“Peace among us” – Vienna in July 1946

In the face of the hardship of our time, we are showing you previously inaccessible and in part unpublished texts by Viktor E. Frankl. (With the generous permission of the Frankl family)

ABSTRACT OF THE ARTICLE FROM THE WRITING: THE TOWER
Viktor E. Frankl, Director of the Neurological Polyclinic:
If we ask ourselves about the basic experience that we had in the concentration camps – in this existence in the abyss – then its quintessence can be identified from all that we experienced as
: The decisive factor is the human being. In the concentration camp, people were melted down to their essence, and the
essence of them is their humanity. In the concentration camp, where everything unimportant melted away from people to the essentials, a second
thing also happened to them: People were welded together. This is how comrades of suffering under inhumanity became comrades of the
struggle for humanity. If there is any gratitude for the grace of survival – if there is any meaning in continuing to live, then it is the continuation
of the struggle for humanity.

But humanity only begins where the differences between people and people and between groups end. No one can demand of us any more
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 called to proclaim this, to find what we have in common and to overcome what divides us at
than we? Shouldn’t we be able to do it, we who were able to do it in the midst of hell? That is where we had to learn it and that is where we learned it
– now we have to teach it: to understand others, wherever they may be. Because we need understanding for each other and we need understanding
for each other. Who should be surprised when we declare: for us there can only be one policy, and that is the policy that reaches out. Let no one believe that a
policy that reaches out with its hands forgives itself anything; conversely, a policy that only knows its program and its tactics forfeits the ultimate meaning and the
ultimate purpose of its will.

We want to confess what we have recognized. And what we have recognized is: the human being. We have recognized man for what he is: as the being,
who is always in the decision; discovering him as such a person, however, always means: awakening him to himself.
We have come to know man as perhaps no other generation has done so far. The image of man that we now have is a warning and
a reminder and hope in one. What a creature man is! He is the being who invented the gas chambers, but at the same time he is also the being,
who went into the gas chambers with his head held proudly high and with the Lord’s Prayer on his lips, or the Kaddesh (the Jewish prayer for the dead) or the Marseillaise.
When will the time come, and where will the people be who – just as Judaism once gave the world Montheism – will finally give humanity Monanthropism, the belief in one humanity, as a necessary complement to it? To a humanity that only knows one distinction: the distinction between humans and non-humans.

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