Author
Viktor E. Frankl
The Viennese psychiatrist who survived the camps and wrote, in nine days, the book on the last human freedom.
1 book on BookYol
The story and the impact
Viktor Frankl was born in Vienna in 1905, trained as a neurologist and psychiatrist, and was developing his own approach to therapy when he was deported in 1942. He spent nearly three years in Nazi camps, among them Theresienstadt, Auschwitz and subcamps of Dachau, and lost his wife, parents and brother.
In the months after his return to Vienna in 1945 he wrote the book in nine days. It was published in German in 1946, in English in 1959 as From Death-Camp to Existentialism, and from 1962 as Man's Search for Meaning: half testimony from the camps, half the outline of logotherapy, his psychology built on the will to meaning. It is regularly named among the most influential books of the twentieth century.
He taught at the University of Vienna, lectured worldwide, wrote more than thirty further books, and died in Vienna in 1997.
The signature
Frankl writes with the restraint of a witness: plain sentences about unbearable things, then a psychological observation, then a claim about freedom. His signature is the reversal, it is not what we expect from life but what life expects from us, and the refusal to let the worst circumstances cancel the question of attitude.