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When we write of the life of another person, a quote comes to mind from Richard Holmes' book, Footsteps of a Romantic Biographer (1). Holmes followed Robert Louis Stevenson's footsteps, and donkey steps, as told by Stevenson in Travels with a Donkey in the Cervennes in the hilly canton of Haute-Loire in France. Holmes says (1:69): “Biography—is about someone's life.—You cannot freeze them, you cannot pinpoint them at any particular turn of the road.—They are always in motion, carrying their past lives into the future.” (2).
Biography has become one of the more important areas for knowledge from books published today. It has become a major way of recording history, with a focus on a “great” individual, then on significant others and events and culture during the life span of the individual. If the individual has lived until current times, biography tends to tie history to the present. Hopefully, it presents an individual's development of his/her life and essential ideas and accomplishments over the course of time and in relation to other thinkers or artists of that day who had a mutual influence with the individual and with each other in life and thought. Some biographers attempt to interpret the individual's “greatness” in relation to his/her family of origin and childhood experience. All of the above are in Rainer Funk's illustrated biography of Erich Fromm, published in German in 1999, and recently (2000) translated into English by Ian Portman and Manuela Kunkel for the Continuum International Publishing Group (3).
Erich Fromm lived from 1900 until 1980. He was born and grew up through his early youth as an only child in an orthodox German-Jewish family in Frankfurt, Germany. Funk quotes the eighty-year old Fromm as saying to Gerard Khoury that: (3:6):
—my spiritual home was—a medieval atmosphere, in which everything was directed to traditional learning, to the perfection of man, to spiritual values; and while I went to a German school and took part in German cultur