The Satanic Cosmic Force 123
The story of the Hiroshima pilot turned monk was a myth, but, as Robert
Jungk wrote in his foreword to Anders’ correspondence with Claude Eatherly,
this was a myth much needed: “It had invented an act of repentance which,
in any case, had, sometime or other, to become a reality.” 69 In the eyes of
Günther Anders, through his seemingly insane acts, Eatherly claimed for
himself the guilt denied by society as a whole and thus attempted to restore
the moral foundation that is being lost in the age of industrial mass annihilation. With Joseph Connor, the protagonist of Abel (August 6th), Vasilii
Grossman had created a Soviet version of the repentant pilot, who through
his uncomprehending participation in the devastation of Hiroshima becomes
guiltlessly guilty, both perpetrator and victim of the nuclear age, and who
takes upon himself the responsibility for his unquestioning service to the
technological apparatus that produces mass murder. Grossman’s fictional pilot
was neither relegated to a monastery, nor to an insane asylum, but to the
writer’s drawer, from where he would be released only in 1989, shortly before
the demise of the Soviet Union.
The Satanic Cosmic Force: Nuclear Technology as
a Signature of Twentieth-Century Totalitarianism in
Vasilii Grossman’s Sistine Madonna and Life and Fate
In Abel (August 6th), Vasilii Grossman uses the historical bombing of
Hiroshima to explore the moral implications of technification. In a prefiguration of Günther Anders’ Theses on the Nuclear Age, he shows how the
suspension of individual responsibility and the replacement of human agency
by a mere functioning of the bureaucratic-technological apparatus provide
the prerequisite for industrialized mass murder on an unprecedented scale. In
the essay The Sistine Madonna and the novel Life and Fate, the focus is on the
impending arms race. Here, too, Grossman departs from the concrete historical situation to general thoughts on the human potential for mass murder.
The threat of wholesale nuclear annihilation is located on a continuum of
totalitarian violence that started with the Stalinist war against the so-called
kulaks and culminated in the genocidal policy of the Nazis, with nuclear
omnicide looming ahead. In both texts, the Shoah appears as a kind of negative epiphany in that it fully reveals the horror of industrial mass murder
carried out by a seemingly faceless bureaucratic-technological apparatus. In
both The Sistine Madonna and Life and Fate, nuclear processes are invoked as
metaphor for the inhuman tendencies that make this horror possible.
In The Sistine Madonna, Grossman presents human history as based on a
precarious balance of inhuman cruelty and suffering on the one hand, and
what he terms “what is human in man” (“chelovecheskoe v cheloveke”) 70
on the other. It is this human spirit that even in the most adverse of circumstances is capable of unexpected acts of kindness, thus preventing human
civilization from permanently lapsing into barbarism. For Grossman, the
human spirit is embodied in Raphael’s Sistine Madonna, which he saw in a
The story of the Hiroshima pilot turned monk was a myth, but, as Robert
Jungk wrote in his foreword to Anders’ correspondence with Claude Eatherly,
this was a myth much needed: “It had invented an act of repentance which,
in any case, had, sometime or other, to become a reality.” 69 In the eyes of
Günther Anders, through his seemingly insane acts, Eatherly claimed for
himself the guilt denied by society as a whole and thus attempted to restore
the moral foundation that is being lost in the age of industrial mass annihilation. With Joseph Connor, the protagonist of Abel (August 6th), Vasilii
Grossman had created a Soviet version of the repentant pilot, who through
his uncomprehending participation in the devastation of Hiroshima becomes
guiltlessly guilty, both perpetrator and victim of the nuclear age, and who
takes upon himself the responsibility for his unquestioning service to the
technological apparatus that produces mass murder. Grossman’s fictional pilot
was neither relegated to a monastery, nor to an insane asylum, but to the
writer’s drawer, from where he would be released only in 1989, shortly before
the demise of the Soviet Union.
The Satanic Cosmic Force: Nuclear Technology as
a Signature of Twentieth-Century Totalitarianism in
Vasilii Grossman’s Sistine Madonna and Life and Fate
In Abel (August 6th), Vasilii Grossman uses the historical bombing of
Hiroshima to explore the moral implications of technification. In a prefiguration of Günther Anders’ Theses on the Nuclear Age, he shows how the
suspension of individual responsibility and the replacement of human agency
by a mere functioning of the bureaucratic-technological apparatus provide
the prerequisite for industrialized mass murder on an unprecedented scale. In
the essay The Sistine Madonna and the novel Life and Fate, the focus is on the
impending arms race. Here, too, Grossman departs from the concrete historical situation to general thoughts on the human potential for mass murder.
The threat of wholesale nuclear annihilation is located on a continuum of
totalitarian violence that started with the Stalinist war against the so-called
kulaks and culminated in the genocidal policy of the Nazis, with nuclear
omnicide looming ahead. In both texts, the Shoah appears as a kind of negative epiphany in that it fully reveals the horror of industrial mass murder
carried out by a seemingly faceless bureaucratic-technological apparatus. In
both The Sistine Madonna and Life and Fate, nuclear processes are invoked as
metaphor for the inhuman tendencies that make this horror possible.
In The Sistine Madonna, Grossman presents human history as based on a
precarious balance of inhuman cruelty and suffering on the one hand, and
what he terms “what is human in man” (“chelovecheskoe v cheloveke”) 70
on the other. It is this human spirit that even in the most adverse of circumstances is capable of unexpected acts of kindness, thus preventing human
civilization from permanently lapsing into barbarism. For Grossman, the
human spirit is embodied in Raphael’s Sistine Madonna, which he saw in a