Cultivating Love and Hope

Abstract

Abstract This chapter considers the meanings inherent in Fromm’s elaborations on love and solidarity against the backdrop of war and genocide. It sheds light on the powerful parallels that exist between Fromm’s exploration of human connection and the letters that his aunts, Gertrud Brandt and Sophie Engländer, wrote shortly before their deportations and deaths. These ideas are expressed in Fromm’s best known work, The Art of Loving (1956), and in his belief that love is a necessary countervailing force to cruelty and destructiveness. It also draws on Fromm’s psychoanalytic writings, which are often overlooked and are the source from which much of his thinking about love and solidarity emerged. The book and the chapter conclude by considering the nature of one’s ethical obligation to others and the moral responsibilities that are associated with belonging to a perpetrator group or inheriting a perpetrator history. The chapter asks what can be learned from Fromm and the Holocaust correspondence when seeking to respond to the social and political crises, and the renewed threat of fascism in the modern age.