Traveling to Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1958, seeking the meaning of the “new” world

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Does imagination have a moral quality? “Today, seeing is really possible only by closing one’s eyes; and a realist today is only one who has enough imagination to picture a fantastic tomorrow,” notes the German philosopher and writer of Jewish origins, one of the most important of the twentieth century, Günther Stern, alias Günther Anders, a student of Heidegger and Husserl and, moreover, the husband of Hannah Arendt, in The Man on the Bridge : Diary from Hiroshima and Nagasaki and Theses on the Atomic Age (Mimesis). Faced with a fantastic reality, fantasy must become “a method of empiricism, an organ of perception that is truly enormous.” As Micaela Latini emphasizes in the Introduction, art is for Anders the most perspicuous access to reality and promotes the improvement of man, fulfilling him morally. The reserve of meaning of a work is its “Earth,” to use Heidegger’s words. But can we still speak of the existence of this dark place, the Earth, as a forge of bridges thrown to the world? Can we still form a mysterious image of the world? Or must we decree its emptiness, its inconsistency? Are we playing badly, like Hamm in Beckett's "Endgame," a game we already know is lost? Or, instead, is this bottomless abode that is the Earth still capable of throwing a bridge of truth, of making the language it guards heard?

In our ambiguous age of the technologically reproducible, which crushes between its gears clods and undertows of surviving meaning that insinuate themselves among the ruins of an atomic landscape, it almost never happens that we find ourselves in the presence of a work that has in itself such power as to inaugurate a new balance between Earth and the world, that is, a new morality. But would we be capable of not-dominating? The arms race and the atomic threat make everyone a potential prey or assassin: at any moment, humanity could self-annihilate . Could we, perhaps, prefer annihilation to the slavery of an Orwellian global statute? What is at stake is not only the choice between totalitarianism and freedom, but that between being and not being (Karl Jaspers).

The inconceivable has already happened. Faced with enormity, what Earth, what landscape can still sustain the reality-system? In 1958, in Tokyo, Anders, who is also one of the founders of the global anti-nuclear movement, participates in the International Congress against Atomic and Nuclear Weapons and for Disarmament, proposing a moral code for the atomic age. In the Diary he insists, as Norberto Bobbio notes in the 1961 Preface, on the moral aspect of the question. He emphasizes the analgia and blindness in the face of the Apocalypse, blaming the “Promethean gap”, that is, the discrepancy between action and effect and between fiction and reality in the technocratic era , for the ostrich’s lack of responsibility that sticks its head in the sand: when, on August 6, 1945, the pilot of the Straight Flush plane, officer Claude Heaterly, in charge of evaluating the weather conditions, gives the green light to the Enola Gay to drop the atomic bomb on Hiroshima, he is unaware, he doesn’t know exactly what he’s doing. Heaterly, with whom Anders maintains a large correspondence (The Last Victim of Hiroshima, Mimesis), tries to take his own life several times; he is interned, in an attempt to make him alien to a guilt that he, however, knows to be real. He could have not followed orders. Something in him was not alienated: he was, in fact, able to imagine an alternative, to build a bridge to enormity.

The man Anders meets on the Hiroshima bridge, a survivor reduced to an automaton, would still have hands, a face.

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