Lit Up by David Denby

Author:David Denby
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780805095869
Publisher: Henry Holt and Co.

CHAPTER ELEVEN

BEACON, MARCH: VIKTOR E. FRANKL

Where Was Joy?

Rebellion (If That’s What It Was)

Viktor E. Frankl and the Meaning of Life

Hier ist kein Warum

A Death in the Family

Sophomoric

Okay, this was enough. Enough.

The students needed a break from grim books. I needed a break from grim books. Slaughterhouse-Five was black comedy, and funny in its morbid-whimsical-fantastical way, but death ran right through it, and I wondered, Where was the exhilaration of the body in movement, the triumph of heroes and heroines, the happiness of youth as well as the strivings of youth? Mr. Leon’s moral intensity was powerful, but where was the rest of life? Joy? Exhilaration? Art as delight? The pleasures of story? I agreed that middle-class students in a privileged atmosphere needed some shaking up, but they needed happiness, too. Along about this time, the students could have used, well, some Shakespeare. Much Ado About Nothing, say, with its dueling Beatrice and Benedick, its play of ridicule and intrigue, and its ruling notion—the ruling notion of all romantic comedy—that “the world must be peopled.” Yes, the notion that banter and flirting and quarreling between men and women leads to romance and bed and the perpetuation of the race. But never mind the perpetuation of the race. Exuberance, play, nature, sex, life in the world, narrative—where were they?

Somehow, Mr. Leon did not respond to my desires. He did not hear my silent complaint. Instead, he pressed ahead. Earlier in the year, he had written a sentence of Nietzsche’s on the board: “He who has a why to live for can bear almost any how.” Now he brought it up again: if you have a purpose in your life, you can put up with almost anything. Nietzsche’s sentiment was central to the next book on the reading list, Viktor E. Frankl’s The Search for Meaning, an account of Frankl’s time in several Nazi concentration camps. With a sigh, I read the book, which was new to me.

Frankl was a Viennese psychiatrist and neurologist with general medical training, and therefore of some value to the Nazis, who kept him alive despite his Jewish identity. Arrested with his wife in 1942, he survived and even flourished in Theresienstadt, the “model” camp near Prague that the Nazis used as a propaganda tool to demonstrate their “benevolent” treatment of the Jews. In 1944, he was transported to Auschwitz; he survived there, too, but got moved again, to a Dachau subsidiary camp, and was finally liberated by the American Army in April 1945. His brother, parents, and pregnant wife, Tilly, all perished in the camps.

Later that year, he wrote a short memoir (allegedly in nine days). The original title (in translation) was Say “Yes” to Life: A Psychologist Experiences the Concentration Camp. When Frankl published the book in America, in 1959, he added a new section, and the title became From Death-Camp to Existentialism. Sometime later the title morphed into Man’s Search for Meaning. In the 2006 paperback edition, the book had acquired a foreword by Rabbi Harold S.

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