Emembering Erich Fromm by STEVEN S
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Propriety of the Erich Fromm Document Center. For personal use only. Citation or publication of material prohibited without express written permission of the copyright holder. Eigentum des Erich Fromm Dokumentationszentrums. Nutzung nur für persönliche Zwecke. Veröffentlichungen – auch von Teilen – bedürfen der schriftlichen Erlaubnis des Rechteinhabers. J? r> l( >• in: J&e "tj&cvtiU. -ftcc-fnfc^r ,-t-*((tf&o yt emembering Erich Fromm By STEVEN S. SCHWARZSCHILD ERICH FROMM was a fatherly friend to me— I sometimes wondered why Fromm went out of even in the literal sense that he reminded me in his way to be so gracious to me. He and my father more than one way of my father. had known one another when they were young men. Also, he and I were very self-conscious When he came to Washington University, not German Jews ("Yekkes")—socialists in the tradi the only time, in November, 1967 for a week-long tion that Fromm, in the title of an anthology he symposium, so many students flocked around him edited, designated as Socialist Humanism, oppo that loudspeakers had to be set up outside of nents of political Zionism on Jewish, socialist and Graham Chapel for the overflow crowd to hear ethical grounds—and quintessential examples of him. One afternoon during that week he and his wife and my wife and I were sitting around our the "symbiosis" of classical Jewish and classical humanist cultures. But there were also real differ dining-room table for a very Germanic coffee-and- ences between us: he was of a previous generation cake, when our son, who had never seen Fromm, not only chronologically. He had, with wry nos came home from high school. He stopped as talgia, ceased being an observant Jew, and I though thunderstruck in the doorway. Afterwards haven't; he was a psychologist with strong philo he explained: my father had died very recently, but sophical and political interests, whereas my phi our son thought that he saw his grandfather sitting losophizing is strongly anti-psychologistic; he was there—that's how much the two resembled one an a man of world-fame, and I am a modest professor other. at a modest university in the American Middle • There is, indeed, a prototype of German-Jewish West. middle-class intellectual that shares a character istic physiognomy. Fromm, like myself and my I figured out Fromm's reasons for being inter family, came from Frankfurt-am-Main, the most ested in me. For one thing, we did, as I have said, historic German-Jewish community. (In Hebrew share a number of values that greatly mattered to literature it is sometimes referred to as "the Jeru us. Fromm, sure as he was of himself in psychol salem of the West"). Children of its old families ogy, sociology, politics, and basic ethics, felt a lit tend to be very conscious of their lineage, and so tle insecure in philosophical and Jewish sources in was Fromm. I recall that on the same afternoon his later years. He had started out as a student some of our conversation dealt with a significant of philosophy, not of medicine, and his Ph.D. episode in the 19th-century history of Frankfurt thesis at the University of Heidelberg dealt with Jewry: the dispute between Rabbi Samson Ra the line from Karaism through Hasidism, to Re phael Hirsch, the founder of "neo-Orthodoxy," form Judaism. He, therefore, liked to use me, and and Rabbi Seligmann Bamberger, "the Wuerz- I was delighted to let myself be used, as a sort of burger Rav," who was a direct ancestor of sounding board, in which he felt he could trust Fromm's. Rabbi Bamberger, though representing and from whose echo he could measure the unreconstructed Orthodoxy, opposed Hirsch's se strength of his own voice in Jewish and philo cession from the united Jewish community on the sophical matters. Thus he wrote to me on Oct. 11, ground that Reform elements had subverted its 1974: "Indeed our communications are exceed Jewish legitimacy. In glancing over my letters ingly sporadic but whenever they occur they feel from Fromm, I see that on March 30, 1967, he as if they were bits of an uninterrupted discussion. had written to me: "I was always a strong partisan I think the reason is that there is so much in com of the Bamberger standpoint." A lateral forebear mon in our thinking that we feel in many ways at of mine, Emanuel Schwarzschild, published An home with each other, at least I do." Open Letter to His Honor, District-Rabbi S. B. Bamberger of Wuerzburg (Frankfurt: Kauffmann, WHEN I came to Switzerland from Israel, in 1877), in which he sided with Rabbi Hirsch. 1975, I wrote him beforehand that I would be in Zurich. Although he offered to meet us there, he clearly preferred that we visit him in Locarno- Dr. Schwarzschild is Professor of Philosophy and Judaic Studies at Washington University. Muralto where he lived (and died). We spent a Fall, 1980 29 Schwarzschild, S. S., 1980: Remembering Erich Fromm, In: The Jewish Spectator, Fall 1980, pp. 29-33. i;>~m Propriety of the Erich Fromm Document Center. For personal use only. Citation or publication of material prohibited without express written permission of the copyright holder. Eigentum des Erich Fromm Dokumentationszentrums. Nutzung nur für persönliche Zwecke. Veröffentlichungen – auch von Teilen – bedürfen der schriftlichen Erlaubnis des Rechteinhabers. \ week with the Fromms, who had a smallish apart years, never was in contact with that Jewish di ment. In order to persuade their friends to come mension. and visit them they made a practice of renting the In death, Fromm's and Marcuse's kinship can most stunning room and terrace in the hotel where be seen more clearly again. Both belonged to the the Locarno Pact had been signed, in which to put physiognomic type of German-Jewish middle-class up their guests—overlooking Lake Maggiore and intellectuals that I mentioned. Both tried some the snow-covered mountains around it. Fromm how to unite Marx, Freud and Heidegger in their was at the time finishing his last major book, To respective teachings. Both fought valiantly against Have Or To Be, a strange combination of Marx all forms of totalitarianism and of private or col and the medieval German mystic Master Eckhart. lective sacro egoismo. I think that Marcuse occa We spent a part of every day having him "talk the sionally slipped into socialist pseudo-messianism, book at me" and I briefly reacting. which can become an accessory to totalitarianism, , But I left no dent on the book. I have always as in the case of Ernst Bloch, another branch on had my qualms about Fromm's revisionist "soft" the same tree. They all died within a short time of Freudianism. Though I share some admiration one another, almost the last of a great and tragic for. Marx and Master Eckhart, I vehemently reject generation. My remembrance of Fromm cannot the quasi-ontologism of the mystic, conveyed in possibly reach the moral splendor of the short let the word "Being" in the title of the book. Fromm ter that Marcuse's children sent to the N.Y. Re defines that "being" pretty much as "becoming" view of Books (9/27/79) after his death: they as. "active being." Still, looking for "tran said what could also be said of Fromm—that his scendence," he talks about "the x experience" of admirers should act in line with and in memory "being." For example, in You Shall Be As Gods, of their teacher—that he regarded himself first and A Radical Interpretation of the Old Testament and foremost as a universalistic German Jew (so that Its Tradition, he even refers in passing to Rudolf over this atheist's grave kaddish was recited)— Bultmann. Also in his fight against technological and that contributions, if any, should be sent to instrumentalization, there seem to be the under Rudi Dutschke (the leader of the German stu tones of Heidegger, which totally repels me. I, dents' rebellion in the 1960s, then in Denmark, therefore, argued in favor of "Doing," praxis, as since prematurely deceased) on behalf of a dis the antithesis of "Having." But the book is, of senter in the jails of the East-German Stalinists. course, Fromm's. His practiced belief in the value of- mutually respectful argumentation was, how AMERICAN obituaries of Fromm quote him as ever, again substantiated, as it always was. What having said that he left Judaism in the 1920s. he liked to call "the character structure" of sworn Well, yes—and the leopard has removed his spots. enmity to all forms of private or social, capitalist Fromm himself told me the witty pun that the or bolshevik, dictatorship was again displayed by artist Hermann Struck made during Fromm's ob him. servant period: "Fromm ('pious') he is, but he's still Erich." You have to say this with a German accent He and his first wife Frieda Reichmann con THAT BUSINESS of "being" (fuzzy and danger ducted, in the 1930s the only Orthodox-Jewish psy ous as it is) reminds one of the fact that in the choanalytic institute. In the 1960s, Fromm wrote 1920s, when Fromm's mind was being shaped, the to me from Mexico, where he was men living, ask great philosophical event in Germany, and even ing me to remind him of the details of Jewish law tually beyond, was Martin Heidegger's Being and regarding "harugay malchut"—the martyrs of a Time. It exercises, to my continuous chagrin and government—i.e., people killed by a ruling power outrage, tremendous influence also on the avant- because they testified to a higher truth.