOURCES
This introduction has drawn heavily on Gerhard Oberschlick’s Afterword to the second edition of
Die molussische Katakombe, Munich, C H Beck 2012, ISBN 978 3 406 60024 1.
