Remembering War, Forgetting Hiroshima: "Euroshima" and the West German Anti-Nuclear Weapons Movements in the Cold War

Citation

Nehring H (2020) Remembering War, Forgetting Hiroshima: "Euroshima" and the West German Anti-Nuclear Weapons Movements in the Cold War. In: Ikenberry GJ & Gordin MD (eds.) The Age of Hiroshima. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, pp. 179-200. https://doi.org/10.2307/j.ctvkwnq1q.14

Abstract
First paragraph: In January 1959, at a student conference against nuclear weapons at the Free University in West Berlin, the existentialist German-Jewish philosopher Günther Anders, Hannah Arendt’s first husband and a disciple of Martin Heidegger, developed twenty-two “Theses for the Atomic Age.” Anders’s first thesis addressed “Hiroshima as a World Condition.” The first-ever use of a nuclear bomb on the Japanese city had, Anders argued, signaled the arrival of a “New Age.” “At any given moment,” he wrote, “we have the power to transform any given place on our planet, and even our planet itself, into a Hiroshima.”

Keywords
Hiroshima bombing; peace movements; memory

People

Professor Holger Nehring

Chair in Contemporary European History, History