From Death-Camp To Existentialism [Man's Search For Meaning].

First edition in English of Frankl's classic work, which was later titled Man's Search For Meaning in 1962. Octavo, original cloth. Boldly signed by Holocaust survivor and Nobel Laureate Elie Wiesel on the front free endpaper. Both Frankl and Wiesel survived Auschwitz, and both spent the rest of their lives transmuting that survival into something the world needed. Frankl arrived at Auschwitz in 1944 as a thirty-nine-year-old Viennese neurologist and psychiatrist with a nearly complete manuscript of what would become logotherapy hidden in the lining of his coat. (It was confiscated and destroyed; he reconstructed it after the war.) Wiesel arrived a few months earlier, at fifteen, and was separated at the selection ramp from his mother and youngest sister, whom he never saw again. The age difference matters enormously. Frankl entered the camps with an intellectual apparatus already in place, and used the experience to test it under the most extreme conditions imaginable. Wiesel was formed by them. Man's Search for Meaning, published in 1946, is fundamentally a constructive document — Auschwitz becomes the proving ground for Frankl's thesis that meaning can be discovered even in unspeakable suffering, and that the human will to meaning is more primary than Freud's pleasure principle or Adler's will to power. Night is a work of refusal. Wiesel resisted any framing that would let the reader close the wound — no theodicy, no consolation, no redemptive arc. The most famous passage in the book, in which a child is hanged and a voice asks where God is, ends not with an answer but with an answer that is also an indictment. This is the deep tension between them. Frankl is the great affirmer — even Auschwitz, he insists, cannot strip a person of the last human freedom, the freedom to choose one's attitude toward one's suffering. Wiesel is the great refuser — to find Auschwitz meaningful, in any redemptive sense, risks a betrayal of the dead. And yet both men insisted, equally fiercely, on the obligation to bear witness, on memory as a moral category, and on the irreducible dignity of the human person. Wiesel's 1986 Nobel lecture, with its insistence that silence always serves the tormentor and never the tormented, is in some deep sense kin to Frankl's project, even though Frankl reaches for therapy and Wiesel for literature and theology. There is also a quieter connection between them as both were rooted, before the war, in Central European Jewish intellectual life — Frankl in Vienna's psychoanalytic culture, against which he positioned himself; Wiesel in the Hasidic world of Sighet, which he later honored at length in Souls on Fire and elsewhere. Each carried a destroyed world inside him and each refused to let it disappear. Near fine in a very good dust jacket. Translated by Ilse Lasch. Preface by Gordon Allport. Originally published in German, in 1946 under the name Ein Psycholog erlecbt das konzentrationslager. Rare and desirable signed by this legendary survivor, leader and award-winning writer.