Life and Works of Viktor Frankl

April 29, 2008 at 2:11 pm (Author biographies, Criticism, Resources) (, , )

The Man
Viktor E. Frankl was born in Vienna, Austria on March 26, 1905 as the second of three children. He died in 1997 in Vienna, Austria, of heart failure. His mother was from Prague and his father came from Suedmaehre. Frankl grew up in Vienna, the birthplace of modern psychiatry and home of the renowned psychiatrists Sigmund Freud and Alfred Adler. A brilliant student, Frankl was involved in Socialist youth organizations and became interested in psychiatry. At age 16 he began writing to Freud, and on one occasion sent him a short paper, which was published three years later, Frankl earned a medical degree from the University of Vienna in 1930 and was put in charge of a Vienna hospital ward for the treatment of females who had attempted suicide. When Germany seized control of Austria eight years later, the Nazis made Frankl head of the Rothschild Hospital.

 In 1942 Frankl married his first wife, Tilly Grosser. Nine months later, Frankl, his wife and his parents were deported to the Theresienstadt camp near Prague. Even though he was in four Nazi camps, Frankl survived the Holocaust, including Auschwitz in Poland from 1942-45, where the camp doctor Josef Mengele, was supervising the division of the incoming prisoners into two lines. Those in the line moving left were to go to the gas chambers, while those in the line moving right were to be spared. Frankl was directed to join the line moving left, but managed to save his life by slipping into the other line without being noticed. Other members of his family were not so fortunate. Frankl’s wife, his parents, and other members of his family died in the concentration camps.

On returning to Vienna after Germany’s defeat in 1945, Frankl, who had secretly been keeping a record of his observations in the camps on scraps of paper, published a book in German setting out his ideas on Logotherapy. This was translated into English in 1959, and in a revised and enlarged edition appeared as The Doctor and the Soul: An Introduction to Logotherapy in 1963. By the time of his death, Frankl’s book, Man’s Search for Meaning, had been translated into 24 languages and reprinted 73 times and had long been used as a standard text in high school and university courses in psychology, philosophy, and theology.

In 1946 Frankl became executive director of the Viennese neurological health center and kept this position until 1971.

In 1947 Frankl married his second wife Eleonore Schwindt, who survived him, as did a daughter, Dr. Gabrielle Frankl-Vesely. Frankl’s postwar career was spent as a professor of neurology and psychiatry in Vienna, where he taught until he was 85. He was also chief of neurology at the Vienna Polyclinic Hospital for 25 years. Frankl received twenty-nine honorary doctorates from universities in all parts of the world. He wrote over 30 books and became the first non-American to be awarded the American Psychiatric Association’s prestigious Oskar Pfister Prize and was a visiting professor at Harvard, Stanford and other universities in Pittsburgh, San Diego and Dallas. Frankl has given lectures at 209 universities on five continents. The U. S. International University in California installed a special chair for Logotherapy- this is the psychotherapeutic school founded by Frankl, often called the “Third Viennese School” (after Freud’s Psychoanalysis and Adler’s Individual Psychology.)

The American Medical Society, the American Psychiatric Association and the American Psychological Association have officially recognized Dr. Frankl’s Logotherapy as one of the scientifically based schools of psychotherapy.

His hobbies included mountain climbing, and at 67 he obtained his pilot’s license. Frankl holds the Solo Flight Certificate and the Mountain Guide badge of the Alpine Club “Donauland”. Three difficult climbing trails (on the Rax and Peilstein Mountains) were named after him. His less serious interest was his love for ties; he would admire them through a shop window.

In a 1991 survey of general-interest readers conducted by the Library of Congress and the Book of the Month Club, Man’s Search for Meaning has sold over nine million copies alone in the USA and was ranked among the ten most influential book in America.  In 1992, the  “Viktor Frankl Frankl-Institute” was created in his honor in Vienna. Viktor Frankl’s life serves as a reminder to all, no matter how difficult the path may be, choosing to give up, before it has had the chance to fly, only holds the human spirit back.

Awards and Achievements
    * 1930- Graduated from the University of Vienna Medical School
    * 1940-42- Director of the Neurological Department of the Rothschild Hospital
    * 1946-70- Director of the Vienna Neurological Policlinic
    * 1985- Viktor Emil Frankl, MD, PhD, was a recipient of the Oksar Pfister (Award presented by the American Psychiatric Association.)
    * He lectured at 209 universities on 5 continents.
    * The American Medical Society, the American Psychiatric Association, and the American Psychological Association officially recognized Logotherapy as a scientifically based school of psychotherapy.
    * Frankl was considered to be one of the last great psychotherapists of this century, after Freud and Adler.
    * Founder of Logotherapy and Existential Analysis
    * Dr. Frankl was a visiting Professor at Harvard, Pittsburgh, San Diego, and Dallas.
    * The U.S. International University in California installed a special chair for Logotherapy.
    * Recipient of 29 Honorary Doctorates from universities around the world.
    * 151 books have been published about Frankl and his work in 15 different languages.
    * Statue of Responsibility Award – This Award was named in honor of Dr. Viktor E. Frankl. The late Mother Teresa was a recipient of his award.

The Psychiatrist
Viktor E. Frankl was one of Europe’s leading psychiatrists and one of the most modern thinkers in the world. During and partly because of his suffering in concentration camps, Frankl validated a revolutionary approach to psychotherapy known as Logotherapy. At the core of this theory is the belief that man’s primary motivational force is search for meaning and the work of the logotherapist centers on helping the patient find personal meaning in life, however dismal the circumstances maybe. He is the father of the Logotherapy, an existential analysis.  

Logotherapy, developed and validated by Viktor Frankl has become known as the “Third Viennese School of Psychotherapy,” after that of Sigmund Freud and Alfred Adler. He gives a brief synopsis of the theory in his book, Man’s Search for Meaning. It is a theory Frankl used not only in his professional life, but also in his private one. Logos is a Greek word translated as “meaning.” “Logotherapy focuses on the future.” According to Logotherapy, meaning can be discovered in three ways:

    * By creating a work or doing a deed
    * By experiencing something or encountering someone
    * By the attitude we take toward unavoidable suffering

The “existential aspect of Frankl’s psychotherapy maintains man always has the ability to choose; no matter the biological, or environmental forces. An important aspect of this therapy is known as the “tragic triad,” pain, guilt, and death. Frankl’s  “Case for a Tragic Optimism” uses this philosophy to demonstrate… “optimism in the face of tragedy and in view of the human potential, which at its best always allows for”

    * Turning suffering into human achievement and accomplishment
    * Deriving from guilt the opportunity to change oneself for the better
    * Deriving from life’s transitoriness and incentive to take responsible action.

Franklian Philosophy
    * The belief in a healthy core is the basis of Franklian Psychotherapy.
    * The principle goal is to help the person become aware of the resources of their healthy core and to help them use these resources.
    * Life does not owe you happiness, it offers you meaning.

Basic Concepts of Franklian Psychology
    * Life has meaning under all circumstances
    * Main motivation for living is our will to find meaning in life.
    * Freedom to find meaning.

Assumptions of Franklian Psychology
    * The human being is an entity consisting of body, mind, and spirit.
    * Life has meaning under all circumstances, even the most miserable.
    * People have a will to meaning.
    * People have freedom under all circumstances to activate the will to find meaning.
    * Life has a demand quality to which people must respond if decisions are to be meaningful.
    * The individual is unique.

Aims of Franklian Psychotherapy
    * Become aware of spiritual resources.
    * Make conscious spiritual resources.
    * Use “defiant power of the human spirit” and stand up against adversity.
 
Franklian Philosophical Questions
    * How do we find meaning?
    * How do we know when suffering is unavoidable and meaningless?
    * How do we find the meaning of the moment in situations of value conflicts?

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Tadeusz Borowski

April 25, 2008 at 5:48 pm (Author biographies, Criticism) (, , )

(First name also transliterated as Theodore) Polish short story writer, poet, essayist, historian, and journalist.

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INTRODUCTION

Borowski was one of the most lauded Polish fiction writers of the post-World War II era. He is best known for the English translations of his short stories, collected in This Way for the Gas, Ladies and Gentlemen, and Other Stories (1967), based on his experiences as an inmate of the Auschwitz concentration camp during World War II. Borowski’s Auschwitz stories are unique to the body of Holocaust literature because they focus as much on the persecutions and betrayals among prisoners as on the cruelties and inhumanity of the guards. Borowski’s narrator in many of these tales is a prisoner who has survived by securing a position of relative privilege within the camp system, aiding in the functioning of the Nazi death machine. Borowski’s tone is one of detachment as he relates the horrors of concentration camp life. Often, Borowski’s prose was extolled by critics for its profound sense of dissolution in relating the ineffable barbarism that characterized life and death at Auschwitz. Borowski’s uncompromising realism banishes heroic acts or redemptive lessons—his stories are bitter testimonies of human atrocity and baseness, effectively conveying the narrator’s responsibility to “bear witness” for those who did not survive the Holocaust.

Biographical Information

Borowski was born November 12, 1922, in Żytomierz, Poland, then part of the U.S.S.R. When he was four years old, his father was accused of political dissidence and sent to a labor camp in the Arctic. When Borowski was eight, his mother was sentenced to prison in Siberia, and he was put in the care of an aunt. In the late 1930s, shortly before the outbreak of World War II, Borowski was united with his parents, and the family moved to Warsaw. After Nazi forces invaded Poland during World War II, Poles were forbidden from obtaining any education; Borowski, of college age, began to attend clandestine courses at Warsaw University. During this time, his first volume of poetry was illegally published and distributed by an underground press. Shortly after, Borowski and his fiancée were arrested by the Gestapo for political dissidence. They were placed at various prison camps until finally they were sent to Auschwitz. Their lives were spared only because three weeks before their arrival the SS had changed its policy to exempt non-Jews from execution. Borowski became a hospital orderly at the camp, thus earning various minor privileges. Other duties took him into the women’s area of the camp, where Borowski was able to see his fiancée. Toward the end of the war, Borowski and his fiancée were moved to another camp, Dachau, from which they were liberated by Allied forces in 1945. In 1946, now married, they returned to Warsaw, where Borowski began to publish volumes of short prose pieces based on his experiences during and after the war. In 1948, he became a Stalinist and staunch supporter of the Communist Party in Poland. He worked for the Secret Police and wrote pro-Communist propaganda pieces. The details of Borowski’s death are ironic: having survived Auschwitz, Borowski, in July of 1951, committed suicide by turning on the gas oven in his apartment and asphyxiating himself.

Major Works of Short Fiction

Borowski’s most widely celebrated short fiction is the volume This Way for the Gas, Ladies and Gentlemen, and Other Stories, which includes translations of his stories originally published in the late 1940s. This collection of short stories is based on Borowski’s experiences in Auschwitz during World War II. His other major story collection is Pozegnanie z Maria (1948). Borowski’s fiction is frequently categorized as literature of atrocity—works inspired by mass crimes against humanity committed during the twentieth century. More specifically, his stories are often discussed as Holocaust literature. Borowski’s fiction is unique among works of Holocaust literature in its focus on daily life in the concentration camp, particularly through portrayal of the betrayals and persecutions the prisoners themselves employed to survive. Jan Kott, in an introduction to This Way for the Gas, Ladies and Gentlemen, quoted Borowski’s charge to those survivors of Nazi concentration camps who would write of their experiences: “The first duty of Auschwitzers is to make clear just what a camp is. … But let them not forget that the reader will unfailingly ask: But how did it happen that you survived? … Tell, then, how you bought places in the hospital, easy posts, how you shoved the ‘Moslems’ [prisoners who had lost the will to live] into the oven, how you bought women, men, what you did in the barracks, unloading the transports … tell about the daily life of the camp. … But write that you, you were the ones who did this. That a portion of the sad fame of Auschwitz belongs to you as well.” Unlike other works of fiction to emerge from survivors of Nazi concentration camps, Borowski’s stories lack any heroic martyrdom or redemptive morality, offering only a stark realism. Irving Howe, in the New Republic (1986), commented that in these stories, “Borowski writes in a cold, harsh, even coarse style, heavy with flaunted cynicism, and offering no reliefs of the heroic.” Howe added that Borowski’s stand-in and central character throughout these stories, Kapo Taduesz, “works not only with but on behalf of the death system.” Andrzej Wirth, in Polish Review (1967), noted, “In the Auschwitz cycle [of Borowski's fiction] the narrators have certain features in common. In each case he is a victim collaborating in crime. Within the system of extermination he has found a comparatively comfortable position of a mediator between victims and their tormentors and plays this role with relish.” Borowski focused on the ways in which extremes of persecution can result in the corruption of the victims as much as the perpetrators. In one story, a Jewish woman at Auschwitz refuses to acknowledge her own child, as it walks behind her yelling, “Mama! Mama! … don’t leave me!,” because she is afraid she will be killed if the SS guards see that she is a mother. While Borowski conveys the inhumanity of those who run the concentration camp, he is no less harsh in his depiction of the cruelty and betrayal that the inmates perpetrate upon each other. The protagonist in many of these stories is, much like Borowski himself, one of the camp inmates who manages to survive by securing for himself a post with which he assists in the functioning of the death camp, leaving the narrator passive in the face of mass murder. Borowski’s prose details an inability of the individual to challenge the bloody reality of the camp, allowing a surreal mixture of normative leisure activities with grim slaughter. In “The People Who Walked On,” for example, the main character notes that, while he plays soccer in a field near the gas chambers, “right behind my back, 3,000 people had been put to death.”

 

Critical Reception

Mark Shechner, in the Nation (1976), described Borowski’s prose as “some of the most lucid and powerful testimony we have about life in the house of death.” As John Thompson, in Commentary (1967), asserted, Borowski, in This Way for the Gas, Ladies and Gentlemen, “tells the most horrible tales the human race has ever had to hear about itself since time began.” Neal Ascherson, in the New York Review of Books (1976), described Borowski as “the most astonishing young writer in Poland to emerge after the war.” Borowski’s first short stories about his concentration camp experiences, “This Way for the Gas, Ladies and Gentlemen” and “A Day at Harmenz,” were published in Poland before he returned from Europe after being liberated. Kott asserted that these stories “produced quite a shock” to a Polish public that expected to read “martyrologies”; Borowski was thus “accused of amorality, decadence, and nihilism.” Kott added, however, that “at the same time it was clear to everyone that Polish literature had gained a dazzling new talent.”

Critics have often commented on the unique tone of Borowski’s Auschwitz stories, noting that they convey the unspeakable horror and hopelessness of the concentration camp through a narrative voice which, on the surface, seems isolated and unmoved by the daily machinations of the Nazi death machine. As Kott commented, “The most terrifying thing in Borowski’s stories is the icy detachment of the author.” Howe attributed the impact of these stories to Borowski’s narrative voice, which conveys “his absolute refusal to strike any note of redemptive nobility.” Many commentators have observed that Borowski’s unique narrative tone relays the burden of a survivor’s responsibility to “bear witness” or “give testimony” in speaking for the many who did not survive the camps. Kott described the significance of Borowski’s fiction as related to literature of atrocity as such: “Among the tens of thousands of pages written about the holocaust and the death camps, Borowski’s slender book continues to occupy, for more than a quarter century now, a place apart. The book is one of the cruelest testimonies to what men did to men, and a pitiless verdict that anything can be done to a human being.”

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