2020 marks 75 years since the end of World War II, which saw one of the largest genocides in human history. As Viktor Frankl explains in his book Man’s Search for Meaning, the Jewish people of Europe were “stripped bare naked” of their possessions, careers, reputations, and human dignity. In history books and memoirs, it is evident that the Holocaust unveiled the brutality of man as he attempts to conquer, exterminate, and dominate. The tragedy also revealed a core revelation about life itself, as even within the seemingly ceaseless and unabating suffering, life did continue.

Published in 1946 and written by Holocaust survivor and psychiatrist Viktor Frankl, Man’s Search for Meaning is regarded as one of the most important Holocaust memoirs today. The book consists of two parts—in the first, Frankl analyzes his and others’ experiences in the German concentration camps, and in the latter half, he introduces his new understanding of man and life.

During his time in the Nazi concentration camps, Frankl began to notice that, in the worst of conditions, the limits of the human body were surprisingly flexible. He determines that the survival of prisoners depended on how they pursued and found meaning to life. The ultimate judgment of death was the will to keep living when it seemed there was nothing to live for. Frankl explains that the extinguishment of this will and hope was evident in how cigarettes—precious tokens of special favors—were spent inside the camp. Often, they could be traded for additional food, and thus, survival. When a prisoner lit a cigarette to savor the smoke, it meant they had accepted death.

Throughout the book, Frankl subtly asks his readers, “Detached from the materialistic and social substances of the world, who are we, what do we have, and why do we live? With nothing of the world, what reason do we have to keep living?” In order to answer these questions, Frankl developed his psychoanalytical theory of logotherapy. This existentialist theory claims that the mere search for meaning in life is what gives us the motivation to live. As was evident with the prisoners who smoked their cigarettes on their final nights, the loss of the will to search for hope meant the loss of life itself.

However, logotherapy does not claim that people die simply because they have no will to live. Instead, it proposes that survival depends on a constant and perpetual search for what makes life meaningful. As a victim of one of the greatest sufferings of the last century, Frankl does not attempt to disguise pain through his writing. It is rash and insensitive to claim that suffering happens for a reason. Yet, humans can still retain the freedom of choice and attitude in the face of such suffering.

In the preface, Frankl refers to the success of his book, not as an achievement on his own part, “but rather an expression of the misery of our time.” Millions of people have reached for a book that suggests, straight from its title, insight into the meaning of life. In other words, even today, when Man’s Search for Meaning remains Amazon’s top-selling Holocaust book, people want to know why life goes on. Frankl’s proposal is concise: even amidst horrendous suffering, life exists simply because people desire a reason for life to exist.

Book Information

Title: Man’s Search for Meaning

Author: Viktor Frankl

Publication Year: 1946

Publisher: Beacon Press

Pages: 200