Confronting Genocide

Abstract

Abstract This chapter examines connections between the personal dimension of the Holocaust in Fromm’s life and his writings on the destructiveness and evil. The chapter sheds new light on Fromm’s marriage to Henny Gurland, a fellow German Jewish refugee, who accompanied the philosopher Walter Benjamin on his fateful attempt to flee Nazi-occupied France and on Fromm’s rescue of his cousin, Heinz Brandt, who had remarkably survived Auschwitz and was imprisoned by the East German secret police. Throughout the postwar years, the Holocaust correspondence forms the unspoken context for Fromm’s impassioned stance on human solidarity. At the height of the civil rights movement, Fromm spoke directly to the scourge of racism. In The Anatomy of Human Destructiveness, he analyzed the personal pathologies of Hitler and Himmler at the heart of the “Final Solution.” Fromm struggled to bridge his early life experiences in Germany with the reality of antisemitism; called out ambivalent postwar German commitments to remembrance and responsibility; and sought to understand the motivations of major Nazi figures like Albert Speer. At the end of his life, he offered a series of critical reflections on Zionism and Israel.