The Leo Baeck Institute London is pleased to announce that Adi Armon is the winner of the 2017 Leo Baeck Institute Year Book Essay Prize in German-Jewish Studies for his article The Parochialism of Intellectual History: The Case of Günther Anders, featured in the 2017 Leo Baeck Institute Year Book.
The name of Günther Anders, who was one of the first philosophers to try to contend with the meaning of Being, ethics, and philosophy in the atomic age, was absent from Anglo-Saxon discourse during his own lifetime and has continued to be so since his death in 1992. He frequently wrote about the Holocaust and Hiroshima, about evil, the Vietnam War, Heidegger and the effects of technology, and its inherent destructive potential. However, the bulk of his writings has not yet been translated into English, and the studies that focus on him in the United States pale by comparison with those on other thinkers of his time.
The reason he was marginalized is not only a matter of style or circumstances but also of language, location, and historical context—it is embedded in the text and content of his writings, which placed Auschwitz alongside Hiroshima and located signs of totalitarianism in the West as well. The purpose of this study is twofold: to locate Anders alongside other German-Jewish thinkers of the twentieth century and to provide an answer to the question of why historians, philosophers, and many scholars in the humanities and the social sciences in the United States have ignored his existence for so long.
Adi Armon received his Ph.D. from The Department of Political Science at The Hebrew University of Jerusalem. His areas of expertise include the cultural and intellectual history of the 19th and 20th centuries, with a special focus on Jewish nationalism from 19th-century Europe to the contemporary State of Israel and the Jewish and European political, cultural and intellectual origins of Israel’s right-wing ideologies. He is the author of “Leo Strauss Between Weimar and America,” (2019).
