Many decades later in the 1950s, he offers strong praise of Rosa Luxemburg, who was of course brutally murdered during the reactionary crackdown at the hands of the Freikorps, supported by right-wing elements in the SPD. Later in the US, when he became much more directly involved - a bit later in his time in the US - he maintained nevertheless that his personality wasn’t quite suited to politics and he didn’t have the temperament for it, which may have been a factor in this earlier distance from politics.īut whatever the reason might have been, it’s clear that he was influenced by socialist ideas during and after the war.

He wasn’t involved in any radical parties, or parties of any stripe, during his life in Germany as a whole, in fact. The whole experience of the First World War, with its mass irrationality and its unheralded level of destructiveness, was an absolutely central influence on Fromm.ĭespite this, it’s also true that Fromm was somewhat removed from organized politics during this period. On the issue of politics more specifically, Fromm reported being influenced in his seeing-through of the mass irrationality of German nationalism by reading the arguments of the socialist deputies in the Reichstag who voted against the war budget, who were visible at the time in their attacks on the German government’s position. The whole experience of the war, with its mass irrationality and its unheralded level of destructiveness, was an absolutely central influence on Fromm, and ultimately pushed him in the direction of the study of psychology, and of Freud and psychoanalysis.

He spoke some years later, in his sixties, of the Great War as the event that determined his intellectual development more than anything else, and of how struck he was by the nakedness of the hate and irrationality, as manifested in German nationalist feeling toward the British at the time - how the British had suddenly become evil and unscrupulous, intent on destroying the innocent and all-too trusting German heroes, as he put it. Living through these events that completely transformed Germany in the early 1900s had a profound effect on Fromm.

The mass psychology of fascism