Viktor Frankl’s Man’s Search for Meaning is the most-read book ever written by a Holocaust survivor. Published first in German in 1946 as Ein Psychologe erlebt das Konzentrationslager (“A Psychologist Experiences the Concentration Camp”), it was a small, fast, urgent book of around 30,000 words written in nine days in the late summer of 1945, in the months immediately after Frankl’s release. The 1959 English translation, retitled and expanded with an essay on Frankl’s logotherapy school of psychiatry, became one of the most-read books of the second half of the twentieth century, with sales now estimated at well over fifteen million copies in around fifty languages.
Frankl before the camps
Viktor Frankl was born in Vienna in 1905 to a Jewish family of modest means. He trained as a doctor at the University of Vienna in the late 1920s, took his doctorate in medicine in 1930, and began clinical work in psychiatry. By the late 1930s he had developed his own school of psychotherapy, logotherapy, which he positioned as a third Viennese school after Freud and Adler. The central claim of logotherapy was that human motivation is most fundamentally directed at meaning rather than at pleasure (Freud) or at power and self-realisation (Adler). The position was developed in academic papers through the 1930s.
The Anschluss of March 1938 changed Frankl’s professional and personal circumstances. As a Jew he was forbidden to treat Aryan patients; he became director of the neurological department of the Rothschild Hospital, the only Jewish hospital still permitted to operate in Vienna, and concentrated his work on patients at risk of suicide. He had received an American visa in 1941 but did not use it; his elderly parents could not leave with him, and he chose to remain. He married Tilly Grosser in late 1941. Tilly became pregnant in 1942; the regime required Jewish women to abort their pregnancies, and the couple complied.
The Frankls were deported to Theresienstadt in September 1942 along with Frankl’s parents. His father died in Theresienstadt in 1943. In October 1944 Viktor and Tilly were both transported to Auschwitz; they were separated on the ramp and never saw each other again. Tilly was sent on to Bergen-Belsen, where she died in early 1945. Viktor was sent on to Kaufering and Türkheim, the satellite camps of Dachau, where he survived as a slave labourer until liberation by American troops on 27 April 1945. His mother had been murdered at Auschwitz in 1942.
The book
Frankl returned to Vienna in August 1945 and learned of his family’s deaths over the following weeks. He began writing his book in early September, dictating to three secretaries in the rooms of friends because his own apartment had been requisitioned. He completed the manuscript in nine days. The book was published in German in 1946 by the Viennese publisher Verlag für Jugend und Volk in a small print run.
The book has two parts. The first, around 25,000 words, describes Frankl’s experience in the camps. It moves through the stages of psychological response he observed in himself and other prisoners: the shock of arrival, the apathy of the long middle period, the emotional reactions after liberation. The descriptions are observational and clinical rather than narrative; Frankl is a psychiatrist taking notes on himself and others under conditions designed to break the noticing capacity. The second part, around 5,000 words in the original German, is a brief exposition of logotherapy as a therapeutic school, framing the camp experience as a confirmation of the school’s central thesis.
The 1959 English translation by Ilse Lasch was published by Beacon Press as From Death-Camp to Existentialism. A revised edition in 1962 retitled the book Man’s Search for Meaning, which has remained the standard English title. The 1962 edition added a fuller exposition of logotherapy as a postscript and dropped some of the more clinical material from the camp section. The book began to sell in tens of thousands rather than hundreds, and over the following decades became, by some counts, one of the ten most-read books of the post-war period in any genre.
The argument and its reception
Frankl’s central claim is that the prisoners who survived the camps psychologically, where survival was possible at all under the random external conditions, were those who held on to a sense of meaning beyond their immediate suffering. The meaning could be found in love (Frankl describes thinking of Tilly during forced marches), in unfinished work (he had been writing a book on logotherapy when he was deported and reconstructed sections of the lost manuscript on scraps of paper in the camp), in religious faith, or in the responsibility one owed to one’s own moral standing under conditions designed to remove all standing. The most-quoted single passage is the formulation that “everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of the human freedoms, to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances”.
The book has had two distinct readerships. The first is the readership of survivors and their families, who found in it a serious psychological account of an experience that was difficult to render in narrative form. The second is the much larger general readership of the late twentieth century, who read the book primarily as a self-help and existential meaning text rather than as a Holocaust memoir. The book’s standing in popular psychology has at times made it one of the most-cited texts in the broader meaning-and-purpose literature, sometimes with the camp framework reduced to a backdrop for the logotherapy doctrine.
Critical reception
The book’s standing in the academic literature has been more contested than its popular standing. The historian Lawrence Langer, in Versions of Survival (1982), argued that Frankl’s emphasis on meaning and on the freedom to choose one’s attitude underplayed the way the camps systematically destroyed the conditions for any kind of choice; Langer argued that Frankl was retrospectively imposing a redemptive frame on an experience that did not in fact admit one for most prisoners. Other survivor-writers including Primo Levi were more sceptical of Frankl’s account; Levi’s own writings rarely cite Frankl and his characterisation of the camp experience is harder, less consoling, less amenable to a meaning-of-life reading.
The defence of Frankl is that his book is a clinical observation rather than a universal claim, that he was reporting what he had seen in himself and in a small number of other prisoners rather than legislating for all, and that the philosophical framework was an attempt to extract whatever could be extracted from an experience designed to leave nothing. The argument runs both ways and is not settled.
Afterwards
Frankl returned to clinical work in Vienna in 1946 and was appointed head of the Vienna Polyclinic of Neurology. He published more than thirty further books on logotherapy, lectured widely in the United States from the 1960s onwards, and held visiting professorships at Harvard, Stanford and Pittsburgh. He died in Vienna in 1997 at the age of ninety-two. The Viktor Frankl Institute in Vienna, established in 1992, is the principal centre for the continuing work of logotherapy. Man’s Search for Meaning remains in print in around fifty languages and continues to sell at a rate of around 100,000 copies per year in English alone.
See also
- Viktor Frankl
- Sigmund Freud Albert Einstein and Jewish Intellectuals in Exile
- Primo Levi
- Elie Wiesel
- If This Is a Man by Primo Levi
Sources
- Viktor Frankl, Ein Psychologe erlebt das Konzentrationslager, Verlag für Jugend und Volk, 1946 (the original German text)
- Viktor Frankl, Man’s Search for Meaning, Beacon Press, 1962 onwards (the standard revised English translation)
- Viktor Frankl, Recollections: An Autobiography, Plenum Press, 1997
- Lawrence L. Langer, Versions of Survival: The Holocaust and the Human Spirit, State University of New York Press, 1982
- Timothy Pytell, Viktor Frankl’s Search for Meaning: An Emblematic 20th-Century Life, Berghahn Books, 2015
- Anna Redsand, Viktor Frankl: A Life Worth Living, Clarion Books, 2006
- Viktor Frankl Institute, Vienna, https://www.viktorfrankl.org