UPDATE 4/04/2025
I’ve just come across the most succinct and informative explanation of what The Molussian Catacombs is about. It appears as a footnote to a long article about Anders in an arts journal I was previously unaware of. The author is Hunter Bolin. If Mr Bolin would like to get in touch via the website email, I’ll be happy to thank him in person!
The Molussian Catacombs is Anders’s anti-fascist novel, which he worked on and revised for over sixty years, and which was first published in a complete edition in 1992, the year of his death. He references the novel continually throughout his other works, as here. When asked about the novel’s conception, Anders said, “Molussia is an imaginary exotic country which I invented in a Swiftian manner to unmask the nascent National Socialism by means of disguised narratives and pseudo-documents.” Composed of a thematically connected series of parables, fairy-tales, songs, and poems, the novel takes place in the complete darkness of the catacombs beneath the imaginary country of Molussia. The catacombs are first and foremost a place of imprisonment for the pariahs of Molussia, and the narrative element of the novel is told through dialogues between two prisoners held captive there, Olo and Yegussa. Deprived of all light and therefore of the faculty of sight, the prisoners live a Grenzdasein, an “existence between life and death,” where they can rely on the power of the spoken word alone to execute their ethical imperative “to hand down the legacy of the truth.” This task is carried out by a chain of so-called “dispatch riders” (Meldereiter) which spans generations, and whose stories of both oppression and resistance must be communicated verbally from one prisoner to the next. So long as this chain of dispatch riders goes unbroken, the subterranean non-place that is the catacombs serves as a repository of truth, which will ultimately be brought back up to Molussia when a great revolution finally arrives and makes the last the first, the first the last. Since the truth is forbidden up above in Molussia, the catacombs are also a store of knowledge that would otherwise be lost forever.
Here, for the first time in English, is the only novel by the ‘philosophical anthropologist of the atomic age’ Günther Anders. The Molussian Catacombs was written in 1930-33, with additions and amendments made up until 1936 while Anders was an exile in Paris. But it was not published in Germany until 1992, a few months before his death.
Hence the novel is another of those works that fell victim to the sharp break (unparalleled in English literature) between the tumultuous but evolving culture of the Weimar years, and the post-1933 and post-War situation in German-speaking lands.
I included my Introduction in an earlier post (February 2022), when I offered a few chapters of the text only. Please take a look there – it should whet your appetite for the full text.
Download the full text of The Molussian Catacombs.
I’d love to know your reactions to this unique novel!
