The Lives of Erich Fromm: Love’s Prophet

Erich Fromm was born in Frankfurt at the start of the twentieth century. At the time, Frankfurt was the financial capital of Germany. Situated on the Main River near its juncture with the Rhine, it was one of Europe’s major transportation and commercial centers and a historical magnet for Jewish business and intellectual ventures. Goethe had been born in Frankfurt, and idealistic liberals had gathered there in 1848 to try to create a democratic and united nation. In brief, major German economic, political, and intellectual changes often registered themselves first in Frankfurt.

The city resonated deeply with Fromm for much of his life. It was there that he first became acquainted with the Talmud, with Jewish ethical traditions, and with new socialist ideas. As a student in a local gymnasium (an advanced secondary school) during World War I, he became disillusioned with jingoistic nationalism, sought world peace, and became what he would eventually call a “humanist.” A young man after the war, Fromm was seduced by an older woman, Frieda Reichmann, while he was her analysand. To Fromm, Reichmann seemed brilliant, exciting, even angelic. He married her, and she helped him to become acquainted with the clinical and theoretical dimensions of Freud’s new “science of the psyche.” Joining the esteemed Frankfurt Institute for Social Research and becoming a significant contributor to its work in Critical Theory, Fromm proposed new ways of discussing the findings of Freud through the aid of Marx. This became the basis for his work as a social commentator, what we have come to call a “public intellectual.” Although young Fromm sometimes lived outside Frankfurt—in Heidelberg, Munich, and Berlin—“home” remained the city of his birth. Whenever he considered what it meant to be a German Jew—psychologically, intellectually, and historically—he thought of Frankfurt. Indeed, Fromm’s enduring classic on authoritarianism, Escape from Freedom, was written with Frankfurt in mind.

When Fromm was born in 1900, Frankfurt Jews had yet to be fully assimilated into middle-class culture. Some clung to rituals of the past even as they embraced the modernizing presence of money and the marketplace. Fromm experienced this dual pull as discomforting: “I felt quite at home neither in the world I lived in, nor in the old world of traditions.” But if he was to choose between modern capitalism and traditional Jewish orthodoxy, he preferred the latter. He described his earliest years in Frankfurt’s Jewish community as having a reclusive, “medieval atmosphere, in which everything is dedicated to traditional learning.” Fromm would seek out or promote this kind of community for the rest of his life.1

Consistent with his embrace of a “medieval” tradition of Talmudic study over the marketplace, Fromm offered an admittedly “idealized” portrayal of his great-grandfather on his father’s side, Seligmann Bär Bamberger, who had been one of the most prominent and learned German rabbis during the middle decades of the nineteenth century. Indeed, Bamberger had founded a center of Torah study and was regarded as a preeminent authority on a variety of Hebrew Bible topics. He wanted his writings to be studied by women and was known for his books that dealt with Halacha, focusing on ethics in matters of daily life. Bamberger urged Jews to cling to Orthodoxy by resisting Reform-dominated congregations. Above all, he appealed to the more traditionally minded to resist modernizing trends in German Jewish life and doctrine. So fundamental was Rabbi Bamberger to Fromm’s vision of this “medieval” past that he minimized the elements of nineteenth-century biological racism in Bamberger’s publications.²

Bamberger’s daughter, Rahel, married Rabbi Seligmann Pinchas Fromm, who became a leader of the Frankfurt Jewish community. They had ten children. Five of the six girls married professionals—primarily teachers. The sons were ambitious, one becoming a successful merchant, one a doctor, and one a distinguished lawyer and ethicist. Naphtali, Fromm’s father, considered himself the most marginal son in the family—an undistinguished wine merchant who regretted that he had not become a rabbi. Like their parents, the children were Orthodox Jews and attended synagogue regularly. Intelligent, humorous, and interested in the arts, Rahel was close to all of her children and did much to hold the family together; her husband devoted most of his time to Talmudic study.³

The Krause family—Erich’s maternal relations—was less distinguished. Initially, the Krauses had migrated from Russia to Finland, where they had been converted to Judaism. We do not know the reasons for the conversion. From Finland, the Krauses moved to Posen, part of the German empire at the time (though it became Polish after 1918), where they lived under difficult economic conditions. Moritz Krause, Erich’s maternal grandfather, had started a cigar factory but died early, leaving his wife Anna without funds but with six children to feed. Moritz’s brother Ludwig tried to assist Anna on the meager earnings of a Talmudic scholar. One of Moritz and Anna’s sons tried desperately but without success to keep the cigar factory going, but there is little information on most of his siblings. One of the sons remained in Posen and died in World War I. A daughter, Sophie, married David Englander, a high-school English teacher, and resided in Berlin. Another daughter, Martha, also married a professional, Bernhard Stein. They too took up residence in Berlin. Rosa Krause, affectionately called Rosita, was fair, blue eyed, and blond as a child (revealing the family’s Finnish roots). She had a pleasant disposition and was a source of good cheer to her mother and her siblings. Not wanting to be a financial burden to her struggling mother, she sought a husband for sustenance and security more than for love. Rosa settled for a successful local wine merchant, Naphtali Fromm, whom the larger Krause family did not regard highly, and the marriage seemed to cost her much of her good cheer.4

Rosa and Naphtali had a strained relationship, and Erich sometimes speculated that his presence may have held a bad marriage together. He was born scarcely nine months after the wedding, on March 23, 1900, and no siblings followed. Rosa clung to Erich as the pride and joy of her life, projecting onto him an idealized vision of herself. She began struggling with depression, gained a good deal of weight, and cried frequently. “I always felt that I was the defender of my mother, who used to cry a lot,” Erich recalled, “and I felt I had to defend her against my father.” Often, Rosa sought relief by taking Erich to visit with her sisters and their families; in their company, her lighter and happier self seemed to reawaken. She held Erich up during these visits as a Krause more than a Fromm and often spoke ill of Naphtali’s family. This made Erich uncomfortable and may have cultivated a lifelong unease with most of his Krause relatives. Regarding her son as inseparable from herself and betraying a preference for a daughter, Rosa kept him in long hair and girl’s clothing well beyond the age where boys began to wear masculine attire. Rosa also insisted that Erich excel at the piano despite his strong preference for the violin, hoping that he might become another Paderewski, the celebrated Polish pianist and statesman. Through much of his childhood, Erich recalled that Rosa embraced him more as a prize possession than as a person. He felt a mildly depressive sort of bondage to Rosa, a sense that would be rekindled in his subsequent relationships to considerably older lovers.5

Young Erich felt somewhat closer to his father, Naphtali. A thriving peddler of fruit wine but embarrassed by the calling, he frequently traveled to sell his wares within a 124-mile radius of Frankfurt and sent postcards to Rosa and Erich even when he was away for only a night. All his business transactions were pursued in accord with the Shulhan Arukh, the guidelines to ethical conduct. Naphtali became active in the local synagogue and served as cantor, observing all of the Jewish holidays and customs meticulously. He met all of the formal imperatives of Orthodox Judaism, even as his son considered him short on inner spirituality and ethical introspection. Indeed, Erich characterized his father as “very neurotic, obsessive, anxious,” reflecting deep personal insecurities that he projected upon Erich: “I suffered under the influence of a pathologically anxious father who overwhelmed me with anxiety, at the same time not giving me any guidelines and having no positive influence on my education.” At some times he spoke of Naphtali as “a sick man” and “a very odd man” and even “a [mental] case.” Naphtali worried constantly about Erich but never quite moved beyond viewing him as a young child. Thus he decreasingly served his son’s need for a father. As Erich matured, Naphtali insisted that during inclement weather he remain at home, for fear that Erich might catch a cold. He regularly tried to isolate Erich from others his age and rejected the youngster’s dream of pursuing Talmudic studies abroad. Erich sometimes interpreted Naphtali’s obsessive and nervous energy as indifference—that his father “was not interested in my personal development.” But there was another, more endearing side to this father-son relationship. When Erich sat on Naphtali’s lap—though well beyond his toddler years—the rapport between father and son temporarily seemed to rekindle. Erich also attempted to emulate Naphtali’s mannerisms and speaking style, trying desperately to look to his father as a role model.⁶

To be sure, Rosa and Naphtali cared deeply for Erich even as their marriage remained troubled. But the absence of consistent love and good cheer in the household set Erich in search of alternatives. Retrospectively, he characterized his life caught between Naphtali’s neurotic unevenness and Rosa’s smothering possessiveness as one of much “suffering” that was producing an “unbearable, neurotic child.” For relief from such troubled and unempathic parenting, Erich became a frequent visitor at the house of his uncle, Emmanuel Fromm, where he confided to his cousin, Gertrud, that he preferred her father to his own. (She remained his lifelong confidante and something like a sister. In time, she became a prominent psychoanalyst.) Emmanuel represented what might be characterized as a stabilizer in the boy’s life; he was gentler and far more easy going than Naphtali. Emmanuel was also an eminent lawyer and ethicist known for taking on only clients whose causes he deemed principled and righteous. He had a special talent for connecting law and ethics, which Fromm admired. Little is known about his wife, Clara, but Emmanuel often seemed to be both father and mother to Gertrud and Erich. Whereas Rosa and Naphtali raised their son in the sparse cultural world of the petty bourgeoisie, Uncle Emmanuel introduced Erich to Goethe, Schiller, Beethoven, and other luminaries of German and European high culture. He recognized that the boy had a special ear for complex music, which his parents lacked, and he encouraged Erich to cultivate that capacity. For the rest of his life, Erich would cross and recross the divide between middlebrow and high culture, perhaps feeling more comfortable emotionally with the former but sensing that it was more appropriate to embrace the cultural riches that Uncle Emmanuel brought into his life.7

Another influence during Erich’s childhood—one helping to account for his strong, if nostalgic, embrace of a “medieval milieu”—was his great-uncle, Ludwig Krause, a prominent Talmudic scholar from Posen. Calm and convivial, Ludwig preferred a kosher household but accepted his wife Sophie’s dietary departures. He frequently visited members of the Krause family in Germany, eventually taking up residence near Frankfurt when after World War I Posen ceased to be German and its residents were required to become Polish citizens. Far more than Erich’s parents and Uncle Emmanuel, Uncle Ludwig acquainted the young boy with the world of Talmudic study and deepened his appreciation of the contribution of his great-grandfather Bamberger. Erich became fascinated with the Hebrew Bible, especially with the prophetic writings of Isaiah, Amos, and Hosea and their visions of peace and harmony among nations. During Ludwig’s visits, he and Erich spent whole days studying Talmudic passages together. Erich soon came to regard the world of biblical study, free of marketplace concerns, as a desirable alternative to the modern world of commerce and profits that seemed increasingly to pervade life in Frankfurt. Indeed, Uncle Ludwig had such a transformative effect upon the young boy that he gave Erich a sense of what he might want his future to be. Following in Ludwig’s footsteps, Erich might end up “an old Jew,” generous, pious, and an expert in Hebrew Bible passages. While Erich attended a local school (the Wohlerschule) and experienced the more secular marketplace trends of middle-class Frankfurt society, Uncle Ludwig exemplified a comforting alternative: a world of study and contemplation that was in eclipse.8

As Erich matured, he noticed that his mother focused increasingly on Krause family affairs, a habit that augmented her happiness and distanced her from her husband and many others in the extended Fromm family. Rosa became especially close to her older sisters, Martha and Sophie, who lived in Berlin, planning family gatherings with them and sometimes inviting Naphtali’s spinster sister, Zerline. At these gatherings, Erich became especially close with Martha’s daughter, Charlotte, regarding her as an older sister and a companion in a world of adults. The two liked to spend their summers together. When Rosa was not with her family, she arranged excursions with Naphtali and Erich to popular resorts such as Baden Baden, Davos, and Montreux, hoping that travel could kindle greater happiness in their dour family life. Whether at home or on vacation, however, photographs of the three together are rare and hardly depict joyous relationships. Pictures of Rosa and Naphtali alone are almost nonexistent. Decades later, Erich wrote to a niece, Annelie Brandt, recalling “a good deal of the suffering when we were children.”⁹

Erich later labeled World War I “the most crucial experience in my life,” an event that accelerated his personal maturity as much as it ushered in a bloody and traumatic interval in human experience. When war broke out, he was fourteen and a student at Frankfurt’s Wohler Gymnasium. His Latin teacher, who had previously argued that the German arms buildup would keep the peace, was jubilant: “From then on, I found it difficult to believe in the principle that armament preserved peace.” Even though the Wohlerschule purported to emphasize the humanism of the classics, with the onset of war almost all the students and their teachers lost any belief in the dignity of the individual and the unity of humankind. Most became “fanatical nationalists and reactionaries,” attributing the war to British duplicity and German innocence. Only in Fromm’s English class did he encounter a more sober perspective. There, his deeply respected teacher cautioned students who expected an instant German military triumph, in a historical overstatement: “Don’t kid yourselves; so far England has never lost a war!”¹¹

As the war progressed and the prognostication proved increasingly correct, Erich came to herald those words as a “voice of sanity and realism in the midst of insane hatred.” Following the example of his English teacher, he came to resist the simplistic portrayal of innocent Germany attacked by bellicose Britain. He understood that Germany and the Austrian-Hungarian government had contributed substantially to the outbreak of hostilities. Several antiwar socialist deputies in the Reichstag voted against the war and offered what Fromm considered persuasive reasoning. So did a number of publications from France. As soon as Fromm “saw the wounded and the reports of the battles, the war became the center of my thinking and feeling. How was it possible that people went on killing each other and being killed?” Some of his uncles, cousins, and older schoolmates were among the dead—and to what end? Hereafter, he would strive to avoid “partisanship and non-objectivity” and never again “fall under the spell of emotional slogans” as he had in 1914. He would forever distrust official dogma offered by the “establishment” and become a reflective dissident against all such orthodoxies. When the war ended in 1918, Fromm saw himself as “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.” With this new, more critical, and antiwar perspective, Fromm sensed that he was shedding adolescence and becoming a reflecting, serious, and independent young man. A lifelong interest in politics and public affairs was emerging. Sussman, who apparently died in the war, would have been proud.12

Midway through the war, Fromm came under the influence of Rabbi Nehemiah Nobel of the Borneplatz synagogue, the leader of Frankfurt’s Orthodox Jewish community. Nobel had taken his rabbinical training in Berlin’s Hildesheimerschen Seminar and studied in Marburg with the renowned neo-Kantian and socialist Hermann Cohen, who taught him that ethics was not a matter of consensual validation within prevailing norms and traditions. Rather, while they were discovered through reason, ethical laws applied to all of humanity, irrespective of time and place. Early in their relationship, after a service at the Borneplatz synagogue, Nobel reviewed Cohen’s works with Fromm and introduced the young man to his intellectual mentor. Cohen’s view of a universal code of ethics became the bedrock of Fromm’s thought, especially after he read Cohen’s Religion of Reason out of the Sources of Judaism.¹³

Soon Fromm discovered that Nobel had “a strong Hasidic bent” and embraced Jewish mysticism as well as propagating the philosophy of Cohen. Fromm was attracted to Nobel’s simple, humble, but exciting and intellectually penetrating sermons, which often took off on themes of the German Enlightenment. He began taking walks with Nobel on the outskirts of Frankfurt, where they discussed the rabbi’s sermons. Indeed, Erich could not get enough of Nobel, often visiting his apartment for additional conversation. Through Nobel, Fromm’s knowledge of the messianic ideas of the prophets deepened. In time, he was able to offer a coherent synthesis of the ethical code Nobel embraced, summed up in three major points. For one, it was imperative for those who stood for ideals of progressive change to practice them in their daily lives. For another, one had to take seriously the questions and needs of others and to help them find answers for their queries and the satisfaction of their needs. Finally, no ideal could be reached through raw power. Rather, love, humility, and the embrace of justice marked out the proper path. Through Nobel, Fromm also became a Zionist and helped form the Kartel Jüdischer Verbindungen of Frankfurt, a league of Jewish organizations that embraced Zionist ideals. However, his Zionism was tempered by Cohen’s insistence that the universalism and humanism of the prophets precluded loyalty even to a Jewish state. Fromm resigned from the Kartel in 1923. By then he openly took issue with Nobel’s premise that religion and nationalism were organically connected to Judaism.14

When Fromm introduced two of his closest Frankfurt friends, Leo Löwenthal and Ernst Simon, to Rabbi Nobel, they too found a Judaism mixing mysticism and the Enlightenment in a way that seemed exceedingly relevant to their lives. Soon a small Nobel circle of young enthusiasts gathered, including Franz Rosenzweig, an emerging young philosopher of religion. Periodically, Georg Salzberger, a young liberal rabbi from Frankfurt, made contact with the circle, and he cultivated a special friendship with Fromm. In a sense, this circle represented Fromm’s first experience with a small group of convivial colleagues, the type of collectivity that would promote stability and comfort in his life for decades to come.¹⁵

Salzberger’s particular concern was to remedy the widespread ignorance of local Frankfurt Jews about their religion and its history. Fromm strongly concurred in this goal. Late in 1919, he and Fromm formed a local Association for Jewish People’s Education, and Nobel read a chapter from the Kabbala to inaugurate the lecture program. The Association was instrumental in creating the Free Jewish Teaching Institute, which was directed by Rosenzweig, and it became the Association’s main focus.¹⁶

The Free Jewish Teaching Institute quickly evolved into a pioneer secular center for adult Jewish education in Germany. Martin Buber, a major Jewish philosopher and theologian celebrated for his long essay I and Thou; Gershom Scholem, a philosopher and historian who pioneered the modern interpretation of the Kabbala; and Leo Baeck, an important philosopher and rabbi, joined. Indeed, the Nobel circle, the Association, and the Institute combined to become a formidable hub of Jewish intellectual discourse. For the first time in his life, Fromm was in regular contact with an array of creative minds sharing his enthusiasm for religion and the life of the mind. Baeck became a close friend and supporter for the next fifty years.

When Nobel died suddenly in 1922 at the age of fifty-one, Rosenzweig wrote to Buber that their circle had suffered a formidable blow and that “a fundamental part of life has been pulled from under my feet.” Fromm wrote the obituary in Frankfurt’s New Jewish Press, stressing that Nobel “lived what he said and only said what he lived. He taught that love bound people together and [his students] understood because he loved [them].”17

Fromm completed his final examination at the Wohlerschule in 1918. Influenced by his Uncle Emmanuel, he considered becoming a lawyer and consequently studied jurisprudence for two semesters at Frankfurt University. Fromm soon realized that his deeper love lay in the close study of the Hebrew Bible. To break from his stifling family and enhance his training, Fromm sought additional study in Lithuania, an innovative center for Talmudic scholarship and training. His parents (especially his mother), however, would let him study no further away than nearby Heidelberg. Consequently, in May 1919, he entered the University of Heidelberg, for one semester on a trial basis. Since there was no specialty in Hebrew Bible studies, he listed jurisprudence as his focus. However, he discovered that his academic interests were eclectic, and he took courses in medieval German history, the theory of Marxism, social movements, and the history of psychology. He also had a strong interest in Buddhist thought and began privately practicing Tai Chi and meditation. The experimental semester extended into a year, at which point Fromm switched into Heidelberg’s department of national economy, with a specialty under Alfred Weber in sociology.¹⁸

Alfred, Max Weber’s brother, was his first and only Gentile mentor. Attending Alfred Weber’s lectures and seminars, Fromm was impressed by the courage and integrity with which the professor expressed his thoughts and commitment to universal humanism over the rigid nationalism that Fromm ascribed to his brother. However, a certain shyness—perhaps even a sense of awkwardness at relating closely for the first time to a non-Jew—set limits on Fromm’s rapport with Weber: “I avoided as much as I could to see him alone.” Yet Fromm wrote to Weber decades later that “studies with you were one of the most fertile experiences [of] my life; not only in what I learned but also through your personality as a model.” As Fromm profited from his association with Ludwig Krause and Rabbi Nobel, his relationship with Weber seemed as important as the content of his ideas. Weber taught Fromm that while it was essential for the sociologist to be attentive to the individual, it was imperative to recognize that an individual was inescapably rooted in collective life. This vaguely presaged what Fromm came to call social character. While Weber rejected Gustave Le Bon’s notion of a collective or crowd psychology, he impressed Fromm with the idea that culture was a product of concerted and interlinked individual agencies spread over historical time and space. Moreover, any belief system was rational if it adapted to the exigencies of a particular time and place, however irrational it might later be regarded. For Weber, linguistic and juridical norms as well as aesthetic and musical forms were phenomena that helped the sociologist to discern the nature of collective life. He represented an important tradition in German social thought, one congruent with Wilhelm Dilthey and Georg Simmel.19

Although Weber was no expert on Jewish law, theology, or history, he knew that the young Fromm was hardly disposed to write a dissertation on any other topic. To be sure, Weber insisted that Fromm master his own writings as well as those of Dilthey and Simmel. He recognized, however, that Fromm also wanted to draw on key Jewish theologians and philosophers. They agreed that Fromm would write his dissertation (“Jewish Law: A Contribution to the Study of Diaspora Judaism”) on the function of Jewish law in maintaining social cohesion and continuity in three Diaspora communities—the Karaites, the Reform Jews, and the Hasidim. Without a state, a common secular language, or even the opportunity to build a place of worship, Fromm argued, a Jewish social body bound by a law-abiding ethos was able to endure and to perpetuate both a belief system and a unique culture. By “law,” Fromm meant the applied religious and moral code of a people. Indeed, there was a “soul” within Jewish law, which established the moral-ethical unity of the people. The collective content within the law was sufficiently flexible to allow individuals to interpret and implement its requirement; freedom of interpretation was embedded in the ethos of the community.²⁰

To be sure, the Karaites had formed during the economic dislocations the Jews had experienced in eighth-century Babylon. They came to pursue trade in the nascent Arab empire and adjusted their sense of law to make it congruent with their ethical needs in this pursuit. European Jewish emancipation commenced in the eighteenth century, and as it progressed in the nineteenth century, Jews also experienced the “victory of the civil-capitalistic culture” that afforded increasing opportunities to amass private wealth. At this point, another transformation occurred. European Reform Judaism shaped law to become a much-needed spiritual and ethical anchor that served as a counterpoint to marketplace culture; law was also invoked as a source of an increasingly endangered social cohesion. For Fromm, however, Hasidism represented the ideal adherence to law broadly construed.21

Of the three Diaspora communities, Hasidism afforded the ideal “social cement” to bind together the essentials of Jewish tradition. Fromm was taken by the Hasidism because they emphasized feeling over erudition and contemplation over economic activity. Indeed, they promoted an inner sense of wholeness, integrity, joy, and sincerity that resisted the amassing of wealth. In the next few years and informed by Marx, Fromm would characterize this as a sense of “being” over “having,” and for the rest of his life, the joyous and celebratory spirit stressed in Hasidism would dispose him to lead a life of exuberance and the pursuit of joy, even in the face of totalitarianism, bureaucratization, and threats of nuclear war. To be sure, the Orthodox Jewish community where Fromm grew up in Frankfurt looked down on the Hasidim as undisciplined and erratic. Perhaps because of his mother’s Eastern roots, Fromm admired the “extravagant” qualities inherent in the Hasidic experience—reverent, joyous, and full of gratitude for the “good life.” In addition, Salman Baruch Rabinkow, a Talmudic scholar whom Fromm met in 1912, was now helping him with his dissertation. Rabinkow reinforced this disposition toward Hasidism. Through Hasidism and its tie to Jewish law, Fromm stated in his dissertation, “the Jewish historical body had really preserved its own life so well” and became “the full issue of the cultural and social cosmos of Judaism.”²²

Fromm’s dissertation was a remarkable essay in social psychology. With its focus on Jewish law most richly exemplified by the Hasidic tradition, he was seeking out a conceptual unit connecting the morality of the individual “soul” and especially the collective “soul” with larger social processes. Fromm was trying to determine how to integrate morality (both individual and group) with the collective lifestyle. Within a decade, as he became thoroughly grounded in Freud on the unconscious and Marx on economic and class structures, he would equate this soul with the “libido structure or organization of social entities” before settling on his signature term: social character.

Weber was impressed with Fromm’s work. In contrast, Naphtali appeared in Heidelberg the day of Erich’s defense of his dissertation before a faculty committee. He feared that Erich would not pass the defense and would subsequently commit suicide. Fromm was awarded the second-best grade (“very good”) after defending the dissertation, and he realized that Naphtali had simply “transferred his strong inferiority feeling about himself” to his son. He was learning to distance himself from his father’s neuroses. Not privy to this familial baggage, Weber suggested proudly that Fromm might want to pursue an academic career. But Fromm felt “that such a career would restrain me,” given his emerging interests. He had little sense that a university base could position him in the decades ahead to research and write in a community of scholars with specialties and library resources.23

In addition to his feeling that academia would restrain him, Fromm’s decision not to remain in the university was attributable to Salman Rabinkow’s influence. A devout socialist from Russia, where he had studied at a yeshiva as an adherent of Habad Hasidism and been ordained as a rabbi (but never practiced), Rabinkow had been a tutor to Jizchok Steinberg, an activist in both the 1905 and 1917 Russian revolutions. He sympathized with Steinberg’s revolutionary Marxist socialism, and he actively raised funds for poor Jewish students from Eastern Europe.²⁴

Fromm visited Rabinkow’s austere apartment almost daily, sometimes finding others that Rabinkow mentored there. He instructed Fromm in the Talmud through the Lithuanian emphasis on the deeper psychological and spiritual truths inherent within its unifying themes (in contrast to the Hungarian approach, involving the formal mastery of specific Talmudic texts and the delineation of the internal contradictions within that text). With Rabinkow, Fromm also studied the philosophical writings of Moses Maimonides, the great medieval philosopher and Torah scholar, and the Tanya, a central text of Habad Hasidism written in the early nineteenth century. Fromm became expert in the Likutej Amarim—the collected sayings of Schneur Zalman, the eighteenth-century founder of Habad Hasidism. Guided by Rabinkow, Fromm learned that Habad Hasidism was a populist reaction against the legalism and rationalism of the rabbinic orthodoxy.²⁵

Rabinkow had a knack for synthesizing Marxism and socialist protest politics with traditional Jewish pietism. It is likely that Rabinkow introduced Marx to Fromm. He taught Fromm to interpret Jewish tradition in the spirit of “radical humanism” (the individual and his society cultivating their full revolutionary potential) even as he himself remained a scholar and politically inactive. Fromm also regarded himself unfit for political activism during his student days. Soon, however, Rabinkow’s notion of radical humanism would become the basis for Fromm’s notion of a productive social character and would spark his interest in psychoanalytically informed Marxism. Fromm identified himself not only intellectually with Rabinkow but held him up as an ego ideal; Rabinkow displayed most of the qualities Erich hoped to find in himself.26

The degree to which Fromm patterned his life on the teacher “who influenced my life more than any other man” is striking. Rabinkow impressed on Fromm the idea that professional or political positions, wealth, and power were not a valuable measure of man but rather his endearing qualities and the depth of his thought. Rabinkow seemed to subsist on herring and tea. Creature comforts were secondary. If Fromm’s own diet during his student days was not as sparse, he professed to place little stock in consumption. Fromm remembered how fastidious Rabinkow was in his hygiene and general appearance and emulated him. An early riser, Rabinkow disciplined himself to put in long days of study. For the rest of his life, Fromm devoted the early morning hours to sustained reading and writing. When he was not studying, Rabinkow welcomed students to join him in warm and open-ended discussions, offering questions but rarely answers and seldom charging even minimal tutorial fees. Fromm particularly enjoyed singing Hasidic songs with Rabinkow and would sing or hum them for the rest of his life. He noted that Rabinkow had “an inexhaustible sense of humor” that seemed to be rooted in the commonalities of Jewish life; this became one of Fromm’s most marked personal characteristics. Stressing the universalistic humanism of Hebrew Bible prophets, Rabinkow (like Hermann Cohen before him) made it clear to Fromm that wisdom did not lie in loyalty even to a Jewish state. Though he started as an ardent Zionist, Rabinkow was reexamining Zionist premises at the time he met Fromm. By 1923, Fromm also revised his views on the subject and became a lifelong critic of Zionism and nationalism generally.²⁷

As much as he sought to emulate Rabinkow, Fromm departed from him in two essentials. First, Fromm was less reclusive and more attentive to his place in society. He agreed with Rabinkow that rank and title were less important than a life-loving and caring personality and intellectual profundity. He admired Rabinkow’s humility, diffidence, and devotion to his Yiddish roots over the assimilatory tendencies of middle-class and university-educated German Jews. Yet Fromm was also keenly ambitious. He determined to distinguish himself within the Heidelberg and Frankfurt professional and academic communities and in prominent Jewish intellectual circles.

Over the course of his life, Rabinkow published only one article, “The Individual and Society in Jewish Life and Lore” (1929). His style was awkward, the essay was poorly organized and often redundant, and the content was sometimes less than clear. During the years he was meeting with Fromm, Rabinkow had been struggling with this essay, which was intended to systematize the basic philosophic, historical, and theological perspectives he presented to his students. The parallels between this essay and Fromm’s 1922 dissertation on Jewish law are striking. They show how profoundly Rabinkow influenced Fromm. And by comparing the dissertation to the article, it seems likely that in return Fromm’s chapter drafts helped Rabinkow find the proper words and phrases, even its organizational framework, so that he could complete his only publication.28

In the article, Rabinkow explained that the organizing principle in Jewish life and the core of Jewish law was the covenant with God. That covenant determined “the ethical maximum” of the community as well as its cultural and religious life and became the basis for its political institutions. “From the living covenant with God,” Rabinkow postulated that there “grew not immovable formulations but cultural tasks in continued change,” as conditions in the community required. Similar to Fromm’s dissertation, Rabinkow’s article argued that Jewish law and ethics adapted to evolving human needs. Whereas the dissertation (perhaps reflecting Weber’s emphasis on social structure and collective life) merged the needs of the individual soul with the soul of the community, Rabinkow elevated the individual: “the moral autonomy of the individual is basic.” Indeed, “everyone is entitled and obliged to say: ‘The world has been created for me.’” While the dignity of the individual derived from the community, Rabinkow insisted, far more forcefully than Fromm, that the perfection of the community required the complete autonomy of every person. Religious and ethical duties could only be performed properly and life’s joys fully experienced through the “autonomous individual.” Finally, Rabinkow argued that the ethical-legal core of Jewish life, while based on a covenant with God, was valid in the “special community of Judaism” but did not apply to other groups. In his dissertation, Fromm differed. He presented his discussion of Jewish law and ethics as an illustration of universal human needs and experiences.29

When Fromm’s commitment to Judaism began to ebb during the mid-and late 1920s, he moved beyond the limits set by Rabinkow. That is, he applied Rabinkow’s vision of Jewish life to humanity at large but focused more on the needs of the individual. For Fromm, as he ceased to be an observant Jew, humanity became a unified moral community rooted in individuals with moral autonomy and the freedom to fulfill individual needs for productiveness and happiness within a humane society. Rabinkow voiced no disappointment at Fromm’s drift from Judaism. Indeed, he understood that when Fromm spoke of a life-affirming human character structure, the young man was very close to his own Jewish humanism: “the world has been created for me.” Writing in 1964, Fromm asserted that “Rabinkow influenced my life more than any other man perhaps, and … his ideas … remained alive in me.”³⁰

Reichmann was born in Karlsruhe to a middle-class Orthodox Jewish household with politically progressive values. The oldest of three daughters, her mother was trained as a teacher but never labored outside the household, in which she was domineering and possessive. Reichmann’s mother had no respect for her husband, who, like Naphtali, had failed to train as a rabbi and instead became a leader of the local Jewish community with a rather lackluster business career in banking. When he suggested, against her mother’s objections, that she might pursue medicine, Frieda was intrigued by the idea and commenced her medical studies at the University of Königsberg when she was only seventeen. She chose a psychiatric specialty and spent a semester in Munich studying with Emil Kraepelin, a professor of clinical psychology. Graduating from Königsberg’s medical school in 1912, she published her dissertation on pupillary changes in schizophrenics. At this point, Reichmann had spent several years in both Königsberg and Frankfurt working in the psychiatrist Kurt Goldstein’s pioneering clinics for the treatment of brain-injured soldiers. Just as the war affected Fromm, World War I had a transformational effect on Reichmann, as she witnessed the effects of combat quite vividly in her patients. She treated brain-injured soldiers at the university hospital in Königsberg and coauthored papers on neurotraumatology with Goldstein based on her clinical observations. Reichmann first met Fromm in Frankfurt toward the end of the war, but both were exceedingly shy, and nothing initially came of the acquaintance. From Frankfurt she went to Dresden, where she became an assistant physician-psychiatrist at the Weisser Hirsch Sanatorium from 1920 to 1923. There she determined to become a psychotherapist. At the time, Weisser Hirsch was the only facility in Germany with a structured psychotherapy program. When Fromm visited her there, the relationship became more serious.32

At some point during her medical studies, Reichmann had been brutally raped, which dimmed her marriage prospects and possibly her child-bearing interests or capabilities. During her last two years at Weisser Hirsch, doubtless sparked by the rape, a growing interest in psychoanalysis, and perhaps Fromm’s visits, Reichmann traveled regularly to Munich. She had arranged to be analyzed by Wilhelm Wittenberg, a convivial fellow and a less-than-orthodox Freudian. Wittenberg belonged to the German Psychoanalytic Society. He did not make much of an impression on Reichmann. She then had a training analysis with Hanns Sachs, a member of Freud’s inner circle, in Berlin and became a practicing psychoanalyst as well as a psychiatrist. All the while, the attraction between Frieda and Erich grew stronger. An important commonality was that both were strict practitioners of Orthodoxy and were apprehensive that German Jews generally were assimilating too rapidly and losing their unique identity. Reichmann appreciated Fromm’s interest in grand theory and his passionate engagement in broad questions about human existence, even if he did not seem terribly talented in navigating life’s day-to-day requirements. Fromm was taken by her excitement over intellectual topics and by her more practical side, sensing that like his mother, Reichmann might take care of him. She began a therapeutic analysis of Fromm, which, as Reichmann acknowledged, was probably professionally inappropriate: “and then we fell in love, so we stopped. That much sense we had.” A sexual relationship ensued—probably Reichmann’s first intimate contact with a man since the rape. This may or may not have been Fromm’s first sexual encounter, but it is clear that Reichmann’s proficient biographer Gail Hornstein was off the mark in characterizing him as a “ladies’ man” at this precise point in time.33

In 1923, Reichmann and Fromm decided to open a therapeutic facility (a therapeuticum) for Jewish patients in Heidelberg. Their mission was utopian: to create what, years later, would be called a therapeutic community. Reichmann based the idea on the sense that psychotherapy was tzedakah, a Jewish religious commitment to social justice. The goal was to nurture simultaneously Jewish identity and psychic health along quasi-socialist lines. As Reichmann put it, “we first analyze the people and second make them aware of their tradition and live in this tradition.” In the midst of horrendous German inflation, she managed to borrow twenty-five thousand marks from friends and family to purchase a large house and furnish it properly. The facility integrated the basics of Jewish life—celebration of the Sabbath and other holidays and rituals, kosher food, a steady diet of traditional Jewish literature, common prayers, and Fromm’s lectures on theology. Ten to fifteen patients lived in the house and paid what they could afford or donated their labor in exchange. Others came for scheduled meals and treatment, also based on what they could afford. Like several other analysts with socialist allegiances in Germany and Vienna, they “didn’t want to go on only treating wealthy people.” Each patient received psychoanalysis or psychoanalytically informed therapy. Initially, Reichmann was the sole therapist, but as his psychoanalytic training advanced, Fromm joined her. Both were friends with Martin Buber, and, as did Buber, they conceived of therapy as a close interpersonal “I-Thou” relationship as well as a method to alleviate deep psychic repression. Less than informed about transference problems (i.e., the interpersonal perils involved in projecting imagined persona onto a “neutral” clinician), they undertook analyses of friends such as Leo Löwenthal, Ernst Simon, Rabinkow, and even household staff. In the evening, they conducted an early form of group therapy—open-ended community discussions of personal conflict. “It was a wild affair” of enthusiasm and good cheer, Reichmann recalled, going on while “Erich and [she] had an affair. [They] weren’t married and nobody was supposed to know about that.”34

As this therapeutic community developed, Reichmann and Fromm grew closer, even as she continued to regard him as “spoiled.” Middle-class sexual propriety and the presumption within Orthodox Judaism that a woman like Frieda, who at thirty-six was well into middle age, should marry was relevant to their decision. She had to prod the twenty-six-year-old Erich, however, to agree to a firm wedding date: his parents’ wedding anniversary, in June 1926. “I got what I wanted,” Reichmann recalled, “a very intelligent, very warm, very well-educated man who knew lots of things in another field from mine.” She made little of the age gap between them, perhaps because she felt that her rape had seriously reduced her marriage prospects. The wedding was held at her mother’s house, and Reichmann recalled almost missing it because she had tonsillitis. At the conclusion of the ceremony, Naphtali felt relieved, telling Reichmann, “Now, you can take care of him.” He knew that she would attend to Erich’s domestic needs and perhaps his parental needs as well. As she later wrote, Naphtali was “so glad because I could take care so well of his only son and by golly wasn’t he right!”³⁵

Even before the marriage, Fromm moved to Munich in 1925 to complete an analysis with Wilhelm Wittenberg and to attend Emil Kraepelin’s lectures, much as Reichmann had done earlier. From Kraepelin, he learned elements of what came to be called psychopharmacology, and this put him in good stead as he advised colleagues and patients concerning their medications. Kraepelin also increased his interest in the neurosciences generally, and that interest never flagged. Fromm’s analysis with Wittenberg turned out to be less eventful. Although Fromm found him a great conversationalist, he considered Wittenberg an ineffective psychoanalyst. That said, Wittenberg died within a year of the analysis. Reichmann paid Fromm’s expenses of six hundred marks a month.

By then it was clear to both of them that their newly launched therapeuticum was failing for two reasons: First, the utopian therapeutic goal had not been reached. Many of the patients craved the kosher food and Jewish social life but dismissed the efficacy of psychoanalysis within a therapeutic community and were reticent to pursue it. This was especially true of the rabbis and rabbinical students. And second, as their analytic training deepened, Fromm and Reichmann found that their commitment to Orthodoxy and its rituals had slackened. As she noted, “After four years, we decided we couldn’t keep the sanatorium any longer because our conscience and hearts were no longer in it.” One Passover, they went into a park and ate leavened bread—a grave sin professedly resulting in korvat, childlessness. But they “were a little surprised that nothing happened actually,” Reichmann recalled, and they proceeded to eat food that was especially forbidden, including ham, lobster, and oysters. This break from Orthodox dietary laws was a first step for Fromm in living a life, if not wholly of material extravagance, then certainly wary of social norms. Although the deliberate dietary departures were kept secret from patients and staff at the therapeuticum, they both essentially publicized their break from Orthodoxy in articles published in the psychoanalytic journal Imago in 1927. The contents of the articles became common gossip among their patients. The therapeuticum was at an end, and so were Fromm’s plans for becoming a Talmudic scholar. Once more he seemed to be on uncertain footing, and so did she.36

A certain sadness or lack of zest began to appear in the marriage as they wound down the work of the therapeuticum; the initial spontaneity and rebellious experimentalism in the relationship was ebbing along with the dissolution of their joint venture. The substantial age disparity probably contributed to this malaise. By now Frieda was having a number of affairs, one of which may well have been with Rabinkow. Erich took an interest in other women, especially Karen Horney. But although affairs and flirtations were not uncommon in European psychoanalytic circles in the 1920s, there was something deeper at work. The marriage was childless—korvat. Although Erich sometimes told others that Frieda could have no children, the evidence indicates otherwise. Nearing menopause, Frieda craved a child and confessed as much to Erich early in their marriage. He responded mockingly, betraying a certain arrogance and insensitivity: “Having a child is nothing; even a cow can do it.” Erich also felt that the presence of children would reduce his professional productivity while increasing pressure on him to adapt to prevailing social values, a not uncommon perspective in Weimar intellectual and cultural circles. Memories of his own unhappy and troubled childhood may also have contributed to his unwillingness to father a child. In mid-July 1932, Frieda had a surgical procedure in a Basel hospital. Two days later, her doctor brought her the body of what appeared to be a stillborn child. It had a large head, torso, and limbs and looked like a dead fetus. However, in her correspondence with Georg Groddeck, Frieda claimed that it was not a dead fetus but a myoma (a benign tumor) that looked like a developed fetus. In that event, she had not been pregnant, whether by Erich or another man. A third possibility is that there was both a fetus and a tumor, and that the tumor undermined the viability of the fetus, resulting in a stillbirth. Whatever occurred, it contributed to an already deeply strained marriage. Rainer Funk, Fromm’s research assistant, once asked Fromm late in his life if he regretted having no children—by Frieda or by his subsequent wives. For the only time Funk can recall, Fromm’s face showed deep emotional pain, and he was unable to reply. The issue resonated deeply through much of his life. There would be no successor generation.37

As their marriage became increasingly difficult, Frieda urged Erich to accompany her on her visits to Groddeck for potential assistance. Born in 1866, Groddeck was a psychoanalyst and directed the Marienhohe Sanitarium near the spas of Baden Baden. He administered therapeutic massage as a part of analytic therapy, and Freud was supportive of his insights. Indeed, Freud delighted in his irreverent 1921 novel, Der Seelensucher (The Soul Seeker) about a retired bachelor who went mad and then became capable of extraordinary psychological interpretations of special human situations, sometimes explaining his perspectives with very humorous if embarrassing sex-charged observations. Groddeck’s more substantial The Book of It (1923) laid out his essential thoughts through a series of letters. His concept of the “it” (das Es) overlapped with Freud’s concept of the id, which Freud openly acknowledged. However, Groddeck was more intent than Freud on preserving a unity between psyche and soma. His “it” drew heavily from German romantic tradition and stood for the unconscious, broadly construed, as well as for the ego—the totality of human potentiality (organic and spiritual). In contrast, in The Ego and the Id (1923), Freud differentiated between ego, id, and superego as separate forces in forging his structural theory. In brief, for Groddeck, the “it” symbolized the inner wish to become sick and to become well. This “it” manifested itself in specific illnesses, and the psychoanalyst responded to the illness by assuming a maternal kindness and concern that enjoined the patient to fathom the underlying repressed sources of the malady through a childlike trust and innocence. The “it,” which had brought on the physical illness, would thereby be undermined and disappear. Groddeck had thus fashioned an early psychosomatic perspective. With Groddeck’s help, for example, the Berlin psychoanalyst Ernst Simmel, who could only see with glasses, was suddenly able to read a very distant clock without them. But when Simmel returned to his old lifestyle habits in Berlin, his improved distance vision ceased.38

It was Groddeck’s therapeutic and personal manner—warm, open, humble, and direct—that impressed Sandor Ferenczi, Karen Horney, and other less-than-orthodox psychoanalysts who came to Baden Baden. Their visits often coincided with Erich’s and Frieda’s, which gave the couple a sense of joining a Groddeck-led psychoanalytic community of sorts just as their therapeuticum collapsed. While the evidence is inconclusive, there is a good possibility that Fromm met Freud at one of these convivial gatherings in Baden Baden, and if he did, the conversation almost certainly involved Freud’s “science of the psyche.” After a few such trips with Frieda, Erich became captivated by Groddeck’s very presence, despite the man’s contempt for rigorous science and his reactionary positions on social issues. Given Groddeck’s theoretical flexibility, his nonjudgmental sincerity, his appreciation of matriarchy, and his remarkable psychological intuitions, Erich felt freer to ponder his emerging reservations mixed with affirmations concerning orthodox Freudianism. With Groddeck and his circle, he felt that he could speak openly and independently and express growing skepticism about Freud’s mechanistic theory of libido, the universality of the Oedipus complex, and Freud’s strong patriarchic premises, even as he never entirely dismissed any of them. Without Groddeck’s psychosomatic emphasis, Erich would not have given his first public lecture on “The Healing of a Case of Lung Tuberculosis During Psychoanalytical Treatment.” With Erich and Frieda feeling increasingly comfortable in the Groddeck circle, they found that they could better articulate the strengths and weaknesses of their precipitous marriage and whether it was meant to be.³⁹

Groddeck was no intellectual, Fromm concluded, but he had an engaging personality, a quality in people that always attracted Fromm. Now in training to become a psychoanalyst, he needed an instructor with a therapeutic personality who integrated the life of the mind with other personal qualities. Fromm could have found no better clinician to emulate than Groddeck—a consummate therapist and kindly human being who made the patient’s inner subjective world his own and learned from the patient. The nature of the interpersonal relationship between clinician and patient was the key. Groddeck taught Fromm to feel the patient’s emotions within himself and to work through the patient’s problems until the outward symptoms of the inner emotional illness subsided. As such, the clinician was to discover the unfolding of the totality of the patient’s qualities, what Fromm would later call the “total man.” Of all the German psychoanalysts that Fromm encountered, he concluded that Groddeck was the least comfortable with clinical abstractions or theory and the first in “truth, originality, courage, and extraordinary kindness. He penetrated the unconscious of his patient, and yet he never hurt.” Indeed, it was largely Groddeck’s presence and skill, Fromm recalled, that drew him and Reichmann into a study group of southwestern German psychoanalysts, which established the Frankfurt Psychoanalytic Institute in 1929.40

The couple likely joined the Southwest German Psychoanalytic Study Group in Frankfurt in 1927. The Vienna-trained psychoanalyst Heinrich Meng, a staunch socialist with a psychosomatic approach and a desire to present psychoanalytic ideas to the public in an accessible form, had elicited Groddeck’s help in establishing the group. Also trained in Vienna and specializing in the treatment of narcissistic disorders and the way inhibitions of the ego contoured feeling and thinking, Karl Landauer soon became a central presence in the group as well. Erich and Frieda participated in the group, and Erich had some therapeutic contact (and perhaps some supervision) with Landauer in Frankfurt, even though Wittenberg analyzed him in Munich.⁴¹

With the demise of the therapeuticum in 1927–1928 and with Erich requiring additional psychoanalytic training unavailable in southwestern Germany, the couple moved to Berlin. There Frieda set up a private psychoanalytic practice and continued as the principal breadwinner, while Erich continued to be the less-than-practical student.

At the Berlin Psychoanalytic Institute, Erich took his training analysis with Hanns Sachs, of Freud’s inner circle, as well as with Theodor Reik. Fromm regarded Sachs as unquestioningly loyal to Freud—an accurate appraisal. Indeed, Sachs was the least controversial and inquisitive of Freud’s closest colleagues, echoing Freud’s positions on all but his one interest outside the clinical setting: the psychoanalytic interpretation of art. Sachs insisted that Fromm had experienced a “positive transference” toward him because he always hung his coat beside Sachs’s in a little vestibule before each session. Fromm considered this utter nonsense. Reik shared Fromm’s interest in the psychology of religion and had a more active and exploratory mind than Sachs, but he, too, seemed excessively orthodox to the rather arrogant young Fromm.

While still unsteady in his temperament and disappointed with his training analysts, Fromm nonetheless seemed to thrive in Berlin’s psychoanalytic climate, which was more innovative than Vienna’s. Indeed, it was not uncommon for senior analysts to sit in cafes with their candidates until the early morning hours discussing not only Freud but also philosophy, politics, and art. The richness of Weimar culture was on conspicuous display in Berlin. Fromm met Otto Fenichel, who had begun his Kinderseminar for young left-leaning analysts, working on Marxist-Freudian theoretical integrations as well as progressive social and economic reforms. Karen Horney, whom Fromm had first met in Baden Baden, was a founder and central figure at the Berlin Institute and was already building her case against the Freudian premises on women. Erich found her interesting and exciting. The creative and eclectic Marxist-Freudian Wilhelm Reich expanded Erich’s interest in character patterns and in the ways social and political conditions affected analytic therapy. As a Freudian with reservations often mixed haphazardly with confirmations about orthodox psychoanalytic theory, Erich found that he was also evolving into a Marxist. Indeed, he offered a lecture in 1928 on “The Psychoanalysis of the Petty Bourgeoisie.” At this early date, he already suspected some dangerous authoritarian proclivities in the German lower middle class, and he would soon transform his interests into an active research project.42

By 1929, Fromm had completed his training analysis and started a psychoanalytic practice in Berlin. It is more appropriate, however, to regard him at this point as a social psychologist who was beginning to focus on the concept of a social unconscious—the underlying drives that bind people together and promote a sense of collectivity. Having been credentialed in both disciplines, he offered a paper to the Frankfurt psychoanalytic community in 1929 on “Psychoanalysis and Sociology.” The thrust of the paper was to encourage analysts to avoid giving psychoanalytic answers to questions that could be sufficiently dealt with through economic, political, or sociological explanations. But Fromm also urged sociologists and other social scientists to recognize that “society” was an abstraction and that the underlying unit was the specific individual. Ultimately, both the psychoanalytic and the social scientific communities had to recognize the socialized human being as the central concern, both a product of society and a unique personage.⁴³