Staying human in war

Elisabeth Lukas

Staying Human in War Thoughts by Viktor E. Frankl Born in 1942, I was a child of the war and grew up in bombed-out Vienna. From my early memories, I remember the hunger, the constant power cuts and freezing in my thin coats in winter. There were no toys in my childhood and many of my school friends missed their fathers, who had not returned home from the war. I have an idea of the unnecessary and incomprehensible misery caused by armed conflicts between peoples. That is why my deepest sympathy goes out to all the people who are currently suffering blamelessly under the terror of irresponsible rulers. They are confronted with a destiny that restricts their free development and imposes necessities on them that they would never have chosen.
My teacher Viktor Frankl was also unable to choose his fate during the Second World War. He was just as innocently drawn into a maelstrom of brutality and violence – and the fact that he saved his bare life is nothing short of a miracle. He lost his loved ones and had to struggle through grief and despair to say “yes anyway” to continuing to live and making a difficult new start. The same will one day happen to the inhabitants of war-torn countries. The weapons will fall silent again, but the disaster they have caused will cast a long shadow.
In this situation, there is nothing to say that could really comfort us. That is why I would just like to point out one thing: Hatred has the unfortunate potential to spread, from opponent to opponent, from ideology to ideology, from nation to nation, from person to person. In doing so, hatred sits nowhere else but in one’s own heart and clamps it shut. Squeezes it together. Squeezes all sparks of love, fairness and empathy out of it and destroys them. Viktor Frankl was wise when he said to thousands of listeners at a memorial service to mark the end of the Second World War in Vienna’s Rathausplatz: “Don’t expect a single word of hatred from me!”
No one can go on living well with hatred in their heart, because hatred binds you to the hated with iron chains, no matter how much you want to get rid of it. Anyone who hates another person has them constantly in their emotional and cognitive memory banks. They literally go to bed with them at night and get up with them in the morning. Not only will they no longer be happy “from the heart”, but they will also never be sufficiently elated and unencumbered to creatively shape their own present and future.
When Viktor Frankl was nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize by the University of Porto Alegre in Brazil as part of an honorary doctorate he received there, he explained another surprising aspect: no one deserves to be hated. Because every human being is a unique, valuable person who deserves our respect and esteem. What can be rejected, indeed what can be absolutely despicable, is a person’s behavior. It is legitimate to condemn cruel behavior in the strongest possible terms.

But the person himself is a human being and as such neither an angel nor a devil, but “someone like us”. For we too – and it is helpful never to forget this – are not pure angels. Our behavior is not always praiseworthy either.
As a psychiatrist, Viktor Frankl was well aware of the danger of post-traumatic stress syndrome when he returned home from the hell of the concentration camp. The problem was not so much rebuilding his family and career from scratch. The problem was to come to terms with the horror images that haunted him and to fight down the barren “why” question that inevitably forced itself upon him. Now the therapeutic theories he had developed before the war had to prove their worth. And they proved themselves brilliantly.
These theories include Frankl’s conviction that people can take a mental stance on everything and everyone inside and outside themselves, a stance of their own choosing. Even if a situation is unchangeable, if a person no longer has a choice, the last thing he can do is change his inner attitude towards it if necessary. So Viktor Frankl changed his attitude to the suffering he had endured. He transformed it into an experiential competence that empowered him to report both artistically (in a play he created) and scientifically (in his books) on strategies that could lift people tormented by pain. By using his resources as the great doctor and psychologist that he was, he took intensive care of the “homo patiens”, the suffering person, whether as a therapist in his neurological practice in the Vienna Polyclinic or as a lecturer to many university committees and student bodies, he defeated the horror images that tried to catch up with him and transformed them into images of human steadfastness and unbreakable human dignity.
Even the “why” question did not affect Viktor Frankl. “We are not the questioners,” he declared plainly. “It is not our place to ask. Rather, we are the answerers.” We are the creatures to whom it is reserved, permitted and incumbent to give answers to the questions that life asks us. Even more: to give answers that make as much sense as possible! The questions may be wonderfully easy or dreadfully difficult – but in the end it doesn’t matter! What counts is our answer to each question, for which we are then responsible. It’s like exams at school: the final result, the grade we are ultimately awarded, does not take into account the challenging nature of the exam questions we are asked. Only our answers count …
Of course, life doesn’t give us “grades”. But from a proper philosophical point of view, we can’t be so sure. After all, everything we have done and failed to do, in short everything we have decided, flows into our life history. And yet nothing can be cut out of this past. Everything that has happened to us, or through us, is securely stored in the past. It gathers and condenses into the “eternal truth”, which no power of the world or superworld can eliminate or correct. In this respect, it is not irrelevant what the “eternal truth” about ourselves will look like one day in the distant future. Will we look back with regret on our deathbed at the latest at what we have missed and failed to do? Or will we look back with satisfaction and pride at what we have achieved and mastered? Will we be able to be in harmony with the “answers” we gave to the “questions” that once preoccupied us? What will the “grades” be that we honestly place under our existence to be completed? This closes the mental arc to the topic of hatred and all desires for punishment and revenge. We do not need to hate someone who has committed atrocities or wish him evil in return. He has branded himself with his atrocities. They stick to his life story for all eternity. They are firmly cemented into it, and no oversized chisel can chisel them out. No matter how much the person in question regrets them, they are still inevitably part of his past and therefore his identity. Remorse soothes them (they also become part of his past), but it cannot erase what has been. I remember how, at a logotherapy conference in Toronto, Canada, representatives of a self-help group of women who had been tortured and sexually abused as children said: “We still have the option of developing well and achieving a presentable identity. Our fate is escapable – we can give it a positive turn and thus escape its pestilence. But the child abusers who have harmed us have inescapably stamped themselves as child abusers. Even after their death, they will have been nothing other than former child abusers. We can only feel sorry for them!” Those who commit bad deeds punish themselves the most, namely inescapably! In this context, it becomes clear why Viktor Frankl fundamentally rejected the idea of collective guilt. No one can be to blame for the actions of others. Everyone creates their own “monument” with their actions, as Viktor Frankl put it. An entire people must never be condemned for decisions that were made over many of their heads. No son or daughter is responsible for what their father or mother did. And it is also highly questionable whether anyone, for example soldiers, should be expected to refuse to obey unethical orders when their life and limb are at risk. Viktor Frankl commented laconically that heroism should only be demanded of one person, and that is oneself. Anyone who has not proven that they have summoned up the courage to resist bravely in an extremely precarious moment is better off keeping their mouth shut.
There is only personal guilt, and it exists on all fronts, in all parties and in all countries of the world. Guilt – like suffering and death – is part of the “tragic triad” of being human.

Let us therefore be careful about “casting the first stone”, as the Bible warns us. Let us hold back the “stones” to be thrown and rather build homes of peace with them. Let us continue to build tirelessly in the knowledge of the weaknesses and shortcomings of human nature, but in the hope and belief that they are escapable and that our species can still grow a good deal beyond them. If we waste our energies in mutual enmities, we will not succeed. But together – in the awareness of being a member of one humanity – we could do it. It depends on every single member of the human community.
With this in mind, I wish all readers the strength to find excellent “answers” to the serious “questions” that life is currently posing, and great joy when they succeed. Elisabeth Lukas, August 2024

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