![]() ![]() 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. ![]()
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