In 1958, Günter Anders participated in the Fourth International Congress against A- and H-Bombs and for Disarmament in Japan, travelling to Hiroshima and Nagasaki on the anniversary of the bombings. Along with other delegates, Anders visited hospitals for victims and war memorials, before returning to Tokyo to lead a special commission on moral obligation in the atomic age.





In The Man on the Bridge, Anders chronicles this trip, combining memoir, philosophy and political activism to interrogate the limits of the human imagination for understanding weapons of mass destruction.





This lucid, illuminating and devastating travel diary is not only a passionate plea against nuclear war, but a piercing examination of the ways in which technologies collapse spatial and temporal distance, demanding new ethical commitments.





Powerfully prescient, and as necessary today as on its first publication, The Man on the Bridge is a radical, groundbreaking work, translated for the first time by Caroline Schmidt, that interrogates how technologies of death and destruction alter human consciousness.



Günther Anders was born in Breslau in 1902. He completed his doctorate under Edmund Husserl in 1923 and worked in philosophy, journalism and literature in Berlin and Paris. He emigrated to the United States in 1936 with his first wife, Hannah Arendt, and took on a series of odd jobs, including factory work, which later inspired his major philosophical work, The Obsolescence of the Human. A co-founder of the international anti-nuclear movement, he visited Hiroshima in 1958 and in 1959 began a correspondence with Claude Eatherly, one of the Hiroshima pilots. He died in Vienna in 1992.