Frankl’s Peace Appeal

It was in April 2022 when politicians of the highest rank in East and West uttered the words of a possible “third world war”. A global shock ran around the globe. Many wondered anxiously if the last days of humanity had begun. Yet such shock is by no means new. Three-quarters of a century earlier, many people in post-war Europe had similar thoughts. In March 1949, Hans Thirring from Vienna wrote the following letter to Viktor E. Frankl: “Dear Doctor, on behalf of Franz Theodor Csokor, Honorary President of the Austrian Peace Society, Ernst Fischer and Prof. Edwin Rollet, who, together with me, have signed the attached telegram to the ‘International Bureau of Intellectuals for Peace’ in Paris, I am sending you the call of the said bureau for the dissemination of a World Peace Congress. We consider the emergence of an all-encompassing peace movement and contact with all forces of peace a necessity and therefore ask you to join our initiative, sign the enclosed telegram and send it to my address. Looking forward to your affirmative response, I greet you with great respect, yours Hans Thirring.” The emergence of an all-encompassing peace movement – wouldn’t this be the most urgent of all necessities even today in the 21st century? Of course, meanwhile, other threats of all kinds have nested on our planet, from virus infestations to the looming climate crisis to radical environmental pollution. But it is precisely such transnational problems that – if at all! – only united peoples can face. Quarreling peoples, peoples occupied with their quarrels, have no chance in this regard. This means that peace is in every respect the prerequisite for prosperous human life. Let us read what Frankl replied to Hans Thirring’s inquiry in 1949:

For a World Congress of Fighters for Peace

The “International Bureau of Intellectuals for Peace,” the “World Federation of Democratic Women,” and the undersigned personalities are concerned by the increasing threat to peace. In various countries, the press, radio, and politicians are openly sowing hostility and hatred against other countries and promoting propaganda for a new war. Instead of reducing armies and armaments, as one might have expected after the end of the World War, the path of rearmament is being taken. Military blocs are being created that pose a threat to the peaceful coexistence of nations. At various points in the world, hotbeds of war are burning again, ignited and maintained by the intervention of foreign countries and the direct involvement of their armed forces. But the people do not want war. They do not want new slaughter, new ruins, and devastation. And it is the duty of all honest people in art, science, literature, the duty of all democratic organizations to devote themselves with determination and passionate will to unite in defense of the peace of nations. Therefore, we appeal to all democratic organizations whose natural task is the defense of peace, and to all progressive people in all countries: to trade unions, women’s movements, to youth and their international organizations, to farmers, to cooperatives, to religious and cultural organizations, to scientists, writers, journalists, artists, democratic politicians, to all who are for peace. And we call on them and ask them to gather to convene a World Congress of Fighters for Peace in April of this year, whose purpose will be to unite all the forces of the peoples of the countries in defense of peace. We hope with the greatest certainty that fighters for peace will rise up everywhere in the world. The document is signed by: Associate Professor Dr. Viktor Frankl, Head of the Neurological Outpatient Clinic in Vienna. Unfortunately, Frankl, who had endured and barely survived two World Wars, overestimated the hope for the greatest certainty that fighters for peace would rise up everywhere in the world after all the misery and massacre. Nevertheless, we can believe his fundamental statement that the peoples do not want war. The peoples want, if at all possible, to live in peace and contentment. But the peoples consist of countless individuals, and among them there are always those who, for selfish or psychopathic motives, instigate disturbances of peace or accept them for the sake of reaping personal advantages. If such individuals have sufficient power potential, it becomes dangerous. However, we must not blame only dictatorial rulers. Their power would be limited if they did not have an army of followers to rely on. Interesting in Frankl’s above response is that he addressed his appeal, among others, to women and youth – at a time when this was not customary. Frankl was convinced that the passionate will to defend peace should be fostered early in families, especially by mothers with their sons and daughters, to produce a generation increasingly capable of resolving conflicts without losing humanity. That this has not been achieved to date and still awaits realization is proven by current statistics from the USA. According to these, in 2021, the most common cause of death among young people was the use of firearms (!). Traffic accidents ranked second, and poisoning due to drug use came third. It’s hard to comprehend: in one of the most modern and democratic countries in the world, with a good proportion of wealthy and educated people, young people are dying because they ‘wage war’ on each other and others! Yet all three of their most common causes of death are more or less freely chosen and not factors of fate. One is in the prime of youth, but one shoots around, races across roads, intoxicates oneself… why? Peace would be the sheer opposite: one refrains from shootings, one moderates traffic in harmony with nature, and one makes peace with oneself and one’s options. Frankl spoke of a duty of all honest people to rise up for peace, and this duty apparently begins in the nuclei of families. The depressing thing is: The entire statement of the document Frankl signed in 1949 could, with few changes, come directly from our present: instead of reducing armies and armaments… military blocks are created… war hotspots are burning again at various points in the world… Has nothing been learned from the horrors of past centuries? Can the most capable learning creature on Earth draw no insights from its own failures? To put it another way: What else must happen for such insights not to come too late? In a comparison of community and mass, Frankl offered a conceivable explanation for this strange ‘learning difficulty’ of homo sapiens. While humans gain responsibility by taking on tasks in a community, they lose their essential nature, namely their responsibility or their sense of it, in fleeing or submerging into a mass. Frankl: ‘True community is essentially a community of responsible persons – mere mass, however, is only the sum of depersonalized beings’1. 1 Viktor E. Frankl, ‘The Doctor and the Soul’, Hans Huber, Hogrefe AG Bern, 62015, page 127. This means that in all mass phenomena caused by suggestive propaganda, where collectives are incited against collectives, a kind of ‘depersonalization’ takes place, which seemingly releases the individual from their own judgment and personal responsibility. Not much better is the fate of soldiers who are drafted into a war and forced to obey senseless and inhumane orders continuously. Their sense of personal responsibility is deliberately reduced to zero, which also amounts to depersonalization.
In the state of depersonalization, people act as if they were robots without conscience and without ethical feeling, only concerned with not standing out from the mass to which they (voluntarily or forcibly) belong. Their humanity is, so to speak, swallowed up by the mass. Consequently, the future of our species could depend on what will ultimately emerge victorious in the race: a world community of responsible persons or a mass of depersonalized beings.

Frankl’s View as a Psychiatrist

In August 1969, Frankl was asked to explain some aspects of avoiding war dangers in English at an international conference of the University of Vienna on the topic “The Problem of Peace”. The essence of his speech at that time has been preserved thanks to a conference report. Smiling, Frankl remarked at the beginning that psychiatrists were neither omniscient nor omnipotent, they were only one thing: omnipresent, namely at all meetings and congresses. Then he became serious. Indeed, certain parallels between individual and social pathologies would exist. For example, the harm that excessive “anticipatory anxiety” can cause cannot be dismissed. If, for instance, a speaker is extremely afraid that he will stutter and embarrass himself in front of his audience, he quickly begins to falter and stutter, meaning that what he feared is highly likely to occur. This increases his fear because it has proven justified in his eyes, and his flow of speech is disrupted even more. A tragic circular process begins to take hold. Frankl posed the question: “Is it not possible that wars are also triggered by an excessive fear of war?” It is precisely the fear of war that leads to premature “saber-rattling”, as well as sanctions and threatening gestures towards the feared enemy, which only make them more nervous and aggressive. Frankl then developed suggestions on how an escalation into war anxiety could be curbed in time, for example through confidence-building measures, recollection of one’s own stability, and practice in serenity. Next, Frankl transitioned to psychotic mechanisms. Referring to the paranoia that some mentally ill people suffer from, he explained that such patients tend to continuously observe other people to see if they are pursuing them or want to harm them. The patients are, in a sense, “pursued pursuers” of their own (false) ideas. Only when they can be brought to give up their observation and mental pursuit of other people does their feeling of being persecuted reduce. Frankl posed the question of whether a lesson for war prevention could also be derived from this. Just as excessive fear attracts the feared, mistrust generates return mistrust in the opponent; and every mistrust is reflected in new “precautionary actions against the opponent” (such as isolation, armament, seeking allies…) that reinforce mistrust. Again, it would be worth considering whether an advance of trust and friendship would disarm the enemy more effectively than a meticulously precise observation of their activities in view of possible attacks to be expected from them. However, what is required is extremely difficult. Courage instead of fear, trust instead of mistrust… what gives us the strength to switch from one to the other? To answer this, Frankl took a small detour in his speech.

Frankl: ‘As is well known, war was defined as the continuation of politics by other means. However, this applies only to one of the two types of politics that I personally distinguish. For one type of politics, the end seems to justify any means. The other type of politics, however, is well aware that there are means that could desecrate even the holiest purpose.’ With this, Frankl had arrived at the topic of means and ends. Not every means is permissible to achieve an end! And what about the ends? Logically, not every purpose and setting of goals is justifiable either. ‘It is clear that all this ultimately comes down to a question of values,’ Frankl summarized his thoughts, only to immediately probe further: Frankl: ‘Are there values that are recognized by entire groups? Is there a common denominator regarding what makes life worth living for these groups?’ Undoubtedly, Frankl believed that there are such values that unite humanity, values that connect people in their pursuit and give them the necessary strength to overcome hurdles for the sake of these values. Frankl: ‘If one thing is certain in this regard, it is the following: Mere survival cannot be the highest value. Being human means being oriented and directed towards something that is not again itself. Human existence is characterized by its self-transcendence. As soon as human existence no longer points beyond itself, staying alive becomes meaningless and unattractive, even almost impossible. This, at least, was the lesson I learned in the three years I had to spend in Auschwitz and Dachau. Meanwhile, military psychiatrists around the world have been able to confirm that those prisoners of war who were most likely to survive were those oriented towards the future, towards a goal in the future, towards a meaning that had to be fulfilled in the future. Should not something analogous also apply where it concerns humanity and its survival?’ At the end of his mental detour, Frankl thus gave an answer to the question of what gives us the strength to accomplish what is demanded (for war prevention and peace preservation): The fervent envisioning of a meaningful common goal, such as the conquest of a humane future for all. His monumental closing words shall be reserved for a later passage.

Frankl’s Perspective as a Concentration Camp Survivor

Frankl spoke of a ‘lesson’ that he had taken away from the worst time of his life. Having barely escaped almost certain death, he was ready to pass on this lesson to interested individuals. One cannot marvel enough at how he masterfully avoided two lurking traps, which ultimately allowed him to regenerate mentally. One trap that traumatized people quickly fall into is the grim silence and ‘bottling up’ of suffered injustice and humiliation. What one cannot ‘get out of oneself,’ one cannot find the necessary distance from to process and eventually constructively put aside. The other trap lurking for traumatized people is wallowing in self-pity, linked to endless complaints and accusations which, for all their justification, drag one down like a whirlpool into ever darker depths. Frankl avoided both and transformed his immense suffering into an achievement – not only by bearing it heroically but also by carving out remarkable insights that he had wrested from his suffering, which are relevant for many kinds of similar martyrdom. He summarized and published some of these insights in the monthly journal for Austrian culture ‘Der Turm’ in the July 1946 issue. They are so moving and eternally valid that they would be worth conveying to all school classes of the upcoming generation.
Frankl: “If we ask ourselves about the fundamental experience that we had in the concentration camps – in this existence on the brink – then we can extract from all that we experienced as its quintessence: The human being is decisive. In the concentration camp, the human was melted down to the essential within him, and the essential within him is the human aspect. In the concentration camp, where everything non-essential melted away from people to the essential, something else also happened to them: People were welded together. Thus, comrades in suffering under inhumanity became comrades in the fight for humanity. If there is gratitude for the grace of survival – if there is meaning in continuing to live, then it is the continuation of the fight for humanity. Humanity, however, begins where the differences between person and person and between groups cease. No one can demand from us anymore that we distinguish between Christians and Jews, between Austrians and Prussians, between members of one party or another – not even between members, candidates, followers! But who would be more qualified to proclaim this, to find the common ground and overcome the divisions, than us? Should we not be able to do it, we who were able to achieve it in the midst of hell? There we had to learn it and there we learned it – now we must teach it: to understand the other, wherever he may stand. Because we need understanding for each other and we need communication with each other. Who can wonder then, if we declare that for us there can only be one policy, and that is the policy that – extends hands. May no one believe that a policy that extends hands gives up anything; on the contrary: a policy that only knows its program and its tactics, it gives up the ultimate meaning and final purpose of its will. We want to confess what we have recognized. And what we have recognized is the human being. We have recognized the human as what he is: as the being that always stands in decision; to discover him as such a human being, however, always means to awaken him to himself. We have come to know the human being as perhaps no generation before. The image of the human that we now have is a warning and an admonition and a hope in one. What kind of being is the human? He is the being that invented the gas chambers, but at the same time he is also the being that went into the gas chambers with proudly raised head and with the Lord’s Prayer on his lips, or the Kaddish (the Jewish prayer for the dead) or the Marseillaise. When will the time come and where is the people that – just as Judaism once gave the world monotheism – in its necessary complement finally gives humanity monanthropism, the belief in one humanity? In a humanity that knows only one distinction: the distinction between humans and inhumans.”

Belief in one humanity?

When will the time of monanthropism come? Frankl repeatedly brought this up for discussion in his speeches and writings. Let’s explore this concept that meant so much to him a little further. Well, the mere knowledge of one humanity is not in bad shape. Anthropologists have long established that all of humanity descends from a pre-human animal species and only split into different races and formations over the course of millions of years. The sometimes naively smiled-at statement that we are all brothers and sisters is indeed true from a broader perspective: we are genetically related. This knowledge has also deepened in other respects. At the latest since the invention of atomic bombs and nuclear weapons, it has become clear that all of humanity is, so to speak, in the same boat. At intervals, they are very uncomfortably reminded of this. Since the gradually dawning realization that the climate is heating up globally and the natural foundations of human life are withering, this awareness has become even sharper by several degrees. The outbreak of the pandemic in 2019 gave this sharpening of consciousness an additional kick. The process of globalization and media networking, which doesn’t only have positive sides, has also advanced the knowledge of one humanity. But it is not primarily the knowledge that Frankl meant with his concern, which he further specified in the closing words of his English congress speech in 1969: Frankl: “However, if values, if a meaning is to be found that applies to all, then humanity, after producing monotheism thousands of years ago, the belief in one God, must now take a further step, namely the knowledge of one humanity. Today, more than ever, we need a monanthropism.” It was no coincidence that he drew the parallel to monotheism with the concept formation of “monanthropism”. For monotheism is not about knowledge, but about a reverent belief in something unknowable. Regarding monanthropism, Frankl also wanted to give room to a belief conviction, namely the no less profound conviction that all people are equally important and equally dignified, and may understand themselves as belonging to a single community that has the privilege of having awakened to life, but which also has the duty to responsibly manage and shape this life. And with the allusion to the fact that humanity needed thousands of years to advance to the belief in one God, Frankl wanted to indirectly warn that it does not have another thousand years to work its way through to a “belief in one humanity” – this insight is needed today, as he urgently – decades ago! – admonished. Let’s consider: What can the belief in one humanity achieve? I think two things, namely something on a large scale and, since everything large is constituted from small things, also something on a small scale. Let’s first look at the big picture. For some time now, a massive loss of confidence in the future has been spreading, and the “no-future cry” is not only coming from young throats or from areas of miserable living conditions.
Many people in the affluent, wealthy countries have also bid farewell to the once fun-loving society with its self-realization fads and transformed into a spoiled, complaining, worried, anxious-depressive mob. Yes, they are vehemently mutinying. It’s as if they’ve only just realized that humanity will die. And of course, it will die someday. Perhaps long before our planetary system burns up in the dying sun, which will expand into a “red giant”. (Should we have found and colonized the often-cited “Planet B” by then, it faces a similar fate.) Does it matter? In reality, it doesn’t. As Frankl emphasized, it’s not the length of life that matters. Frankl: “… that life can never be an end in itself, that its propagation can never be its own meaning, rather it derives its meaning only from other, non-biological relationships … Life does not transcend itself in ‘length’ – in the sense of its own propagation – but ‘in height’ – by intending a meaning.”2 2 Viktor E. Frankl, “The Doctor and the Soul”, Hans Huber, Hogrefe AG Bern, 62015, page 123. This means that the central question is not how long humanity will continue to exist, but whether it will intend, create, and produce meaningful things during its existence. Whether the last true difference that Frankl identified, namely that between humans and inhumans, will disappear because the inhumans have “converted”? Despite various philosophical or literary cries of doom and references to the repulsively destructive and cruel aspects that shamefully run through human history, the hope for this is not entirely dismissible. How much meaningful and beautiful has also been created in the cultural development of the human species so far! How much meaningful and helpful has already been established in its social development! How much meaningful and useful has been invented at a rapid pace thanks to its technological development! Certainly, ethical development is lagging behind, but even in this area, there has been progress. We don’t know where humanity is generally drifting, but we should nurture and preserve in our hearts the belief that it possesses a competence for fulfilling meaning, which, with some goodwill, will enable it to increasingly resist negative temptations and gradually bring out the best in itself. This is exactly the belief that Frankl may have had in mind with his concept of monanthropism. Which brings us to the small things from which all great things are built. We not only all come from the same genus, we are also all spiritual persons and as such not related to each other at all. On the contrary: Each person is an absolute novelty, unique in their essence, as Frankl tirelessly explained. Strangely enough, our uniqueness is rooted in our imperfection, because if we were all perfect, we would all be the same. But no, everyone has their particular strengths and weaknesses, talents and gifts, limitations and dispositions.
All of this could be derived, if necessary, from one’s genetic makeup and environmental influences, but what each individual makes of it, how they use their inherited and learned traits, which of their talents they leave fallow, or which of their weaknesses they defiantly overcome, remains ‘their secret’, not fully explainable by any internal or external factors. It is the ‘material’ from which their uniqueness springs. But what does our specifically human uniqueness have to do with the great questions of humanity? Let’s refer to Frankl again. Frankl’s: ‘Uniqueness can only be valuable if it is not uniqueness for its own sake, but uniqueness for the human community.’3 We were not endowed with spirituality for nothing. A ‘will to meaning’ is inscribed in our souls not without demand and mission. Each individual can and should contribute to ensuring that the human community grows – not in temporal length and population density – but in ‘height’, into a higher state of being than its current level. Everyone is, in their own personal way, a glimmer of hope for the mini-world to which they belong. It is no art to stifle this glimmer and refuse any offer of meaning. One can easily decide to do so, only to then complain about the misery on Earth. The art is rather to end the unproductive complaining and to kindly alleviate the misery wherever possible. So what will our future be? I would like to join Frankl’s appeal: Let us believe in humanity, in the one that exists only once, permeated by the breath of the spirit! And let us unwaveringly contribute, each in their own place, so that one may rightfully believe in it! 3 Viktor E. Frankl, ‘The Question of Meaning in Psychotherapy’, Piper Series, Munich, 6 1996, page 100

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