Fwd: Erich Fromm, Alf Lüdtke, Everyday history and the German working class

This is largely non-classics but includes the vexed topic of “class” in antiquity, Ste Croix vs Finley. So possibly of interest.

Dan

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>> Political scientist Henry Farrell and economic historian Adam Tooze today tweeted news of the passing of German historian Alf Lüdtke, famous for his studies of the "history of daily life" and – as Farrell mentions – Prussia's "barracks state" (1815-50).
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>> Lüdtke was a new name to me, but the subjects are of interest.  So I took a look at Lüdtke's The History of Everyday Life: Reconstructing Historical Experiences and Ways of Life (1995), a collection published in English by Princeton, and Police and State in Prussia (review attached; published 1990 and re-published 2009; one of his emphases is the continuation of "extra-economic coercion" by the Prussian bureaucracy).  Both are impressive.  In 2015, Princeton published Everyday Life in Mass Dictatorship: Collusion and Evasion, with interesting-looking chapters on Germany, USSR, Korea etc.
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>> Looking further into History of Daily Life I perked up at a reference to Erich Fromm, famed psychiatrist.  I'd been hearing for years of Fromm's dispiriting interviews in 1929 with German workers, who cared less about class revolution than a strong central leader.  Fromm brought an apparently small portion of his papers to New York.  In History of Everyday Life, chapter 7 ("What happened to the “fiery red glow”? workers’ experiences and German fascism"), footnote 24, Fromm is quoted to the effect that "only 15 percent" of those interviewed agreed with "the socialist line both intellectually and emotionally."   (I am not sure how reliable Fromm's findings are.  More research needed.) 
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>> Lüdtke cites the publication of Fromm's findings, in German, in 1980: Surveys of Workers and Employees as the 3rd Reich Dawned, Arbeiter und Angestellte am Vorabend des Dritten Reiches.  I'd not known of this volume, but got a Kindle and read more. 
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>> Fromm's comments are riveting, not only if one cares about German history but also as we look at American voters today:  he says, or claims, that the "unreliability" (Unzuverlaessigkeit) of the workers he interviewed became evident when "they were offered a program like the Nazis'," which…: 
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>> appealed not only to the attitudes that found socialism attractive, but also to the side of their nature that socialism had left unsatisfied or unconsciously contradicted* [my emphasis] ['unbewusst widersprochen']. In these cases they morphed (wandelten) from unreliable leftists to convinced Nazis ('von unzuverlässigen Linken in überzeugte Nationalsozialisten'). In view of the relatively large votes on the left, 1926-31, it's safe to say that most of those interviewed would stand with one or the other of these parties.
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>> Fromm reported these findings to the Frankfurt School team in the '30s. I think they influenced not only Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno but the younger members:  Herbert Marcuse, Franz Neumann, and Moses Finley, all of whom seem to have been averse to "class" as an automatically progressive force in history. (Even Marcuse's Reason and Revolution [1941], written in a period when "class" was in the air, avoids it; Finley's scholarship throughout his career kept class at a distance, leading to attacks from people who seemed unaware of this background. 
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>> This is interesting in many ways, though the notes above are only jottings.  I'm sending them to friends and colleagues who know more than I, and would welcome any criticism.
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>> Dan
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>> *Adding now: this was perhaps the anti-Semitic side?
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