Haddon Klingberg - When Life Calls Out to Us: The Love and Lifework of Viktor and Elly Frankl

Quotations from Mans Search for Meaning copyright 1959, 1962, 1984, 1992 by Viktor E. Frankl appear courtesy of Beacon Press, Boston.

Quotations from Viktor Frankl Recollections: An Autobiography copyright 1996 by Viktor Frankl, reprinted by permission of Perseus Books Publishers, a member of Perseus Books. L.L.C.

Quotations from Doctor and the Soul by Viktor Frankl, translated by Richard & Clara Winston, copyright 1955, 1965 by Alfred A. Knopf. Used by permission of Alfred A. Knopf, a division of Random House, Inc.

Quotations from Sigmund Freud: His Life in Pictures and Words by Ernst Lund, Lucie Freud and Ilse Gurgrich-Simitis, copyright 1978 by Harcourt, Inc., reprinted by permission of the publisher.

Every effort has been made by the author to trace the ownership of all copyrighted material included in this volume. Any errors that may have occurred are inadvertent and will be corrected in subsequent editions, provided notification is sent to the publisher.

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Klingberg, Haddon.
When life calls out to us: the love and lifework of Viktor and Elly Frankl / Haddon Klingberg Jr.1st ed.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references.
1. Frankl, Viktor Emil. 2. Frankl, Elly, 1925.
3. JewsAustriaViennaBiography.
4. Holocaust, Jewish (19391945)AustriaVienna.
5. Holocaust survivorsAustriaViennaBiography.
6. PsychiatristsAustriaViennaBiography.
7. Logotherapy. 8. ViennaAustriaBiography. I. Title.
DS135.A93 F725 2001
943.61300492400922dc21
2001028643

Copyright 2001 by Haddon Klingberg, Jr.

Maps by Travis Klingberg

eISBN: 978-0-385-50647-2
All Rights Reserved

v3.1

to Jan

ODDLY ENOUGH, THE origins of this book can be traced back to a long automobile tour of Chicago and a conversation the following morning.

The drive around the city began in the late afternoon of Saturday, May 22, 1993. Viktor and Eleonore Frankl had come to Chicago from their home in Viennahe to give a lecture, but mainly to be with Elly when she received an honorary doctorate from North Park University. My wife Janice and I were hosting the Frankls, who stayed at a hotel near our home in Evanston.

After the Saturday morning ceremony in which Elly was honored, the Frankls had returned to their suite to rest. Viktor was eighty-eight, Elly twenty years younger. Following his usual afternoon snooze, he phoned us to ask for a ride around Chicago. It was a balmy spring day and there was little traffic. The drive lasted five hours, but we didnt see much and I was the only one who ever got out of the carand that only to refuel after nightfall.

We spent the whole time swapping stories. The time flew by as the Frankls reminisced about their long lives, the Hitler years, and a half-century of love, work, and travels. There were poignant moments, of course, but jokes and laughs abounded. Just before dropping the Frankls at their hotel, I asked them, Certainly someone in Vienna has recorded these stories of yours? No, no. They didnt have the time for it, since back home they were always working on Viktors brainchild, logotherapy. Plenty has been written about logotherapy and its keystonethe search for meaningbut Jan and I thought: what a pity if the Frankl personal stories are lost. But that was not up to us, so we let it be and slept through the night.

Early the next morning I drove the Frankls to the airport to meet the Japanese host for their Tokyo flight. On the way there Viktor took me by surprise. Don [my familiar name], Elly and I were talking last night. We want to tell you that, if you will come to Vienna, we will make time to tell you our storiesas much as we are able to do, since we dont know how much longer I will live.

As I drove away from OHare Airport, it dawned on me that I was alone with this. If I did not record their stories no one ever would, and there might not be much time. So using money left from the sale of my motorcycle, the following month I was in Vienna with tape recorder and cameramy mission, to capture the stories. I had barely a clue about what I was getting into.

Over a period of seven years the project widened and deepened. Recording anecdotes turned into gathering the Frankl love story itself and recreating its context. A mere inkling of writing something evolved into this book. Thanks to grants, loans, and breaks from university teaching, I returned to Vienna whenever I could and accumulated more than a hundred hours of audio recordings of intimate conversations with the Franklsliterally thousands of recollections, opinions, impressions, stories, jokes, and anecdotes. These I indexed on minidiscs and in a vast computer database.

In addition, the Frankls towed me around Vienna to see the places of significance to them, and I tagged along to dinners with friends and family, even to appointments with their doctors. By the end I had taken eleven hundred slides of the Frankls, their places, people, and documents. I mixed with a lot of other people and conducted interviews with more than thirty of them in Europe and the United States. For the historical context of the Frankl story I dug through libraries, archives, Holocaust museums and memorials, and the Internet. I visited the sites of the four concentration camps where Viktor was held prisoner. In Vienna, I wandered in the Frankl neighborhoods over and over and began to feel their story.

What makes this book one-of-a-kind is the time I spent with the Frankls in conversation and in their daily lives. Our talks, day after day, week after week, were free-flowing and livelynever a boring moment even in sessions lasting six hours. Elly said, Don, we look forward each time to your coming. You are the only one in the whole world with whom we are so open. It is so easy, and we enjoy it. Viktor chimed in, But you elicit all that. We feel no inhibition to tell whatever can be told at all. We have no hesitation whatsoever. Like nobody else in the whole world you understand our life and our work.

Near the end of this book I will tell more about how I came to be its author, though why remains mysterious even to me. Perhaps what Elly said after Viktors death is the best explanation we have: But Don, its you that Viktor talked to as to no one else. And it is the same for me. I would not talk this way with anyone else. Something happened between usit is the same when you meet someone you are going to marry. You meet a real friend. You cannot choose. You have to take it or not to take it. You know Viktor in a very unusual way. I was always present when you talked with Viktor and he was completely open, but to no one else. To him family was always a private affair, as if it was of no interest to anyone else.

Viktor Frankl never found time for professional biographers who approached him over the years. Occasionally he granted interviews, but he was busy and became impatient. In one such interview in 1974, Frankl insisted at the outset that the concrete situations of his past be used as a way of helping people, without preaching at them. That insistence was the same in 1993 when we started. Apparently my inclusion of Elly as a full partner in the story-gathering was novel for the Frankls, but I knew early on that what I was being given to tell was primarily a love story.