ANCESTOR MURDER – A MOLUSSIAN INVESTIGATION

Without question, History is a process of continual self-liquidation, a kind of endless ‘ancestor murder’. And we, the grandchildren toiling away at History, seeking to summon up what has been, must come to terms willy-nilly with the fact that this Ancestor Murder is almost totally beyond recall. (Annex III)

BACKGROUND

I completed my translation of Günther Anders’ novel The Molussian Catacombs in 2022. Anders’ literary executor, Herr Gerhard Oberschlick, acknowledged my good intentions, but reminded me I had no permission to publish it. He was going to seek a second op[inion on the quality of my translation. I heard nothing more. Meanwhile I posted part of the text.

I’m about to post the full text of the translated novel.

Here now some further Molussian pieces by Anders, delightfully intriguing in their own right, and as cautionary tales gently mocking the assumptions of scholarly research into alien cultures, as well as our own attitudes to traditions, myths, and current political shenanigans.

Download  Ancestor Murder (49 pages) . 

Anders began writing his fictional response to European totalitarianism in 1930.By early 1933 the MS was complete enough to be submitted (via Brecht) to the Kiepenhauer publishing house, just before the Nazis took over. The Gestapo grabbed the MS from the publisher along with other materials, but soon returned it, believing it to be a collection of South Sea folk tales. (The publisher had wrapped it in a map of Indonesia, with the island of ‘Molussia’ drawn in.)

One of the two MS copies of the novel was left behind when he fled to Paris. Hannah Arendt bravely brought it with her, wrapped in a covering that had spent a winter in a smokehouse surrounded by preserved sausages and hams. Anders later claimed the aroma provided a condiment for their frugal Parisian meals of plain baguette.

In Paris, Anders continued adding to the novel. His mythical land of Molussia provided almost endless opportunities for slogans, proverbs, anecdotes, fables and political reflections; the writing provided relief from the fears and hardships of exile.

Molussia was an invented private myth, allowing observations, ideas, insights and reflections in such a way that they lie outside the rules of scientific responsibility, but for that reason can have a more forthright, direct and immediate impact.’ – K. P. Liessmann: Günther Anders Kontrovers, Beck 1992, p.82.

His attempt to have the novel published by the only German-language publisher in Paris was sabotaged by the firm’s Stalinist reader Manès Sperber, who, unhappy with the novel’s exposure of conscienceless Machiavellianism from whatever side, branded it a deviation from the Party line. (Sperber denounced Stalin a few years later, and became a lauded anti-Communist. Anders found it distasteful that an earlier lack of morals could so easily be wiped away.)

So he put the MS away, and was persuaded only months before his death in 1992 to have it published. His excuse: the novel had aimed to alert Germans to the tricks totalitarian forces use to hoodwink the masses. Once the totalitarians had been driven out (by defeat in World War II, not by internal revolt), it seemed pointless and outmoded.

For the next half-century, Anders scattered references to “Molussia” throughout his many writings on the atomic age, on technology, on war and peace, and without embarrassment cited invented scholarly works. Now that totalitarian tendencies have revealed themselves in our supposedly democratic nations, his didactic intent seems by no means irrelevant.