Pilgrimage to the Viktor Frankl Museum

Part II of III: "The Will to Meaning"

Jul 15, 2025

A giddy preamble: last night, around midnight Paris time, I learned about

The Metropolitan Review

’s glowing review of my Viktor Frankl-inspired novel, The Requisitions. Thank you to
Raina Lipsitz
for the close & generous reading,1 which is that much more meaningful given the context of this piece.

summer bathing on the Danube, Vienna, Austria, June 2025

Me at The Museum (1/2)

The Viktor Frankl Museum is designed like an interactive science museum for children, but at 1/15 Mariannengasse, 1090 Vienna, Austria, the wisdom exhibited isn’t about how the world goes round, but about how human beings try and make sense of their existence. From existential cabinets with secret compartments to levers about ethics that must be pulled to reveal their lesson, to Sisyphean dominoes that can be lined up only to be knocked down again, the museum invites visitors to consider Viktor Frankl’s life and existential philosophy with a childlike spirit.

Going to the Viktor Frankl Museum was a pilgrimage for me, the real-world epilogue to a novel inspired by Frankl’s work that took decades to gestate: a boyish obsession with World War Two, a BA in Holocaust Studies, an MA in social theory (The Humanness of Cruelty: Alfred Adler, Viktor Frankl & The Psychology of Genocide), an MFA in creative writing (History is Dead, Long Live History! Postmodernism and Historiographic Metafiction), and 10+ years to finish The Requisitions, a novel about a struggling ~~academic~~ writer named Viktor who finds himself in Łódź, Poland at the outbreak of war and wants to believe, despite all evidence to the contrary, in love’s possibility.

Walking through the modest Viktor Frankl Museum (it’s only three rooms), I expected to jot down copious notes in my little black notebook like I normally do at museums, but instead, I found myself writing almost nothing at all, approaching each tactile interaction with my spirit, not my mind, conscious of my slow movements as I paced through the hallowed space. Despite the hundreds of quotes, citations, photos, and lessons to be learned at the Viktor Frankl museum, I spent most of my time without any agenda, content to be enraptured within the space, opening drawers, listening to recordings, and pulling levers that revealed Frankl’s existential wisdom.

Part II: The “Will to Meaning”

In Part I, I discussed the first pillar of Frankl’s logotherapy—“the freedom of the will”—which posits that human beings are more than psychobiological and environmental conditioning processes.2

The second pillar of logotherapy—the “will to meaning”—doesn’t guarantee meaning but rather illuminates its possibility.

This potentiality, like a farmer’s fallow field at the end of winter, is central to humanism and existentialism, two terms that are often misunderstood.

Humanists reject the idea that any divinity can protect us from ourselves.To this end, humanists place utmost faith in the potential value and goodness of human beings, not their guarantee. Similarly, existentialism, which the most cynical conflate with nihilism, is a belief that while there is no ~~fathomable~~ universal meaning to existence, this in no way detracts from our ability and responsibility to derive individual meaning from existence.

Sartre’s oft-misunderstood dictum “existence precedes essence” simply means the only thing we can be sure of is that we exist; any essence that follows (gender, ethnicity, skin pigmentation, sexual preference, etc.) comes after the fact of our existence, which means any “essence” is malleable and only meaningful until it isn’t.

What an individual becomes, they have made out themselves, and to ~~blame~~ submit to chemical/psychobiological/environmental/parental/social/financial, religious factors, etc. is la mauvaise foi—bad faith—~~a self-deceptive~~ an inauthentic intellectual position that relinquishes the freedom and responsibility of what it means to be a self-determining human being.

“The Existential Vacuum”

“People have enough to live by but nothing to live for; they have the means but no meaning … As to the causation of the feeling of meaninglessness, one may say, albeit in an oversimplifying vein, that people have enough to live by but nothing to live for; they have the means but no meaning.” Viktor Frankl, Man’s Search for Meaning

Viktor Frankl (1905-1997) came of ~~age~~ consciousness during one of the most brutal eras in human history that witnessed 20+ million dead during World War One, another 50+ million dead during the subsequent Spanish Flu (36% mortality rate), and the resultant rise of fascism (the reasons why fascism ~~arose when it did~~ arises when it does are summarized in my 4-part essay, “The Origins of Fascism”).3

According to Frankl, during ~~disillusioned~~ identitarian eras like the ~~2020s~~ 1920s, when an individual lacks traditional directives of what they must do (according to animalistic drives/instincts) and what they should do (according to traditions/spiritual value systems), they often don’t even know what they want to do. Consequently, the individual, “either does what other people do—which is conformism—or he does what other people want him to do—which is totalitarianism,”4 resulting in an “existential vacuum” that can lead to ~~materialist~~ meaningless pursuits of pleasure and power, a satisfaction of animalistic drives at the expense of deriving an individual sense of meaning to existence.

“To the European, it is characteristic of the American culture that, again and again, one is commanded and ordered to ‘be happy.’ But happiness cannot be pursued; it must ensue. One must have a reason to ‘be happy.’ […] a human being is not one in pursuit of happiness but rather in search of a reason to become happy, last but not least, through actualizing the potential meaning inherent and dormant in a given situation.” Viktor Frankl, Man’s Search for Meaning

The “will to meaning” isn’t a panacea or nullification of Freud’s “will to pleasure” or Adler’s “will to power,” it simply overarches them. Frankl recognizes the various psychological, biological, and environmental neuroses, too, but what differentiates human beings from other animals is the uniquely existential source of discomfort that accompanies the all-too-human question, “Why am I here?” While human beings are pushed by the pursuit of pleasure and power as ends in themselves (see: the entire world circa 2025), they are only pulled into a higher realm by the pursuit of meaning. To put it another way: while the animal Homo sapiens is concerned with success versus failure and pleasure versus pain, Homo patiens, the suffering human, is concerned with fulfilment versus despair.

Me at the Museum (2/2)5

a most meaningful space: my writing desk, complete with a gift from the Viktor Frankl Museum

At the end of my museum visit, standing at the entrance with more mass than when I entered, I took note of the foyer, the entrance to somebody’s former apartment, which, in a former life, would have had a coat rack and a small chair to take off one’s shoes. The museum’s curator was curious to learn about my studies in logotherapy, at which point I rummaged in my tote bag and pulled out a single copy of The Requisitions, which I’d brought to Vienna in hopes of meeting someone who might appreciate it.

“That is very kind of you. We would be happy to include it in our library,” the museum’s curator said. “And I would like to give you something in return—an exchange—here is an exclusive publication of the museum, a concise overview of logotherapy.”

“Don’t aim at success—the more you aim at it and make it a target, the more you are going to miss it. For success, like happiness, cannot be pursued; it must ensue, and it only does so as the unintended side effect of one’s dedication to a cause greater than oneself or as the by-product of one’s surrender to a person other than oneself … in the long run—in the long run, I say!—success will follow you precisely because you had forgotten to think of it.” Viktor Frankl, Man’s Search for Meaning

I flipped through the pages with a transcendent smile on my face.

“To whom should I make it out to?”

“To Eleonore.”

“It’s very nice to meet you, Eleonore.”

“Oh, apologies, that isn’t my name—Eleonore was—is—Frankl’s wife, Eleonore Katharina Schwindt. She still lives across the hall where she and Viktor lived.”

“He lived on this floor? But … when did they meet?”

The curator smiled. “Yes, they met just after the war. Eleonore is ninety-nine years old but is still very much with it. I’m sure she’d be pleased to read it.”

She would be pleased?

I couldn’t hide my boyish smile. To think that my tribute to Viktor Frankl’s work is now sitting on his bookshelf, and that his beloved, Eleonore, may, as-I-write-these-very-words-be-actually-reading-it, is a perfect epilogue to the “will to meaning” that inspired me to write The Requisitions.