Man's Search for Meaning
Man's Search for Meaning
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Symbols & Motifs
Content Warning: This section of the guide includes discussion of death, graphic violence, religious discrimination, and racism.
Smokestacks
Smokestacks were associated with the crematoria where the bodies of the dead were burned in Nazi concentration camps. Thus, for prisoners, a smokestack always stood for death on a mass scale. Frankl explains that when he first arrived at Auschwitz, he asked about the fate of a friend and was directed to a “chimney a few hundred yards off, which was sending a column of flame up into the grey sky of Poland. It dissolved into a sinister cloud of smoke. ‘That’s where your friend is, floating up to Heaven,’ was the answer” (10). Later anecdotes reinforce the association with death. For instance, when a prisoner moved from one camp to another, the first and most important thing to look for was the presence or absence of smokestacks. This indicated whether a person had arrived at a place where they would be executed or truly had come to a work camp, or even a rest camp.
Frankl experienced this directly when he was transferred from Auschwitz to Dachau, bypassing the dreaded Mauthausen death camp on the way. On discovering that there were no smokestacks, he and the other prisoners felt a “joyful surprise [which] put us all in a good mood. The wish of the senior warden in our hut in Auschwitz had come true: we had come, as quickly as possible, to a camp which did not have a ‘chimney’—unlike Auschwitz. We laughed and cracked jokes in spite of, and during, all we had to go through in the next few hours” (23). The meaning of the smokestacks evolves in this episode in a way that highlights the theme of Finding Meaning in Extreme Conditions. The mere absence of a symbol of death becomes an occasion for rejoicing and even humor, despite the prisoners’ otherwise dire circumstances. The symbol thus underscores Frankl’s contention that camaraderie, happiness, and purpose can exist regardless of external conditions.
The Fragment of the Ten Commandments
At the very beginning of his book, Frankl describes a symbolic object that profoundly changed his life. Before he saw the piece of marble he describes in the Preface, he had been invited to go to the American Embassy to obtain a visa to leave Austria and go to the United States. However, as he explains, he decided not to use this visa:
I noticed a piece of marble lying on a table at home. When I asked my father about it, he explained that he had found it on the site where the national socialists had burned down the largest Viennese synagogue. He had taken it home because it was part of the tablets on which the Ten Commandments were inscribed. One gilded Hebrew letter was engraved upon the piece; my father explained that this letter stood for one of the Commandments. Eagerly, I asked, ‘Which one is it?’ He answered, ‘Honor thy father and thy mother that thy days may be long upon the land.’ At that moment I decided to stay with my father and mother upon the land, and to let the American visa lapse (5).
Frankl took this piece of stone as a sign of his path in life: He was meant to stay in Nazi-occupied Austria despite the risks. Everything else in his life and in the book he wrote followed from his decision to remain with his family. The fragment of this religious text thus symbolizes The Importance of Moral Choice while also speaking to Faith as an Expression of Humanity’s Deepest Impulses. Indeed, the two are here intertwined, as Frankl’s acceptance of what he takes to be God’s will shapes his understanding of where his duty lies.
Food and Eating
Frankl and his fellow prisoners lived for years on a starvation diet while engaged in hard labor. They thought, talked, and fantasized endlessly about food. They knew that food meant survival so they became accustomed to rationing their meager portions scrupulously. Frankl explains:
Those who have not gone through a similar experience can hardly conceive of the soul-destroying mental conflict and clashes of willpower which a famished man experiences. They can hardly grasp what it means to stand digging in a trench, listening for the siren to announce 9:30 or 10:00 A.M—the half-hour lunch interval […] and tenderly touching a piece of bread in one’s coat pocket, first stroking it with frozen gloveless fingers, then braking off a crumb and putting it in one’s mouth and finally, with the last bit of will power, pocketing it again, having promised oneself that morning to hold out till afternoon (18).
This motif of food has a complex relationship to Frankl’s claims about finding meaning amid suffering. On the one hand, as this passage illustrates, simple nourishment took on outsized significance, becoming an emotional event in and of itself. This suggests that in extremity, meaning does not so much disappear as contract to reflect an impoverished environment.
At the same time, Frankl is adamant that satisfying (or attempting to satisfy) one’s bodily needs was not enough to forestall the kind of despair that threatened survival. In this sense, it is noteworthy that the above passage describes someone saving food for later. As Frankl elsewhere observes, this implies hope for the future, if only in the short term, and this commitment to even a seemingly minor future purpose is among the things that Frankl identifies as a source of meaning. Still, as a psychotherapist, Frankl was concerned that his fellow prisoners spent too much time imagining food they wished they had or hoped to have at the end of the war. He felt it interfered with their ability to cope with their reality, which suggests a further distinction between commitment to an imagined future and escapist fantasy. The motif thus illustrates the spectrum of life in the camps, from physical deprivation to maladaptive coping mechanisms to deep-rooted endurance.
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