comments:
Lawrence Langer, who died last year at the age of 94, came to prominence among Holocaust scholars around this time and began criticizing Man’s Search for Meaning in his 1982 book, Versions of Survival: The Holocaust and the Human Spirit. He viewed Frankl as the father of so-called “redemptive memory” in Holocaust studies, which he defined as “the pursuit of reassurance that however bad the Holocaust was, we can extract something meaningful from it.” Although Langer said he understood this might be a human need, he wrote that “it distorts the nature of the experience. The idea does not emerge from the testimony of Holocaust survivors. It emerges from trauma theorists who believe that one can work through a trauma no matter how bad it was.” Viktor Frankl lied about his time in the camps. He only spend a few days in Auschwitz. He had no real experience of it. His view on how the holocaust could be a vessle to find meaning is imho frankly evil. It really has the same feel as the words 'Arbeit macht Frei' on the entrance of the concentration camps. Thousands of Jews worked themselves to death.