2 How Is This Possible?

When I first read the Holocaust correspondence, I was living in Berlin, not far from where Fromm’s family members once resided. After reflecting on the letters, I wandered aimlessly through the city streets, conscious of the ghostly absence of so many who had called Berlin their home. A sense of grief seemed to emanate from the buildings that were marked by Stolpersteine, or “stumbling stones,” embedded in the cobblestone sidewalks directly in front of doorways and entrances. There are more than 5,000 Stolpersteine in Berlin, each one commemorating a single victim. These markers remind us of the atrocities committed, yet they represent only a tiny fraction of the actual number of individuals who were murdered.

Fromm walked the same streets that are today lined with Stolpersteine when he was a child and visited with his aunt Sophie and her family. These are also the streets that Fromm knew as a young man when he lived and worked in Berlin. And only a few years later these same streets would become the marching grounds of brown-shirted paramilitary troops who spread the Nazis’ racial ideology, carried out the November Pogrom, and unleashed the Holocaust.

I lived in Berlin’s Charlottenburg district, only a short distance from the once-majestic synagogue on Fasanenstrasse. The synagogue, which served the city’s liberal Jewish community, was destroyed by belligerent mobs who set it on fire during the night of November 9–10, 1938. But the violent attacks on the synagogue’s worshipers actually began much earlier. In 1931, several years before Hitler and the Nazis were elected to power, and while Fromm was still living in Berlin, several hundred SA men stormed the synagogue, committing acts of brutal violence that foreshadowed the terror to come. The synagogue was only a short walk from the psychoanalytic office that Fromm visited each day.1Close

When reflecting on the reality of the Holocaust, it is easy to be overwhelmed by the history that played out on Berlin’s streets. The persecution, deportation, and murder of Fromm’s family members breaks the bounds of comprehension. When Sophie bids farewell to her daughters and grandchildren, writing “we don’t know when we can write again,” the grief is overwhelming; it lingers, a tear in the heart of the parent who knows it is likely that she will never see her children again or feel the warmth of their embrace. Gertrud’s care for the children in the ghetto, where, as she says, “the misery prevents me from confronting the need,” reflects the loss of her own children, whereabouts unknown. After the Holocaust, the families of those who were murdered faced the anguish of irreparable separation and loss. Entire communities were extinguished, leaving a trail of trauma to be carried over generations.

As I struggled with the knowledge of what Fromm’s family members endured, I found solace in a local Berlin museum, located not far from where the majestic synagogue on Fasanenstrasse once stood. The museum housed the works of the early 20th-century German expressionist artist Käthe Kollwitz. From that point on, whenever I sought to grapple with horrors that the letters convey, there was a singular image in Kollwitz’s work (Figure 2.1) that came to mind, unbidden. I want to start this chapter by reflecting on what this image, and Kollwitz’s powerful portrayal of human suffering, can tell us.

Two human figures, fused together in grief and pain. A man and a woman, collapsed to their knees, lean into one another for support and are enveloped in darkness, signifying despair. Their faces are hidden but their bodies speak for them. The woman’s head is slumped down. The man has reached out with his left hand to console her, and with his right he covers his face, the agony too much to bear. The hands seem to express the strain, the bones and veins clearly visible, as if aging has taken place prematurely. The jagged lines where the two figures merge into one highlight their physical discomfort and emotional turmoil. The thin lines on the outsides of their bodies seem to melt into the sense of blackness that surrounds them.

The image we see is of two parents who mourn the death of their child. Their bodies are like physical shells that contain the suffering and trauma that endures within. Together, the parents have become holders of cherished memories that are now unbearably defined by absence and loss. Completed in 1923, The Parents is the last and most challenging of the seven woodcut prints that make up Kollwitz’s series entitled, simply, “War.” Shortly before she finished the series, Kollwitz returned to The Parents one more time because, as she wrote in her diary, “Pain is very dark.”2Close Kollwitz’s hope was to express the “totality of grief.”3Close

Kollwitz’s work provides a window into a kind of anguish that defies articulation. Her art represents the deep despair that follows the loss of those whose lives are taken unjustly. As the novelist Romain Rolland later said of Kollwitz, “She is the voice of the silence of the sacrificed.”4Close Kollwitz knew grief. Following the death of her own son in World War I, the image of the mother grieving her dead child became a forthright statement against the ravages of war. Indeed, Kollwitz’s work reflects the social and political landscape in Germany in the aftermath of World War I, which was to play a pivotal role in Fromm’s life.

Reflecting on the impact that World War I had on him, Fromm (1962a) remarked that the longer the massive conflict lasted, “the more urgent became the question how is this possible? How is it possible that millions of men continue to stay in the trenches, to kill innocent men of other nations, and to be killed and thus to cause the deepest pain to parents, wives, friends?” (p. 6). It is the same question that Kollwitz surely struggled with as she set herself the task of representing the emotional and physical burdens of loss and despair. Each time I reflect on the deaths of Gertrud and Sophie, I find myself returning to Kollwitz’s image and to Fromm’s question “How is this possible?” The answer surely alludes us, but as Fromm’s life and work show, the struggle to respond is important.

In this chapter, I want to consider the ways in which Fromm’s life in Germany shaped his response to Nazism and the Holocaust. Although Kollwitz and Fromm did not, to my knowledge, interact or know one another, Kollwitz’s work gives us the means to understand and examine the social, political, and psychological contexts of Fromm’s formative years. For Kollwitz, art became a way of effecting social change. For Fromm, writing became a means to educate and foster solidarity with others. Both sought to address the human cost of war and to explore avenues for social and political transformation. These parallels will provide us with a backdrop for examining Fromm’s response to World War I and his struggle to live and work in the face of the emerging Nazi threat. Above all, they enable us to gain an understanding of Fromm’s determined stance against injustice.

Kollwitz’s incisive social realism shed light on the political forces that shaped life in interwar Germany and fed the nation’s seemingly unstoppable march toward right-wing extremism. Kollwitz was herself directly affected by that history. Having grown up in a progressive household, Kollwitz arrived in Berlin at the turn of the 20th century. It was a city rife with poverty, and in her early art, Kollwitz depicted oppressed workers and women in different states of rebellion. By the outbreak of World War I in 1914, Kollwitz’s stance on social justice was well established. Shortly after the start of the war, Kollwitz’s youngest son, Peter, was killed in combat in Belgium. In her grief, she turned her focus to the suffering and sorrow that ensued from the savage violence of war.

In 1919, Kollwitz began work on the War series.5Close The seven woodcuts in the series all dealt with the tragedies of World War I and the emotional damage wrought on those who were left behind. In contrast to Kollwitz’s earlier works, the War series, and in particular The Parents, drew directly from her own life experience, focusing on the pain that she and so many others were forced to endure as a result of losing loved ones. However, rather than depicting the gruesome destruction and violence of battle, Kollwitz depicted women left to face their grief and fears alone, with their partners, or with each other. This enabled her art to become a clear denunciation of war and power of patriarchy. Kollwitz’s perspective on the lives of women forced to contend with malnutrition, poverty, and the death of their children evoke for me the kind of experiences described by Gertrud and Sophie in their letters.

By 1919, Kollwitz had become one of the foremost representatives of German expressionism and the first woman to be elected to the prestigious Prussian Academy of Art. Kollwitz continued to labor for many more years before she completed a memorial known as The Grieving Parents, which is located at the World War I war cemetery in Roggevelde, Belgium, where Peter was buried. Beginning as a monument for Peter and becoming a memorial to all victims of the war, she sculpted the figures of his mourning parents—her husband Karl and herself—kneeling, arms pressed to their chests, huddled in agony, thus transforming her intensely personal pain into a testimony to the suffering and loss of war. In a diary entry made in November 1922, Kollwitz spoke to the sense of obligation she felt to produce art that could speak to injustice: “Everyone works the way they can. . . I would like to exert influence in these times when human beings are so perplexed and in need of help” (Kollwitz, 1955, p. 104).

Kollwitz’s diary entries reveal how her life intersected with her art. By comparison we know relatively little about Fromm’s personal experience and thoughts. What is clear is that Fromm shared a similar outlook to Kollwitz and that their lives during the interwar years were shaped by similar social and political forces. In Beyond the Chains of Illusion from 1962, in a rare moment of public disclosure, Fromm acknowledged the formative effect of World War I. It was, he said, “the event that determined more than anything else my development” (Fromm, 1962a, p. 5). For the rest of his life, Fromm would theorize about the social and psychological conditions that led nations to go to war. “How is it possible that men stand in trenches for years and live like animals—and for what?” he asked. “The irrationality of human behavior impressed me in this way, and I became curious about the problem” (Fromm, 1962a, p. 7).

At the onset of war in 1914, Fromm was 14 years old, 4 years younger than Kollwitz’s son Peter. While Peter was one of the millions who volunteered to fight for their Kaiser, Fromm took a different stance:

I was a fourteen-year-old boy for whom the excitement of war, the celebration of victories, the tragedy of the death of individual soldiers I knew, were uppermost in my experience. I was not concerned with the problem of war as such; I was struck by its senseless inhumanity. (Fromm, 1962a, p. 5)

It was at this point that Fromm’s deep distrust of nationalism, which would be a guiding theme throughout his life, took root.

Fromm was enrolled in the Frankfurt’s Wöhler Gymnasium and witnessed the changes in his teachers and peers. In regard to one of his teachers, Fromm remarked, “How is it possible that a man who always seemed to have been so concerned with the preservation of peace should now be so jubilant about the war?” Fromm would later ask a similar question about Germans who expressed enthusiasm for Hitler. In 1914, Fromm was “struck by the hysteria of hate against the British which swept throughout Germany . . . suddenly they had become cheap mercenaries, evil and unscrupulous, trying to destroy our innocent and all too trusting German heroes. We were infected by the hate England mood” (Fromm, 1962a, p. 6). Only 20 years later another “hysteria of hate” would infect Germany, this time in the form of Nazi racial ideology.

Fromm clearly struggled to make sense of what he heard and saw, writing that “Year after year the healthy men of each nation, living like animals in caves, killed each other with rifles, hand grenades, machine-guns, bayonets; the slaughter continued, accompanied by false promises of a speedy victory, false protestations of one’s own innocence” (Fromm, 1962a, p. 7). The tragic reality of war was captured by Kollwitz in a diary entry from July 1917, when she poignantly contemplated what epithet to place on Peter’s gravestone: “Here lies German youth. Or: Here lie Germany’s finest young men. Or: Here lie the youthful dead. Or simply: Here lie the young” (Kollwitz, 1955, pp. 82–83).

While Fromm’s comments shed light on his response to the war and the virulent nationalism that fueled it, the effects of the conflict were soon seen and felt on the home front, with far-reaching consequences. Despite being far removed from the trenches, food rationing in Germany began in 1915. By the winter of 1916 there was widespread hunger, a condition that worsened with time. Estimates suggest that well over a half-million Germans died from diseases related to hunger and malnutrition.6Close Urban centers and working-class Germans were especially affected. Soldiers who returned home on furlough told of the bloodshed and carnage; those who were injured or disabled by the war became more visible with time. In the spring of 1918, with the onset of a global pandemic, the so-called Spanish flu, malnourishment, disease, and death increased exponentially.7Close

The impact of the war on Fromm’s political development would be long-lasting. As Fromm states,

When the war ended in 1918, I was a deeply troubled young man who was obsessed by the question of how war was possible, by the wish to understand the irrationality of human mass behavior, by a passionate desire for peace and international understanding. More, I had become deeply suspicious of all official ideologies and declarations, and filled with the conviction “of all one must doubt.” (1962a, p. 8)

Fromm reveals that the war also had a direct, personal impact: “A number of my uncles and cousins and older schoolmates were killed in the war” (Fromm, 1962a, p. 7). In addition, Oswald Sussman, who had lived with the Fromm family between 1912 and 1914, died in the conflict. Sussman was a self-declared socialist who fostered Fromm’s nascent political awareness. The influence of Sussman, together with the irrationality of the First World War, seems to have drawn Fromm toward Marxism at an early age.8Close

Beyond these various influences on his development, Fromm experienced an intensely religious upbringing. As Fromm tells it, “I was brought up in a religious Jewish family, and the writings of the old testament touched me and exhilarated me more than anything else I was exposed to. . . . I was moved by the prophetic writings, by Isaiah, Amos, Hosea,” particularly the teaching that “nation shall not lift sword against nation, neither shall they learn war anymore; when all nations will be friends” (Fromm, 1962a, pp. 4–5), As Fromm aptly states, “what could be more exciting and beautiful to me than the prophetic vision of universal brotherhood and peace?” (Fromm, 1962a, p. 5). But being Jewish in Germany also meant being confronted with the reality of antisemitism. As Fromm admits,

Probably the immediate reason for this absorption by the idea of peace and internationalism is to be found in the situation in which I found myself: a Jewish boy in a Christian environment, experiencing small episodes of antisemitism but, more importantly, a feeling of strangeness and of clannishness on both sides. (Fromm, 1962, p. 5)

While Fromm wrote relatively little about antisemitism, Nazi Germany’s policies of racial persecution and terror against German Jews would play a determinative role in his life and work.

In the wake of Auschwitz and the untold deaths of World War II, it is easy to overlook the utter devastation wrought by World War I. Mass slaughter, mechanized combat on a scale never before seen, total civilian mobilization, and theaters of war that involved nations around globe all combined to shatter long-standing conceptions of security and continuity. The generation that survived the war was indelibly marked by the destructiveness of the years-long conflict. In Germany, as wounded and dispirited troops returned from battle, the human cost of the war began to settle in: some two million German soldiers had been killed and another 1.5 million were disabled.

Despite 4 years of battle, Germany had little to show for its effort. Poverty, suicide, and substance abuse were widespread among veterans. The Kaiser was forced to abdicate, and a German delegation made up of Social Democratic politicians from the newly minted Weimar Republic traveled to Versailles to sign the peace treaty. Germany was unprepared for the harsh penalties imposed by the Allies, who demanded massive reparation payments, demilitarization, and significant territory. Many Germans believed that they had been let down, if not “stabbed in the back” by their new government, a view that the generals were eager to exploit as they sought to retain power. Those on the political left saw an opportunity to establish a new socialist government. But the attempted proletarian revolution in 1918–1919 was violently suppressed.

In the aftermath, Kollwitz produced a woodcut that depicted the funeral of Karl Liebknecht (Figure 2.2), the socialist leader who was ruthlessly murdered alongside Rosa Luxemburg by right-wing nationalists in Berlin’s Tiergarten. Kollwitz was asked by Liebknecht’s family to draw his body. On the morning of January 25, 1919, she went to the morgue to make her drawings. Later that day she joined the funeral as Liebknecht was buried together with 31 other political victims. Although Kollwitz was not politically active in a formal sense, the mass demonstration that followed the funeral made a deep impression on her. Kollwitz’s woodcut was an evocative and moving memorial to Liebknecht and a powerful indictment of Germany’s conservative establishment.

Following the loss of the monarchy, many Germans experienced a kind of psychological and political vacuum. Germany had little experience with democracy, and despite the progressive policies of early Weimar governments, from women’s emancipation to social welfare programs, the benefits of parliamentary rule often went unnoted. The economic and social crises of the era meant that the democratic regime struggled to get full support from the population. The hyperinflation of 1923 and the Great Depression that followed the stock market crash of 1929 exacerbated underlying weaknesses. As the political center fragmented, a divided populace drifted toward the radical extremes. Communists sought revolutionary change and engaged in a bitter political battle with their left-wing rivals, the Social Democratic Party. On the right, ultranationalist sentiment fueled the rise of Hitler and the Nazi Party.

Fromm thus entered into adulthood in a period of social and political upheaval. His deep religious learning inspired a sense of responsibility for others and for a healing of the world in which he lived. His training as a sociologist helped him to understand how human experience is structured by social forces. But it was his introduction to psychoanalysis that proved determinative. Psychoanalysis enabled Fromm to analyze and interpret the lure of authoritarianism and the turbulence that surrounded him, and it offered a means to explore the motivations that spurred people to act in ways that were often against their own interests.

Fromm was introduced to psychoanalysis by Frieda Reichmann. They met through mutual friends, and he began visiting Frieda in the early 1920s while she was working at the Weisser Hirsch Sanatorium in Dresden. Frieda was 11 years his senior, but they shared many interests and were intellectually well matched. Together, Frieda and Erich hatched a plan to establish a psychoanalytic therapeutic community (das Therapeutikum) in Heidelberg, which had two noteworthy characteristics. It was intended specifically for a Jewish clientele, and everyone who lived or worked there, including the cook and the cleaners, entered into analysis with Frieda.9Close This included Erich, who thus became one of her patients as well as her lover.10Close Frieda and Erich seemed to recognize the precariousness of their situation and conferred with a senior psychoanalyst, Karl Landauer. He advised them that they could get married once they finished the analysis. By today’s standards, of course, Landauer’s advice would be manifestly ill-founded and against basic ethical principles. Yet, in the mid-1920s, the limited understanding of power differentials and erotic transferences within a therapeutic relationship seemed to make such marriage a feasible, if ultimately doomed, possibility.

Initially at least, their relationship prospered. Frieda and Erich shared a similar outlook and together made the decision to give up their Jewish orthodoxy. Frieda supported Erich when he underwent an analysis with Wilhelm Wittenberg in Munich, which was subsequently followed by a period of supervision with Landauer at the Southwest German Psychoanalytic Working Group in Frankfurt. In order to finish his psychoanalytic training, Fromm moved to Berlin in 1928, where he completed a training analysis with Hanns Sachs, a personal friend of Freud’s and one of the earliest adherents of psychoanalysis.

In the 1920s, Berlin was a city of deep contrasts. By the time Fromm arrived, Berlin had experienced decades of uninterrupted growth. The rapidly industrializing economy lured huge numbers of workers, but the city was unprepared to meet their needs. The plight of Berlin’s workers was reflected in their destitute living conditions and the lack of adequate public sanitation. In her art, Kollwitz depicted people enduring illness, hunger or death, scenes that she observed on a daily basis throughout her 49-year marriage to a doctor in one of Berlin’s working-class neighborhoods. Berlin’s oft-impressive street fronts hid the poverty that lay behind. Apartments buildings were built around a series of inner courtyards, so that only the front of the buildings that abutted the street were open to the air and light. Apartments that faced the inside were small, dark, and frequently overcrowded.

At the same time, Berlin became a European center for innovative arts and culture. The city embraced a culture of permissiveness and experimentation and came to exemplify the liberal and democratic outlook of Weimar Germany. Psychoanalysis in Berlin thrived and reflected the cultural modernism of the city. The Berlin Institute was at the forefront of the growing profession. It was infused with radical and progressive ideas, and many of the analysts who trained at the Institute saw themselves as working toward social transformation. Among the leaders of this outlook was Otto Fenichel, who organized and led a group known as the Children’s Seminar, named for its many younger members. It met every 2 weeks until the threat posed by the Nazis forced its members to disperse in 1933. Fromm was a key member of the group and was lauded by Fenichel, who judged his work to be of “fundamental importance” (cited in Jacoby, 1983, p. 71).

In the early 1920s, the Berlin Institute set up the Poliklinik, a free treatment center based on the belief that psychoanalysis should be available to everyone, regardless of income or social class. All of the Berlin analysts were obliged to donate their time or financial support. The Poliklinik was flooded with applications, and by the time Fromm arrived, it had already been expanded. Fromm’s association with the free clinic soon led him to establish a similar clinic alongside the new Frankfurt Psychoanalytic Institute. Fromm came to see psychoanalysis as an inherently progressive movement that connected individual well-being with societal well-being. This viewpoint would be at the center of Fromm’s professional development, but the rapidly deteriorating political situation in Germany made such a progressive approach increasingly difficult to sustain.

By the late 1920s, the democratic government of the Weimar Republic had survived multiple challenges, so there was no reason to believe it would fail. But the rapid rise of the Nazi Party as a viable political force proved insurmountable. The Nazis were initially a fringe right-wing paramilitary group, made up of disaffected and nationalistic World War I veterans. After the so-called Munich Beer Hall Putsch in 1923, which landed Hitler in prison, the Nazis changed their tactics and became involved in organized politics. Though they had little early success, the mass unemployment that followed the financial crash provided fertile ground for the recruitment of new members.

The economic crisis in Germany was matched by a series of political crises. Political parties sought to promote the interests of their supporters, leading to a host of conflicting economic demands. From 1930 to 1933, parliamentary government functioned in name only. Germany was essentially ruled by a presidential dictatorship as opposing parties took to the streets to express their demands. In working-class districts of Berlin, flags adorned with hammer-and-sickle emblems fought for prominence with swastikas. Radical political factions fought to secure support, and violent confrontations between politically affiliated paramilitary groups, the communist Red Front Fights and Nazi Brown Shirts, played out on the streets.11Close

Fromm found himself at the center of this developing political maelstrom and felt compelled to comment on the events around him. In 1928, he presented a paper on “Psychoanalysis of the Petty Bourgeoisie,” a topic that soon found expression in his research on the authoritarian tendencies of German workers. In 1929, Fromm gave a lecture on “Psychoanalysis and Sociology,” which pointed toward a synthesis between Freud and Marx. In 1931, he published another essay entitled “Politics and Psychoanalysis”. Fromm’s cross-disciplinary prowess was recognized by Max Horkheimer, who appointed him the Institute for Social Research’s director of social psychology and psychoanalysis.12Close

The start of Fromm’s career as a German intellectual thus looked full of promise. But two life-threatening events intervened: a diagnosis of tuberculosis of the lungs in July 1931, and the election of the Nazi Party in January 1933. Over the next decade, Fromm’s life was directly shaped by these dual threats; their emotional and physical effects lingered far longer. Fromm’s health crisis seemed to mirror the political crisis unfolding in Germany. Within a relatively short period of time, more and more Germans lent their support to Hitler. In September 1930, the Nazi Party gained 18% of the vote and became the second largest party in the Reichstag. In July 1932, they gained 37% and became the largest party. In January 1933, Hitler was appointed chancellor, and in March of that year the Nazi Party gained over 44% of the vote. Decrees creating a one-party state and cementing Hitler’s position as dictator were quickly passed. In short order, the Nazis banned all other political parties, outlawed trade unions, imprisoned political opponents, enacted their racial ideology, and began their reign of terror.

As these ominous political events were playing out in Berlin, Fromm was fighting a personal battle against tuberculosis. On the recommendation of his doctors, he traveled to Davos, Switzerland, to convalesce. Prior to the advent of antibiotics, tuberculosis posed a grave threat. For those who could afford it, the sanatoriums of Davos offered hope. In the 1860s, a treatment based on fresh air, sunlight, and generous amounts of food and dairy was pioneered by Dr. Alexander Spengler, who noticed that the population of Davos remained largely unaffected by tuberculosis. Treatments often lasted months on end. Although there was no medical cure, the sanatoriums of Davos at least presented the possibility of containing the disease.13Close

Davos became a place of recovery for Fromm, but he could not escape the shadow of Nazism. Germany’s incendiary right-wing politics had embedded themselves in the Swiss town. Among the many Germans who lived and worked in Davos was a fanatical supporter of Hitler, Wilhelm Gustloff. In 1931, Gustloff became leader of the local chapter of the National Socialist German Workers’ Party (Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei; NSDAP), and in 1932, he became the leader of the party for all of Switzerland. The NSDAP had a strong influence on the German community in Davos, invested heavily in local property, and bought numerous sanatoriums where staff and guests were screened according to Nazi racial values. Hitler greetings were common among German expats, and signage for the local branch of the Nazi Party could be seen alongside those for doctors’ surgeries.14Close

Gustloff actively agitated against Jewish guests and anyone whom he thought might question the policies of the Nazi Party. As a result of his efforts, Davos became known as Hitler’s Spa (Hitlerbad). After Gustloff was shot and killed by a Jewish medical student from Yugoslavia in 1936, he was turned into a Nazi martyr. Gustloff was given a state funeral in Germany and lauded by Hitler and the Nazi Party elite. His name was even used to christen the cruise ship, the MV Wilhelm Gustloff, which was sunk in the Baltic Sea by a Soviet submarine in January 1945, with the loss of about 9,400 German refugees and military personnel, a story memorialized in Günter Grass’s controversial late-life novel, Crabwalk, about German memory and loss (Grass, 2002). Following Gustloff’s assassination, local Swiss authorities sought to tamp down Nazi activity, and when the war began, Switzerland declared itself neutral, though it maintained good relations with both Germany and Italy and its banks profited over the course of the Holocaust.

Fromm first traveled to Davos in the fall of 1931 and entered quarantine in the Schatzalp Sanatorium. Until his departure for the United States in the spring of 1934, Fromm primarily resided in Switzerland. The initial phase of Fromm’s illness receded in the spring of 1932, and he began to commute back and forth to Geneva to work at the Institute for Social Research, which had just relocated there from Frankfurt. Given its Marxist orientation and the fact that many of its staff were Jewish, the Institute had chosen to leave Germany even before Hitler assumed full power. Fromm’s connection with the Institute during these difficult years was a lifeline, providing both intellectual and financial support.

Starting in the summer of 1932, Fromm lived in an apartment in Locarno-Monti in southern Switzerland that belonged to Karen Horney.15Close As Fromm’s marriage with Frieda faltered, his friendship with Horney blossomed. Fromm originally met Horney during the regular visits that he and Frieda paid to Georg Groddeck at his sanatorium in Baden Baden beginning in the mid-1920s. Groddeck was known to be a warm and dynamic personality, and it was in Baden Baden that Fromm also got to know the Hungarian psychoanalyst Sandor Ferenczi. Fromm would later remark that Groddeck and Ferenczi had the strongest influence on his work as a psychoanalyst.

After a downturn in his condition, Fromm was forced to return to Davos. He signed a rental contract for an apartment in Davos Platz beginning December 1, 1932. The rental contract lists Fromm’s home address as Berlin, though by then he had closed down his psychoanalytic practice and entered into the full employ of the Institute. Fromm witnessed the fateful German elections of January and March 1933 from Davos and clearly hoped to be able to remain in Switzerland. However, like so many Jewish refugees living in Switzerland at the time, both he and the Institute were forced to look elsewhere for safety.

In the fall of 1933, Fromm was well enough to travel to Chicago at Horney’s invitation. He gave lectures at the Chicago Psychoanalytic Institute, which was directed by Franz Alexander, and met the American academics Harald Lasswell and John Dollard, both of whom would later become important colleagues. Fromm’s visit to the United States proved decisive and in the spring of 1934 he received the valuable visa that permitted him to immigrate. He began his journey in the middle of May 1934. Fromm traveled via Geneva, Paris, and Le Havre. From there he crossed to England, where he set sail from Southampton on the ocean liner George Washington and finally arrived in New York on May 31, 1934.16Close While Fromm was undoubtedly relieved to embark on his journey, he was also faced with a sobering fact: He did not know when he would next see his family members, friends, and colleagues who remained behind in Germany. The new anti-Jewish legislation of the Nazi government portended a dark future.

While tuberculosis presented a constant struggle, Fromm’s convalescence in Davos also provided an opportunity for periods of uninterrupted study. Fromm turned his attention to elaborating a critique of patriarchy and a theory of human compassion, two important ideas that would later influence his response to National Socialism. I want to briefly examine Fromm’s approach, with the caveat that Fromm’s ideas were still in the early stages of development and thus are neither complete nor always entirely clear.

In order to formulate a critique of patriarchy, Fromm focused on the values of duty, fear, and submission to authority that permeated German society. It was in this context that he became interested in the notion of matriarchy and Johann Jacob Bachofen’s work The Mother Right, which was one of the first attempts to present a study of the evolution of the family as a social institution.17Close Fromm took his cue from Friedrich Engels, whose book The Origin of the Family (1884) was strongly indebted to Bachofen. Following Engels, Fromm suggested that the notion of matriarchal society “has a close kinship with the ideals of socialism” (Fromm, 1934, p. 28). He associated compassion and solidarity with the working class and contrasted these values with duty and subordination, which he said were characteristic of patriarchal societies.

Fromm believed that the study of matricentric cultures could shine light on the destructive nature of the patricentric principle. Fromm was highly critical of authoritarian attitudes and the dangers they posed when they kept people docile in the face of authority.18Close This was similar to the argument he would later develop in Escape From Freedom. By contrast, the appeal of a matriarchal society could be traced to the fact that “maternal love and compassion are the dominant moral principles, where injury to one’s fellowman is the gravest sin, and where private property does not yet exist” (Fromm, 1934, p. 29). As Fromm wrote,

The patricentric individual—and society—is characterized by a complex of traits in which the following are predominant: a strict superego, guilt feelings, docile love for paternal authority, desire and pleasure at dominating weaker people, acceptance of suffering as punishment for one’s own guilt, and a damaged capacity for happiness. The matricentric complex, by contrast, is characterized by a feeling of optimistic trust in mother’s unconditional love, far fewer guilt feelings, a far weaker superego, and a greater capacity for pleasure and happiness. Along with these traits there also develops the ideal of motherly compassion and love for the weak and others in need of help. (Fromm, 1934, p. 41)

From today’s perspective, the bifurcation of matriarchy and patriarchy rests on a questionable gender essentialism.19Close We can wonder, moreover, about the source of Fromm’s personal interest in matriarchy.20Close Yet it is also important to note that Fromm was not alone in his quest to understand matriarchy. Left-wing intellectuals at the time were attracted to the promise they saw in a matriarchal alternative to patriarchal society. In 1935, Fromm’s colleague Walter Benjamin wrote his own essay in praise of Bachofen and acknowledged Fromm’s “remarkable study on the sociopsychological meaning of matriarchal theories” (Benjamin, 1935, p. 20; see also p. 311).21Close

The importance that Fromm placed on matriarchy also has a specific historical and situational meaning that is easily overlooked. Fromm’s study of matriarchy took place while he was living in Davos. From his vantage point in Switzerland, if Fromm looked south to Italy, he would have observed that Mussolini and fascism were already firmly entrenched, while if he looked north, Hitler and the Nazi Party had just been elected to power in Germany and were in the process of establishing their racialized, totalitarian state. The ideals of fascism were not only pervasive; they were expanding, even on the streets of Davos. Those ideals valorized patriarchy and were highly critical of any notion of female emancipation. For fascists, patriarchy was bound up with an image of hypermasculinity. The leader of a fascist nation was seen as an extension of the father in a traditional patriarchal family, embodying strength and wielding authority over others. Thus, according to the Nazi ideologue Alfred Rosenberg, the Nazi state was based on male warriors and should be entirely free of the influence of women.22Close For the Nazis, the highest duty of women was to give birth and raise children in support of the German racial community, a reinterpretation to the traditional German notion of Kinder, Küche, Kirche (children, kitchen, church). While women were denigrated and cast in need of protection, the militarized fascist state was presented as the male embodiment of the power and authority.

It is worth remembering that this is precisely what Kollwitz sought to challenge with her powerful antiwar message. Kollwitz’s critique of the fascist ideals of motherhood was surprisingly close to that of Fromm. She focused on strong women and mothers who were forced to grieve their children as a result of wars spurred on by the murderous nationalism espoused by male politicians, military leaders, and monarchs. When the Nazis were elected to power in 1933, they objected to Kollwitz’s antiwar message and forced her to resign from the Prussian Academy of Art.23Close In response, Kollwitz joined with other artists to organize in opposition. In 1936, she was arrested by the Gestapo and told that she would be sent to a concentration camp if she did not reveal the names of other German artists with anti-Nazi beliefs. Kollwitz remained silent and was eventually released due to her age. From that point on, she was expressly forbidden to publish or exhibit her work. Her studio was closed, and her art was banned and classified as “degenerate.”24Close

Fromm’s critique of patriarchy not only challenged the dominant social norms and power structures of the time. He also took aim at Freud’s pessimistic and patriarchal account of human sociality. In Freud’s account, humans are predatory creatures who are forced to sacrifice their instinctual freedom in order to live together. As Freud wrote in Civilization and Its Discontents, “men are not gentle creatures who want to be loved . . . they are, on the contrary, creatures among whose instinctual endowments is to be reckoned a powerful share of aggressiveness” (Freud, 1930/1985, p. 302). Freud’s speculative anthropology was heavily gendered. Whereas men were seen as capable of using reason to stem their inclinations, women were given to impulsive action and defined by their passions. The problem, as Carol Gilligan has observed, is that “because his psychology read patriarchy as nature, Freud did not question why sexual love is so problematic and aggression, including war, so irresistible” (Gilligan, 2010, p. 324).

Fromm developed his critique of Freud in Social Determinants of Psychoanalytic Theory (1935), which he likewise wrote in Davos. According to Fromm, Freud was “a classical representative of the patricentric character type” (p. 13). In this patricentric perspective, “the meaning of life lies not in the person’s happiness or well-being, but in the fulfillment of duty and subordination to authority. There is no unconditional right to love and happiness” (p. 13).25Close Fromm read Freud’s technical prescriptions for how psychoanalysts should interact with their patients along similar lines. Freud’s emphases on “indifference,” on “emotional coldness,” and on being “opaque to their patients” (p. 4) were interpreted by Fromm as reflections of the patriarchal bourgeois society in which Freud lived.

By contrast, Fromm sought to emphasize the centrality of compassion in human sociality and found an ally in Ferenczi.26Close Fromm referred to Freud’s attitude as a “patricentric-authoritarian, deep down misanthropic ‘tolerance’” (p. 18), which he distinguished from Ferenczi’s “philanthropic and affirmative attitude towards the patient” (p. 19). According to Fromm, Ferenczi recognized “how decisively important it is for patients that they feel absolutely certain of the unconditional sympathy of the analyst” and that a course of analysis could only end when the patient achieved “a feeling of equality in relation to the physician.” (p. 15). Fromm thus underlined the role of “kindness” (p. 16) in the interaction, which, he said, revealed our compassionate nature as human beings.

Fromm’s emphasis the quality of compassion also illustrates his proximity to Kollwitz. In her compassionate depictions of human suffering and oppression, Kollwitz sought to recognize women who had been silenced by society by offering them a voice and a face.27Close Given the prominence of such themes as grieving and death in Kollwitz’s art, this affirmative aspect of her work has often been neglected. In fact, Kollwitz knew the joys of relating. In March 1928, she wrote in her diary,

Joy in others and being in harmony with them is one of the deepest pleasures of life. Love or infatuation need not have anything to do with it. I know that in recent years I have been fortunate enough to have this splendid feeling, and I have been quite conscious of what a blessing it is. (Kollwitz, 1955, p. 116)

Kollwitz thus acknowledged the ways in which compassion could foster a deep and meaningful connection with other human beings. In the wake of the Holocaust, this idea would become central to Fromm’s writings on love and solidarity and form a necessary counterpoint to human cruelty and destructiveness.

During the late 1920s and early 1930s, as the Nazis were consolidating their power base and spreading their hateful ideology, it must have seemed to Fromm that the human capacity for compassion was becoming increasingly diseased.28Close In the years that followed, events in Germany continued to spiral, and Fromm looked on with concern from his temporary refuge in Switzerland. By 1934, when Fromm boarded a ship for New York, the Nazi regime was actively implementing its anti-Jewish legislation. The contexts that shaped Fromm’s early development as a sociologist and psychoanalyst enabled him to address this growing Nazi threat, but neither he nor his family members who remained behind in Germany could possibly imagine what would happen next. As the Holocaust correspondence attests, and as I will show in the next chapter, Fromm’s quest to save his relatives, friends, and colleagues would become a central theme of his life as a German Jewish refugee and inalterably shape the direction of his work.