The German Genius

class structure and socioeconomic conditions. 19 He distinguished, for instance, between the “hoarding orientation” of nineteenth-century merchants with their predisposition to punctuality, a saving mentality, and orderliness, and the “marketing orientation” of the twentieth century. It was Fromm who identified what he called the sadomasochistic or “authoritarian” personality, which he had observed first in Weimar Germany. 20 Such people respect the strong and loathe the weak, and Fromm thought this might help explain fascism. His Frankfurt colleagues took up the theme of the authoritarian personality in a more sociological context (see below).
    Fromm’s later books Man for Himself (1947) and especially The Sane Society (1955) became works of social criticism—applying a mix of clinical detail and contemporary observation, as Bettelheim was doing and as would become a familiar form of literature in the West from the 1960s on—which castigated modern culture, especially its greed, competitiveness, lack of moral backbone, and loss of community. 21 This was, in its way, a return to German cultural pessimism. Together with Hannah Arendt and Herbert Marcuse, Fromm was adopted as a guiding light by the students of the 1960s (again, see below).
    Wilhelm Reich and Fritz Perls may be considered together as they are often regarded as joint initiators of the “sexual revolution” that began in the 1960s and gathered pace through the 1970s and into the 1980s. 22 This is hardly true of Reich and is based chiefly on his “invention” of the “orgone” box, a telephone booth–shaped instrument, wooden on the outside, with a metal lining which he claimed—fraudulently—had therapeutic properties. Reich began as a serious Freudian (he analyzed Perls) and, like so many others, attempted a marriage of Freud and Marx in the interwar years in Germany. His 1933 book, Die Massenpsychologie des Faschismus ( The Mass Psychology of Fascism ) was timely, so much so that with his background and interests he could not stay in Germany. 23 He reached America via Denmark, settling in the Forest Hills suburb of New York, where he underwent a profound reversal of feeling—from pro-Communism to virulent anti-Communism, and a growing paranoia (it was a paranoiac time). This gradually got the better of him (to the point where he included flying saucers among his enemies), and he was eventually convicted of fraud after the Food and Drug Administration took out an injunction against a shipment of “orgone accumulators,” which he claimed attracted “orgone energy” (basic to life) and focused it on the body inside the box. In March 1957 he was sent to prison.
    Fritz Perls studied dramatic direction in Berlin with Max Reinhardt, later becoming interested in Gestalt psychology, which, he thought, was “the next step after Freud.” It was Perls’s approach that produced the Esalen Institute in the 1960s and that, via “est,” evolved into the “human potential” movement in the late 1970s, the basic idea of which was to “unlock previously blocked psychic energies,” mainly by sexual and sensual liberation—hot tubs in the open air, nudity, drugs, the breaking of taboos. This may be seen as a form of post-Freudian Bildung . Games People Play , by Eric Berne, another émigré, was a best seller in 1964 and explored similar issues.
    H EIDEGGER’S C HILDREN
     
    After psychoanalysis, the area where German thought has had most influence in the United States is politics or, more accurately, political science—i.e., political theorizing rather than practical politics. 24 The first figure here is Hannah Arendt, but Richard Wolin has reminded us in his book Heidegger’s Children (2001) how many of Heidegger’s students became influential after the war on both sides of the Atlantic: besides Arendt, we may include Herbert Marcuse, Leo Strauss, Karl Löwith, Hans Jonas, Paul Tillich, and Hans-Georg Gadamer. 25
    As outlined earlier, Arendt arrived in New York in 1941 via Paris. She moved in the milieu that surrounded such small magazines as Commentary and the Partisan Review , later for a time becoming a professor—at Princeton, the University of California, Chicago, and, perhaps inevitably, the New School for Social Research. The New School had been founded in 1919 by a group of scholars linked to the New Republic magazine, and early professors there had included John Dewey and Thorsten Veblen. In 1933, to help support