Trained as a philosopher in the phenomenological tradition, he obtained his doctorate under Edmund Husserl in 1923 and worked then as a journalist at the Berliner Börsen-Courier.

An important part of Gunther Anders' work focuses on the self-destruction of mankind, through a meditation on the Holocaust and the nuclear threat.

Anders developed a philosophical anthropology for the age of technology, dealing with such other themes as the effects of mass media on our emotional and ethical existence, the illogic of religion, and the question of being a thinker.

[9] The diaries were mainly an academic exercise in developmental child psychology however they were also a larger glimpse into the lives of the children growing up.

[24] In 1930–31 he unsuccessfully attempted a habilitation under Paul Tillich in sociomusicology,[25] and was advised by Max Wertheimer and Karl Mannheim to be patient.

[19] In 1931 he started writing a novel under the title Die Molussische Katakombe (The Molussian Catacomb), a novel about totalitarian techniques of brainwashing taking place within an underground prison.

[26] Anders worked on the novel from 1931-1933, and his friend Bertolt Brecht submitted it with his entrée or endorsement to the publishing Kipenhauer shortly before the Nazis took power.

[27] Anders fled the country shortly after Hitler was appointed chancellor on 30 January 1933, believing the false rumor that Brecht's diary, in which he was often mentioned, had been seized by the Gestapo.

[28] Anders was not the only one who feared being targeted by Hitler's agents: His cousin, Walter Benjamin also fled at right around that time and their mutual friend Ernst Schoen [de] was arrested.

[33] He spent his time in a multitude of activities, hired in the United States Office of War Information, as a writer for Aufbau (journal), as a reviewer for a philosophical journal, as a tutor in the house of a famous composer and songwriter, as a worker in a factory, as a costume and theatrical property boy in Hollywood, as a tour guide at Metropolitan Museum of Art,[21] as a failed scriptwriter, among others.

He became a leading figure in the anti-nuclear movement and published numerous essays and expanded versions of his diaries, including one of a trip to Breslau and Auschwitz with his wife.

Anders' papers are held by the University of Vienna, and his literary executor is former FORVM editor Gerhard Oberschlick.

His essay "The Phantom World of TV", written in the late 1950s, was published in an edition of Bernard Rosenberg and David Manning White's influential anthology Mass Culture.

[53] The essay argues that a gap has developed between humanity's technologically enhanced capacity to create and destroy, and our ability to imagine that destruction.

Anders devoted a great deal of attention to the nuclear threat, making him an early critic of this technology as well.

The two-volume work is made up of a string of philosophical essays that start with an observation often found in Anders' diary entries dating back to his exile in the US in the 1940s.

He suggests that the appellation "Eichmann" properly designates any person who actively participated in, ignored or failed to learn about, or even knew about, but took no action against the Nazis' mass murder campaigns against Jews and others.

"[65] In Mensch ohne Welt, Anders engages in a critique of the contemporary western commodity-society which he deems a society unfit for human beings.