After the works of Anne Frank and Elie Wiesel, the Austrian Jewish psychiatrist Viktor Frankl’s Man’s Search for Meaning remains one of the most widely read Holocaust memoirs. Recently a collection of lectures Frankl gave in Vienna in 1946 has been published in English, and David Mikics takes the occasion to discuss some of the themes of Frankl’s work and thought:
Most readers of Man’s Search for Meaning assume that Frankl spent months at Auschwitz, not a few days. He writes that “the prisoner of Auschwitz, in the first phase of shock, did not fear death. Even the gas chambers lost their horror for him after a few days.” This seems doubtful, and in any case, Frankl had no chance to test its truth.
There are other oddities in Man’s Search for Meaning. Frankl never mentions that the vast majority of the prisoners in the death camps were Jewish. At the end of the book he writes, “Man is that being who has invented the gas chambers of Auschwitz; however, he is also that being who has entered those gas chambers upright, with the Lord’s Prayer or the Sh’ma Yisrael on his lips.” By citing the Christian prayer before the Jewish one, Frankl redefines the Holocaust as more than merely a Jewish catastrophe.
But perhaps most problematic is Frankl’s central contention that people can and indeed must find meaning in suffering no matter how intense:
Frankl avoided the many painful cases of Holocaust survivors who were unable to reconcile themselves to their past torment. He focused only on those who achieved an optimistic, forward-looking life, people like himself, who could be inspirational examples for the rest of humanity. But Frankl’s “tragic optimism,” as he called it, turned away from the true pain of the Holocaust, which is the fact that it cannot be made into a source of moral inspiration. The horrors of the Shoah demand our attention, unsettling everything we thought we knew about human beings. Such a reality can never be a source of satisfying life lessons.
Read more on Tablet: https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/arts-letters/articles/viktor-frankl