Víctor González García – Man’s Search for Meaning (Excerpt)

Víctor González García – Labor Matters Specialist. IE University.

Reading:

Man’s Search for Meaning (Trotzdem Ja zum Leben sagen) (Excerpt) by Viktor Frankl (1946).

With what has been stated, we must conclude that there are two races of men in the world, only two: the decent and the indecent. Both are mixed everywhere and in all social strata. No social group consists exclusively of decent or indecent men. In this sense, no group is of “pure race,” and therefore among the guards there were decent people.

Life in a concentration camp tore apart the human soul and exposed its inner abysses. Is it surprising that, in such depths, human qualities are composed, in their very nature, of good and evil? The boundary that separates good from evil, and that imaginatively runs through every human being, reaches the deepest depths of the soul and appears even at the bottom of the abyss revealed in the concentration camp.

History gave us the opportunity to know human nature perhaps like no other generation. What is man, really? He is the being who always decides what he is. He is the one who invented the gas chambers, but also the one who entered them with firm steps, murmuring a prayer.