Portrait of Günther Anders

Birthday profile

Günther Anders

Günther Anders, German philosopher and journalist (died 1992)

Born
July 12, 1902
Died
December 17, 1992
Zodiac sign
Cancer
Birth year
1902

About Günther Anders

Günther Anders (German: [ˈɡʏntɐ ˈandɐs]; born Günther Siegmund Stern, 12 July 1902 – 17 December 1992) was a German-born philosopher, journalist and critical theorist. Trained as a philosopher in the phenomenological tradition, he obtained his doctorate under Edmund Husserl in 1923 and worked then as a journalist at the Berliner Börsen-Courier. At that time, he changed his name from Stern to Anders. He unsuccessfully tried to get a university tenure in the early 1930s and ultimately fled Nazism to the United States. Back in Europe in the 1950s, he published his major book, The Obsolescence of Man, in 1956. An important part of Gunther Anders' work focuses on the self-destruction of mankind, through a meditation on the Holocaust and the nuclear threat. Anders developed a philosophical anthropology for the age of technology, dealing with such other themes as the effects of mass media on our emotional and ethical existence, the illogic of religion, and the question of being a thinker. He was awarded the Sigmund Freud Prize shortly before his death, in 1992. == Biography == === Early life === Günther Anders (then Stern) was born on 12 July 1902, in Breslau (now Wrocław in Poland), the son of Jewish heritage founders of child developmental psychology Clara and William Stern and cousin to philosopher Walter Benjamin. His parents kept a diary of Gunther and his two sisters Hilde and Eva from April 1900, the birth of their first child Hilde, until August 1912.

Biography source: Wikipedia. The profile adds birthday-specific historical context from the Celebs Birthday Today editorial database.

Career and life highlights

Günther Anders timeline

  1. In 1933, Anders fled Nazi Germany, first to France (where he and Arendt divorced amicably in 1937), and in 1936 to the United States.
  2. He was awarded the Sigmund Freud Prize shortly before his death, in 1992.

The world when Günther Anders was born

Günther Anders was born in 1902. The year snapshot below places that birthday in its cultural and historical setting: the music and films people were following, the headlines shaping public life, and the everyday prices families encountered.

Culture in 1902

  • Best-selling bookThe Tale of Peter Rabbit by Beatrix Potter

Headlines and milestones

  • Major sports momentFirst Rose Bowl game played in Pasadena, California
  • Top headlineEnd of Philippine-American War
  • Technology milestoneAir conditioning invented by Willis Carrier
  • Notable inventionAir conditioning
  • World population~1.62B

United States snapshot

  • U.S. leaderTheodore Roosevelt
  • U.S. population79.0M

1902 versus 2026

These figures put everyday life in Günther Anders's birth year beside the site's latest United States snapshot.

Measure19022026
Population79.0M341 million

Sources and editorial standards

This profile combines a biographical source with structured birthday and historical context. Sources recorded for this profile: Wikipedia, Library of Congress, Wikidata. See our editorial policy for sourcing, corrections, and review standards.

Read the source biography on Wikipedia. Wikipedia text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike License.