Viktor E. Frankl - Mans Search for Meaning: Young Adult Edition: Young Adult Edition

To the memory of my mother

When I was fifteen years old, my English teacher came into school on the last day before our summer holidays and read out a list of about forty books. I want you to read some of these over the break, he told us. I wont test you on them afterwards. I wont ask you what you read or tell you to write any book reports. But each one is a powerful work of literature that has meant a lot to me over the years, and if you give them a chance, if you let these stories and voices into your lives, then they might make you view the world in a different way. And they might change you.

I was unfamiliar with most of the titles, for although this was a point in my development where I was beginning to discover adult literature in a more serious way, I was new to almost all of it. However, being a teenager obsessed with both reading and writing, the list excited me, and I took to my bike and cycled to my local bookshop the next morning ready to begin. It took a long time to decide where this reading journey should start, but eventually I settled on Primo Levis If This Is a Man.

The book had a profound effect on me. It may seem strange now, but growing up in Ireland in the mid-1980s, we didnt study the Holocaust in school, and so, outside of war films that Id seen on television and the occasional World War II novel aimed at younger readers that Id borrowed from the library, this was my introduction to a subject that would grow to fascinate and horrify me in equal parts over the years to come. A subject that would become an intrinsic part of my own story, even though I had been born more than a quarter century after the last of the death camps had been liberated.

As often happens with reading, one book that summer led me to another, and another after that, and soon I abandoned my teachers list and allowed the writers and the stories to dictate where I should go next. I found myself working my way through much of Primo Levis autobiographical writings, as well as the works of Anne Frank and Elie Wiesel, alongside some history books and, memorably, a biography of Hitler. And then, just as the summer was drawing to a close and I was being measured up for the next years school uniform, I discovered Mans Search for Meaning by Viktor E. Frankl, a book whose title intimidated me but that felt like the natural continuation of my education as I attempted to understand the most terrible period of history, a time when it seemed that the human race displayed just how cruel it could be.

Frankls book, like Levis, like Wiesels, like Anne Franks, affected me greatly, both when I read it in 1986 and again, thirty years later, when I re-read it in preparation for writing this foreword. Theres a clarity to his analysis of how prisoners felt in this most dehumanizing of experiences that is both surprising in its lack of bitterness and illuminating in its lucidity: The feelings of shock, dismay, and fear that victims felt having been pulled from their homes and brought to unfamiliar and frightening places. The cycle that the mind must have gone through as it adjusted to living within the electrified fences of death. The basic human urge that must have forced a person to do all he or she could simply to stay alive. And then the effect on the devastated psyche for those victims who survived the experience and found themselves liberated into a changed world, who would take decades to come to terms with the things that had taken place.

Frankl even makes us wonder about that word survived. Did anyone actually survive the camps? Im not so sure that they did, the experience proving so overwhelming, the memories so brutal, the grief for lost loved ones so intense that it must have weighed on the consciousness like an insupportable burden.

Each memoir written by a victim of the camps is different and surprising, but for me, one of the most unexpected elements of Frankls book is his central belief that every moment of our existencehappy, sad, generous, or cruelgives us our experience of life and should be accepted as such. Theres a stoicism to this concept that takes time to understandindeed, I think one would have had to experience what Frankl experienced to comprehend it fullybut it gave the author the courage to survive on a daily basis and eventually to use his experiences to join that extraordinary group of men and women who were willing to plunge fearlessly into their darkest days to share their experiences with the world without self-pity or acrimony but with nothing more than a clear desire that we should understand, and through understanding, prevent such things from taking place again.

Frankl was ahead of his time in his controversial belief that freedom of choice remains an inherent part of the captives life, that under the most extreme of situations, to lose hope is to surrender entirely to the darkness. His analysis of the different types of personwhether guards or prisonersis also startling, and there is real daring in his clinical examination of both that must have proved shocking and perhaps even unpleasant to some when the memoir was first published in 1946.

For me, however, the most fascinating element of the book is his exploration of the life of the victimand I prefer the word victim to prisoner, for prisoner suggests rightful incarceration while victim is clear on the innocence of the abused partyafter his or her liberation. Its impossible for someone of my generation and background to imagine the feelings of relief, confusion, and anger that must have jostled for dominion in the mind. Impossible for any of us, anymore, I think. The emotions and the personality must have been so shattered that to take pleasure in any part of life afterward would have proved a substantial challenge. When you have seen the worst of human behavior, after all, how do you continue to live among people? This was something that each victim had to come to terms with and perhaps some were more successful than others. For Frankl, there was only one way to cope: write about it.

Viktor Frankl died when I was just a child, but as a novelist who has made an attempt at understanding the Holocaust through my own fiction, I have been fortunate to be part of that last group of writers to have had the privilege of meeting survivors of the camps through my travels over the years. The single most humbling experience of my professional life has been standing in community centers, halls, theaters, and on festival stages around the world while audience members have risen to recount their own memories. Talking to them afterward, feeling honored to be in their presence and a little unworthy to have written about a subject using only my imagination when their true stories are so much more powerful and authentic than my own, is something I will always cherish. And in those conversations the name of Viktor Frankl and Mans Search for Meaning has come up time and again, alongside those other classic works that help keep the memories of that time alive. And it always will. That is his legacy.

Why do we keep writing about it? is a question that comes up time and again. I think its because although all powerful works of fiction, nonfiction, and memoir inspire discussion, passion, and even criticism, the joy of literature, as opposed too often to the practice of politics or religion, is that it embraces differing opinions; it encourages debate, and it allows us to have heated conversations with our closest friends and dearest loved ones. And through it all no one gets hurt, no one gets taken away from their homes, and no one gets killed. This is something that Viktor Frankl must have understood, for