An honest and trenchant depiction of life in the Nazi concentration camps, with illuminating insight into finding meaning in one’s life even in the harshest of circumstances.
Title: Man’s Search for Meaning
Author: Viktor E. Frankl
Genre: Nonfiction (Memoir)
Originally published: 1946
Finished reading: 31 January 2020
This book is on my list of “must-reads before you die”.
I have always been enthralled by war history and accounts of the Holocaust. Viktor E. Frankl’s memoir is unique. It does not divulge the great tragedies and horrors of that period—which have already been immortalised in the popular media. Rather, it seeks to illuminate the everyday torments of nameless prisoners in the Nazi concentration camps.
(Image from Wikimedia Commons)
Frankl writes from personal experience. With every turn of events, his grim positivity endures. His words, devoid of anger, resentment or contempt, almost downplay the inhumane conditions in the camps and the deep emotional trauma they must have wrought. Yet we know that the pain—both physical and emotional—must have been unbearable.
The book is divided into two parts. The first mainly focuses on Frankl’s experiences in the camps and those of other inmates, while the second is an elucidation of his own theory of logotherapy. (You may be inclined to skip Part Two altogether, but trust me, it is just as riveting as Part One—and perhaps even more enlightening.)
The crux of logotherapy is encapsulated in Nietzsche’s words:
He who has a why to live for can bear with almost any how.
Frankl believes that what keeps one going is the pursuit of what one finds meaningful in life. What truly strikes me is that he was able to hold on to that conviction even as the world around him became unrecognisable in its inhumanity. He sees suffering as an opportunity:
The way in which a man accepts his fate and all the suffering it entails, the way in which he takes up his cross, gives him ample opportunity—even under the most difficult circumstances—to add a deeper meaning to his life.
Perhaps we are able to appreciate the truth in those words in our current state of existence. Yet when confronted with the most excruciating of life’s trials, how many of us can still maintain that same equanimity—and act accordingly?
Frankl himself observed this degeneration of values in the concentration camps:
… people unmasked themselves, both the swine and the saints.
In many prisoners, even the most noble and respectable in their past lives, it was the “swine”-like potentiality that revealed itself. For Frankl, his inner strength prevailed over his external fate.
In Man’s Search for Meaning, a perennial truth shone through, one that I had always believed myself: We can define our circumstances by how we choose to live through them, rather than letting our circumstances define us. In other words, we have power over our fates. We have power in our choice of action.
In no way can that choice ever be deprived from us. Not even in the living hell of the Nazi concentration camps.
This is truly a book for everyone—even if you’re not into psychology or war history—for “[s]uffering is an ineradicable part of life, even as fate and death”.
My favourite quotes from this book
(All quotes are arranged in chronological order as they appear in the book, with the chapters indicated in parentheses.)
Don’t aim at success. The more you aim at it and make it a target, the more you are going to miss it. For success, like happiness, cannot be pursued; it must ensue, and it only does so as the unintended side effect of one’s personal dedication to a cause greater than oneself or as the by-product of one’s surrender to a person other than oneself. Happiness must happen, and the same holds for success: you have to let it happen by not caring about it. I want you to listen to what your conscience commands you to do and go on to carry it out to the best of your knowledge. Then you will live to see that in the long-run—in the long-run, I say!—success will follow you precisely because you had forgotten to think about it
― Viktor E. Frankl, Man’s Search for Meaning (Preface to the 1992 Edition)
[F]or the first time in my life I saw the truth as it is set into song by so many poets, proclaimed as the final wisdom by so many thinkers. The truth—that love is the ultimate and highest goal to which man can aspire. Then I grasped the meaning of the greatest secret that human poetry and human thought and belief have to impart: The salvation of man is through love and in love.
― Viktor E. Frankl, Man’s Search for Meaning (Part I: Experiences in a Concentration Camp)
To draw an analogy: a man’s suffering is similar to the behavior of a gas. If a certain quantity of gas is pumped into an empty chamber, it will fill the chamber completely and evenly, no matter how big the chamber. Thus suffering completely fills the human soul and conscious mind, no matter whether the suffering is great or little. Therefore the “size” of human suffering is absolutely relative.
― Viktor E. Frankl, Man’s Search for Meaning (Part I: Experiences in a Concentration Camp)
No man should judge unless he asks himself in absolute honesty whether in a similar situation he might not have done the same.
― Viktor E. Frankl, Man’s Search for Meaning (Part I: Experiences in a Concentration Camp)
[E]verything 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, to choose one’s own way.
― Viktor E. Frankl, Man’s Search for Meaning (Part I: Experiences in a Concentration Camp)
If there is meaning in life at all, then there must be a meaning in suffering. Suffering is an ineradicable part of life, even as fate and death. Without suffering and death human life cannot be complete.
― Viktor E. Frankl, Man’s Search for Meaning (Part I: Experiences in a Concentration Camp)
He knows the “why” for his existence, and will be able to bear almost any “how”.
― Viktor E. Frankl, Man’s Search for Meaning (Part I: Experiences in a Concentration Camp)
In some ways suffering ceases to be suffering at the moment it finds a meaning, such as the meaning of a sacrifice.
― Viktor E. Frankl, Man’s Search for Meaning (Part II: Logotherapy in a Nutshell)
A human being is not one thing among others; things determine each other, but man is ultimately self-determining. What he becomes—within the limits of endowment and environment—he has made out of himself. In the concentration camps, for example, in this living laboratory and on this testing ground, we watched and witnessed some of our comrades behave like swine while others behaved like saints. Man has both potentialities within himself; which one is actualized depends on decisions but not on conditions.
― Viktor E. Frankl, Man’s Search for Meaning (Part II: Logotherapy in a Nutshell)
It is we ourselves who must answer the questions that life asks of us, and to these questions we can respond only by being responsible for our existence.
― Viktor E. Frankl, Man’s Search for Meaning (Afterword)