On August 21, 2024, the undoubtedly greatest promoter of Erich Fromm’s thought and work died at the age of 91. The ingenious engineer of concrete pumps set new standards in construction worldwide – for example in tunnel construction (Gotthard, Eurotunnel) or in the construction of the tallest building in Dubai. The concrete pump technology developed by Schlecht made it possible to encase Chernobyl and Fukushima in a protective concrete shell.
One day in the late 1970s, he heard Fromm’s radio report on “vita activa”, which appealed to him and inspired him to read The Art of Loving. From then on, thoughts of Erich Fromm accompanied his life. When he found out in 2011 that Erich Fromm’s estate was in Tübingen, he contacted me and asked to see the Erich Fromm archive in the rooms of my private home. His spontaneous thought was to make Fromm’s estate accessible to the public and to Fromm research forever. If I were to contribute Fromm’s library and his scientific legacy to an Erich Fromm Foundation, he wanted to provide a capital base for the foundation and for the premises and maintenance of an institute.
In 2014, with the legal help of the former chancellor of the University of Tübingen, Georg Sandberger, the Erich Fromm Foundation was established, whose mission is to turn the Erich Fromm Institute at Hintere Grabenstraße 26 in Tübingen into a globally unique center for Fromm research.
But that was not all: since university psychology wanted to know less and less about psychoanalysis, Fromm’s thinking was to receive more attention there. The search led to the world’s only psychoanalytic university in Berlin. Here, Karl Schlecht financed an Erich Fromm professorship (held by Thomas Kühn) from 2016 and provided the funds to found an Erich Fromm Study Center, which now also has its own room with a Fromm library in the Altmoabit 91a building. Teaching assignments held by Burkhard Bierhoff and myself strengthen the range of courses offered by the Erich Fromm Study Center team in order to anchor Fromm’s social psychology in the university’s degree courses.
The Karl Schlecht Foundation, established by Karl Schlecht, is not only responsible for the Erich Fromm Institute in Tübingen and the Erich Fromm Study Center in Berlin. Numerous initiatives, such as a large-scale digitization of the Fromm Institute’s holdings or the financing of the Fromm website, the English edition of the Fromm Forum and an Erich Fromm Document Centre, which was initiated by the Fromm Society, could never have been realized without the financial support of Karl Schlecht and his foundation.
We say farewell to Karl Schlecht with sadness, but also with great gratitude. Rainer Funk
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