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In The Grand Hotel Abyss, the author talks about the Jewish intellectuals of the Frankfurt School, and how they, early on, battled with their parents, the first or second generation of assimilated Jews in Germany. They rebelled against them for many reasons, but mostly because they thought they had “assimilated” far too much.
A Freudian analysis might make this an Oedipal conflict. A Bloomian one might say it was a battle over “the anxiety of influence.” Either way, they rejected the idea that to be a successful human being — or the unsaid “real man” — meant tremendous success in business, with few other exceptions.
Breaking that down further, there was a lot of talk at the time about the dominant role of the Father in Protestant Christianity, and how this led to capitalism, versus the ancient concept of “Mother Right,” and how that led to (or could lead to) real socialism.
From Stuart Jeffries’ bio (on Eric Fromm, at this point):
“As an adult, Fromm became steeped in the work of the nineteenth-century Swiss Lutheran jurist Johan Jacob Bachofen, whose 1861 book Mother Right and the Origins of Religion provided the first challenge to the prevailing orthodoxy that patriarchal society represented a natural state of affairs, and thereby validated capitalism, oppression and male hegemony, as Fromm’s biographer Lawrence Friedman argues. Reading Bachofen also encouraged Fromm to reflect that the mother-child bond was the root of social life and that in a matriarchal society there was no strife, conflict or even private property, reflections that were decisive for his developing socialist humanism. In Bachofen’s description of matriarchal societies they functioned as what Fromm called ‘primitive socialist democracies,’ in which sociability, generosity, tenderness, religiosity and egalitarianism prevailed.”
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