Meaning Page 6
COLLEAGUE: That which does not kill me, makes me stronger.
FRANKL: Then I spoke of the future. Since there was no typhus epidemic in the camp, I estimated my own chances at about one in twenty. In spite of this I did not give up hope—for no man knew what the future would bring.
COLLEAGUE: The future is hope.
FRANKL: I also mentioned the past—all of its joys, how its light ever shone in the present darkness. I quoted the poet, “Was du erlebst, kann keine Macht der Welt dir rauben.”
COLLEAGUE: What you have experienced, no power on earth can take from you.
FRANKL: There is so much that we had already brought into being, and having been is also a kind of being, perhaps the surest kind.
COLLEAGUE: You were yourself transformed that evening.
FRANKL: Then I spoke of the many opportunities of giving life a meaning. Human life, under any circumstances, never ceases to have a meaning.
COLLEAGUE: And that infinite meaning of life includes suffering and dying, privation and death.
FRANKL: For each of us. I said that someone looks down on us in our difficult hours—a friend, a wife, somebody alive or dead, or a God—and he would not expect us to disappoint him.
COLLEAGUE: You would know how to suffer proudly.
FRANKL: Finally, I spoke of our sacrifice, which had meaning in every case, in every case. It was the nature of this sacrifice that it should appear pointless in the normal world, but in reality our sacrifice did have a meaning.
COLLEAGUE: How did they respond?
FRANKL: When the light flared up again, I saw the miserable figures of my friends limping towards me to thank me with tears in their eyes.
COLLEAGUE: You succeeded then.
FRANKL: But I have to confess here that only too rarely had I the inner strength to make contact with my companions in suffering, and that I missed many opportunities to do so.
End of Scene 18
Scene 19
After Liberation
Title Board: THE GUARDS
After liberation
Colleague; Frankl; Man
Visual: Two or three guard photos, open gates, clouds, fields, released prisoners eating and sitting.
Stage Directions: Black-and-white photos yielding to colored ones of meadows and forests and clouds.
COLLEAGUE: Before you speak about the psychology of the prisoners after the liberation, what about the camp guards? How could they do what they did?
FRANKL: First, among the guards there were some sadists, sadists in the pure clinical sense. Second, these sadists were always selected when a really severe detachment of guards was needed. Third, the feelings of the majority of guards had been dulled by the number of years in which, in ever-increasing doses, they had witnessed the brutal methods of the camp.
COLLEAGUE: Yet some of those men refused to take an active part in sadistic measures.
FRANKL: True. But they did not prevent others.
COLLEAGUE: A small sop to their consciences.
FRANKL: Fourth, it must be stated that even among the guards there were some who took pity on us. We found out after liberation that my last camp commander paid out of his own pocket for medicines for prisoners. But the senior camp warden, a prisoner himself, was harder than any SS guard—he beat other prisoners at every slightest opportunity.
COLLEAGUE: You just couldn’t tell.
FRANKL: Human kindness can be found in all groups. I remember how one day a foreman secretly gave me a piece of bread—he must have saved this from his breakfast ration. It was far more than the small piece of bread which moved me to tears at the time. It was the human “something” which this man also gave to me—the word and look which accompanied the gift.
COLLEAGUE: So, the prisoners were profoundly moved by the smallest kindness received from any of the guards.
FRANKL: You know, from all this we may learn that there are two races of men in this world, but only these two—the “race” of the decent man, and the “race” of the indecent man. Both are found everywhere. No group is of “pure race,” and therefore one occasionally found a decent fellow among camp guards.
COLLEAGUE: Only occasionally, only occasionally.
FRANKL: Life in a concentration camp tore open the human soul and exposed its depths. Is it surprising that in those depths we again found human qualities which in their very nature were a mixture of good and evil?
COLLEAGUE: And after the liberation?
FRANKL: On that day there was a sense of total relaxation. But it would be wrong to think that we went mad with joy.
COLLEAGUE: What then? Some kind of anticlimax?
FRANKL: With tired steps we dragged ourselves to the camp gates, looking timidly around. Then we ventured a few steps out of camp. No orders were shouted at us! No blows or kicks! Oh, no! This time the guards offered us cigarettes! We walked slowly along the road leading from the camp—we wanted to see the camp’s surroundings with the eyes of free men. “Freedom”—we repeated to ourselves, and yet we could not grasp it.
COLLEAGUE: You had dreamed about it so much that perhaps it had lost its meaning.
FRANKL: We could not grasp the fact that freedom was ours. We came to a meadow full of flowers. We saw and realized that they were there, but we had no feelings about them. The first spark of joy came when we saw a rooster with a tail of multicolored feathers—but it remained only a spark.
COLLEAGUE: When did you really know?
FRANKL: In the evening when we all met again in our hut, one said secretly to the other—
MAN: Tell me, were you pleased today?
FRANKL: We replied, “Truthfully, no!” We had literally lost the ability to feel pleased, and had to relearn it slowly.
COLLEAGUE: In some ways that was a more brutal act than the beatings and the killings.
FRANKL: In psychological terms, the liberated prisoners were depersonalized—everything appeared unreal, unlikely, as in a dream.
COLLEAGUE: Yet dreams end and you wake up.
FRANKL: You don’t understand—we didn’t believe that. How often had we been deceived by our dreams to wake to a shrill whistle?
COLLEAGUE: But now the dream had really come true.
FRANKL: But could we truly believe in it? Could we?
COLLEAGUE: Slowly, yes, reality must win out.
FRANKL: Our bodies believed it first. We, our bodies, ate ravenously, for hours and days, even half the night.
COLLEAGUE: You were amazed, I’m sure, as to how much you could eat.
FRANKL: It took days. For me it was a few days after liberation when I walked through the country, past flowering meadows, for miles and miles. Larks rose to the sky and I could hear their joyous song. There was no one around, just the wide earth and sky and the larks’ jubilation and the freedom of space.
COLLEAGUE: The freedom of space.
FRANKL: At that moment, I stopped and looked around and fell to my knees. One sentence came to my mind over and over: “I called to the Lord from my narrow prison and He answered me in the freedom of space.”
COLLEAGUE: The freedom of space.
FRANKL: How long I knelt there and repeated that sentence I can no longer recall. But I know that on that day, in that hour, my new life started. Step for step I progressed, until I again became a human being.
End of Scene 19
Scene 20
Dr J.’s Story
Title Board: DR J.’S STORY
A truly satanic being?
Colleague; Frankl
Visual: Hospital in Vienna, Hitler rallies in Vienna, Ljubjanka prison in Moscow, Nazi medical doctors.
Stage Directions: Integrate slides with the text.
Frankl and the hospital team.
Source: Viktor Frankl Institute, Vienna, Austria.
Hitler Wien.
Source: Frankl, V.E. (1997). Viktor Frankl Recollections. An Autobiography.
COLLEAGUE: You mentioned a Dr J. Can you tell me his story?
FRANKL: L
et me cite the following case. It concerns Dr J., the only man I have ever encountered in my whole life whom I would dare to characterize as a satanic being. At the time I knew of him, he was generally called “The mass murderer of Steinhof,” the name of the large mental hospital in Vienna. When the Nazis had started their euthanasia program, he held all the strings in his hands and was so fanatic in the job assigned to him that he tried not to let one single psychotic individual escape the gas chamber. The few patients who did escape were, paradoxically, Jews. It happened that a small ward in a Jewish home for aging people remained unknown to Dr J.; and, though the Gestapo which supervised this institution had strictly forbidden the admission of any psychotic patients, I succeeded in smuggling in and hiding such patients there by issuing false diagnostic certificates. I manipulated the symptomology in these cases so as to indicate aphasia instead of schizophrenia. I also administered illegal metrazol shocks. Thus these Jewish patients could be rescued, whereas even the relatives of Nazi party functionaries were “mercy”-killed. When I came back to Vienna—after having myself escaped from being sent to the gas chamber in Auschwitz—I asked what happened to Dr J. “He had been imprisoned by the Russians in one of the isolation cells of Steinhof,” they told me. “The next day, however, the door of his cell stood open and Dr J. was never seen again.” Later, I was convinced that, like others, he had by the help of his comrades found his way to South America. More recently, however, I was consulted by a former high-ranking Austrian diplomat who had been imprisoned behind the Iron Curtain for many years, first in Siberia, and then in the famous Ljubjanka prison in Moscow. While I was examining him neurologically, he suddenly asked me whether I happened to know Dr J. After my affirmative reply he continued: “I made his acquaintance in Ljubjanka. There he died, at about forty, from cancer of the urinary bladder. Before he died, however, he showed himself to be the best comrade you can imagine! He gave consolation to everybody. He lived up to the highest conceivable moral standard. He was the best friend I ever met during my long years in prison!”
Young Frankl at the clinic, 1930.
Source: Viktor Frankl Institute, Vienna, Austria.
This is the story of Dr J., “the mass murderer of Steinhof.” How can you dare to predict the behavior of man! What you may predict are the movements of a machine, of an apparatus, of an automaton. More than that, you may even try to predict the mechanisms or “dynamisms” of the human psyche as well; but man is more than psyche: Man is spirit. By the very act of his own selftranscendence he leaves the plane of the merely biopsychological and enters the sphere of the specifically human, the noölogical dimension. Human existence is, in its essence, noëtic. A human being is not one thing among others: things are determining each other, but man is self-determining. In actuality, man is free and responsible, and these constituents of his spirituality, i.e., freedom and responsibility, must never be clouded by what is called the reification or depersonalization of man.
End of Scene 20
Scene 21
Some Personal Stories
Title Board: SOME PERSONAL STORIES
Family
Elly-Frau Frankl
Visual: Frankl’s parents, Frankl with brother and sister, Frankl family, mountaineering, Elly, Gabriele and Franz, grandchildren, with Pope Paul VI.
Stage Directions: Integrate family photos with text.
Frankl as a child.
Source: Viktor Frankl Institute, Vienna, Austria.
COLLEAGUE: When were you born?
FRANKL: I was born in Vienna on March 26, 1905. My birthday coincides with the day Beethoven died.
COLLEAGUE: You had some famous ancestors.
FRANKL: My mother was a descendant of an old and established Prague patrician family. Among her ancestors was Rashi, who lived in the twelfth century, and “Maharal,” the “High Rabbi Löw” of Prague who was made famous in the novel The Golem.
Viktor Frankl’s parents, 1901.
Source: Viktor Frankl Institute, Vienna, Austria.
COLLEAGUE: Your mother blessed you before you were all deported to Auschwitz.
FRANKL: When the time had come and I was to be deported to the Auschwitz death camp with my first wife, Tilly, I said farewell to my dear mother. At that last moment I asked Mother, “Please give me your blessing.” I can never forget how she cried out, from deep within her heart, “Yes! Yes, I bless you!”—and then she gave me her blessing. This was only a week before she herself was deported to Auschwitz and sent directly to the gas chamber.
COLLEAGUE: And the last time you saw your father …
FRANKL: Among the few things I was able to smuggle into Theresienstadt was a vial of morphine. When my father was dying from pulmonary edema, and struggling for air as he neared death, I injected him with the morphine to ease his suffering. He was then eighty-one years old and starving. Nevertheless, it took a second pneumonia to bring about his death.
I asked him, “Do you still have pain?”
FRANKL’S FATHER: No.
FRANKL: Do you have any wish?
FRANKL’S FATHER: No.
FRANKL: Do you want to tell me anything?
The Frankl family, 1925. From left to right: Viktor, Gabriel, Elsa, Stella, and Walter.
Source: Frankl, V.E. (1997). Viktor Frankl Recollections. An Autobiography.
FRANKL’S FATHER: No.
FRANKL: I kissed him and left. I knew I would not see him alive again. But I had the most wonderful feeling one can imagine. I had done what I could. I had stayed in Vienna because of my parents, and now I had accompanied Father to the threshold and had spared him the unnecessary agony of death.
COLLEAGUE: Your thoughts on their deaths and death?
FRANKL: In some respects it is death itself that makes life meaningful. Most importantly, the transitoriness of life cannot destroy its meaning because nothing from the past is irretrievably lost. Everything is irrevocably stored.
COLLEAGUE: To change the subject, someone once said you were a lifelong punster.
FRANKL: Punning and other forms of humor have been among my pleasures. Many times I am offered a second cup of tea. I decline it by saying, “No, thanks. I am a mono-tea-ist. I only drink one cup.”
COLLEAGUE: You loved climbing in the mountains.
Viktor and Elly, 1958.
Source: Viktor Frankl Institute, Vienna, Austria.
FRANKL: Every important decision I have made, almost without exception, I have made in the mountains.
COLLEAGUE: You climbed until you were eighty.
FRANKL: It was my most passionate hobby.
COLLEAGUE: You knew Freud, yet you were opposed to his ideas.
FRANKL: Those who know me also know that my opposition to Freud’s ideas never kept me from showing him the respect he deserves.
COLLEAGUE: You have much praise for your wife Elly.
Elly Frankl, 1964.
Source: Frankl, V.E. (1997). Viktor Frankl Recollections. An Autobiography.
FRANKL: The sacrifices of Elly may be even greater than my own. So that I might complete my life’s work, she has denied herself much. She is the counterpart to me, both quantitatively and qualitatively. What I accomplish with my brain she fulfills with her heart. Jacob Needleman once said, referring to the way in which Elly has been my companion on lecture tours, “She is the warmth that accompanies the light.”
COLLEAGUE: How did you meet her?
At the wedding with Leonore Schwindt, 1947.
Source: Viktor Frankl Institute, Vienna, Austria.
Franz and Gabriele, 1966.
Gabriele, Frankl’s daughter 1950
FRANKL: It was 1946, and surrounded by my medical staff I made rounds in the neurology sections of the Polyclinic. I had just left one sickroom and was about to enter the next, when a young nurse approached me. She asked, on behalf of her supervisor in Oral Surgery, if I could spare a bed from my department for a patient who had just had surgery. I agreed, and she left with a grateful smile. I turned to my assistant
: “Did you see those eyes?”
Frankl and family, 1996.
Source: Klingberg, H. (2001). When Life Calls Out to Us. The Love and Lifework of Viktor and Elly Frankl.
Frankl meets Pope Paul VI, 1970.
Source: Viktor Frankl Institute, Vienna, Austria.
COLLEAGUE: And?
FRANKL: In 1947 that nurse became my wife, Eleonore Katharina, née Schwindt.
COLLEAGUE: And the rest of your family?
FRANKL: We have a daughter, Gabriele. Our son-in-law is Franz Vesely, professor of physics at the University of Vienna. We have two grandchildren, Katharina and Alexander.
COLLEAGUE: Tell me the story of your meeting with the Pope.
The Frankls with their grandchildren.
The Frankls on the Rax Mountain.
Source: Frankl, V.E. (1997). Viktor Frankl Recollections. An Autobiography.