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Remembering Viktor
Frankl
Mark Palermo
(08/03/07)
 Ten years ago this month, with
the world’s attention focused upon the deaths
of Mother Teresa and Princess Diana, a third great
figure died in Europe, his death largely unnoticed and
his life’s work seemingly forgotten.
Viktor Frankl was a Viennese psychiatrist who once worked
with Freud. A survivor of Auschwitz and Dachau, he drew
heavily from his concentration camp experiences in his
classic book “Man’s Search for Meaning.”
Unlike many Holocaust writers, who have catalogued the
cruelty and inhumanity of which people are capable,
Frankl took the long view, using his Holocaust
experiences as an existential laboratory to analyze how
some people held themselves together under the most
dehumanizing conditions imaginable.
Having experienced that, he would write, “They can
take away everything except the last of the human
freedoms: Man’s ability to change his own attitude
in any given circumstance.” Frankl’s message to
the world was that human freedom is indeed possible even
under the most wretched conditions. It is notable that
Frankl died of natural causes at the age of 92, while a
number of lesser known Holocaust writers have taken their
own lives.
Frankl’s observations of the concentration
camp system are an interesting take on human nature. For
example, those prisoners whose job it was to run the
crematoriums and gas chambers were granted one special
privilege normally reserved only for the highest levels
of the Gestapo: they were allowed as much alcohol as they
wanted.
While it is widely believed that the camp experiences had
a uniformly degrading effect upon all prisoners, Frankl
writes that it wasn’t that way at all. Some of the
prisoners ingratiated themselves into favorable positions
as cooks, storekeepers, capos, and camp security. The
capos in particular were selected by the Gestapo for
their brutish nature and low level of consciousness.
These favored elite prisoners “did not feel degraded
at all- like the majority of prisoners, but on the
contrary- promoted. Some even developed miniature
delusions of grandeur.” Having advanced in status,
something they had not previously been able to do, many
of these men actually felt fulfilled and self-important
for the first time. They were often harder on their
fellow prisoners than even the Gestapo, a phenomenon
which was a source of bitterness and cynical humor to the
other prisoners.
The camps were rife with betrayals, theft, subterfuge and
ruthless competition, but saintly and heroic people were
present as well. Frankl tells of a noble class of men who
gave away their last meager rations of bread to the sick
or took dangerous risks for the sake of others. Of
survival he writes, “We who have come back, we know-
the best of us did not return.”
Man’s Search for Meaning has been called the first
and the best self-help book. While most current
approaches to mental health delve into the psychology of
the unconscious, Frankl’s is a no-nonsense approach
to growing up and viewing the world as an emotionally and
spiritually mature being. Frankl would say that we cannot
escape suffering. We will all suffer the loss of loved
ones, feel the world’s cruelty and prejudices, be
sick or lonesome, we must all in time grow old and
feeble, and we must all die. But the greatest tragedy is
to lose one’s sense of meaning in life.
Lest we lose faith in our fellow man, Frankl wrote,
“Man is that being who invented the gas chambers of
Auschwitz, however, he is also that being who entered
them upright with the Lord’s Prayer or the Schema
Israel on his lips.”
Frankl was an outspoken and opinionated man. He hated
mass media spectacles; especially the public’s
insatiable demand for scandals, titillation and celebrity
gossip. He deplored the movement of mass culture toward
vicarious living, a phenomenon he would see as evidence
of a growing spiritual void, not only in America, but
increasingly in Europe.
Eulogizing Frankl in the Wall Street Journal, Matthew
Scully wrote, “Frankl was perhaps the most acute
analyst of secular culture, that modern way of swearing
devotion to faraway people, causes, and ideals while
letting one’s own life unravel.”
Frankl was popular on the lecture circuit in the 1950’s
and 60’s. He visited the United States for the last
time in 1990 where -to his dismay- no major network was
interested in interviewing him, an indicator of the
skewed, dumbed-down priorities of network television.
Nevertheless, Man’s Search for Meaning has sold five
million copies, been translated into 32 languages, and
continuously in print since 1946, so people are indeed
still interested.
Matthew Scully wrote, “It’s a safe bet we won’t
be seeing Viktor Frankl on the cover of Time or People.
But his passing reminds us why we should prize wisdom at
least as much as beauty:
We need it more and it lasts a lot longer.”
Mark Palermo is a professor at Northern Essex
Community College in Haverhill. You can email him at markpalermo@lycos.com.
*Send your questions comments to ValleyPatriot@aol.com
The August 2007 Edition
of the Valley Patriot
The Valley Patriot is a Monthly
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All Contents (C) 2007, Valley Patriot, Inc.
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