In 1946, about a year after leaving the Nazi camps, psychiatrist Viktor Frankl dictated a short book in nine days and wanted it published without his name. By his death in 1997, Man's Search for Meaning had sold over 10 million copies.

When Viktor Frankl arrived at Auschwitz in October 1944, he had a manuscript in the inner pocket of his coat. It was the first version of his book on logotherapy, the theory of meaning he had been building for years. He pointed to it and pleaded with one of the prisoners who had been there longer. "I must keep this manuscript at all costs," he told him. "It contains my life's work."

The man grinned. In Frankl's telling, the grin went from pity to amusement to open mockery, and then he shouted a single obscene word back. Frankl understood what he meant. Nothing he had brought with him would survive this place, his life's work included.

The manuscript was lost in the disinfection chamber, along with his clothes. In their place, Frankl was handed the worn-out coat of a man who had already been sent to the gas chamber. In its pocket he found "one single page torn out of a Hebrew prayer book," containing the Shema Yisrael, which he called "the most important Jewish prayer."

"How should I have interpreted such a 'coincidence,'" he later wrote, "other than as a challenge to live my thoughts instead of merely putting them on paper?"

He survived. After the war, he put his thoughts on paper again, and one result was a short book he dictated "within nine successive days" and wanted to carry no name at all. By the time he died in Vienna on 2 September 1997, Man's Search for Meaning had sold more than 10 million copies in 24 languages, according to his American publisher, Beacon Press.

From a number to a book

The camps had already taken his name once. "I was Number 119,104," he writes in the book, "and most of the time I was digging and laying tracks for railway lines."

Frankl had been deported to Theresienstadt in September 1942, with his wife, Tilly, and his parents. His father died there. From Auschwitz he was sent to Kaufering III and then Türkheim, two subcamps of Dachau in Bavaria, where American soldiers liberated him on 27 April 1945, according to the Kaufering memorial project.

He writes about what the number meant. A set number of prisoners had to go on each transport, and "it did not really matter which, since each of them was nothing but a number." In his words, "One literally became a number." What stood behind it, "the fate, the history, the name of the man," mattered even less.

When he returned to Vienna that August, he learned that Tilly had died in Bergen-Belsen. His mother and brother had been murdered at Auschwitz. Apart from his sister, his whole family was gone.

He began writing almost at once. First he rebuilt the lost book on logotherapy, which he had already started reconstructing in the camps, sick with typhus, in shorthand "on tiny scraps of paper." Then came the personal account.

The exact year is less certain than the speed. In a 1992 preface, Frankl says he wrote it in 1945. Britannica and his German publisher date the dictation to 1946, the year it came out in Vienna as Ein Psychologe erlebt das Konzentrationslager (A Psychologist Experiences the Concentration Camp). The first English edition followed in 1959, under the title From Death-Camp to Existentialism.

The number and the name

"I had intended to write this book anonymously," Frankl explains in the original preface, "using my prison number only."

In the camps, he had been a number he never chose. On the cover of his own book, he was willing to be one again. The difference was that this time it was his choice.

He gave his reason in 1992. He wrote the book "with the absolute conviction that, as an anonymous opus, it could never earn its author literary fame." What he wanted was to show readers "by way of a concrete example that life holds a potential meaning under any conditions, even the most miserable ones." The point was the idea, not the man.

Then he changed his mind. Once the manuscript was finished, he saw that "as an anonymous publication it would lose half its value," and that he "must have the courage to state my convictions openly." A book asking readers to take responsibility for their lives could hardly come from someone unwilling to stand behind it. So he kept even the most personal passages, "in spite of an intense dislike of exhibitionism."

The result was a compromise. The first German printing had no name on the cover. At the last moment, after his friends urged him, Frankl agreed to put it on the title page.

I think that compromise is the most honest thing about the book. His name is there, so the claims belong to someone. But it isn't on display. He put himself behind the work rather than in front of it.

What the book actually says

The first half of Man's Search for Meaning is an account of camp life, and it is plainer than its reputation suggests. Frankl writes about hunger, frostbite and typhus, and about the numbness that set in after a few weeks, when the dead stopped moving anyone.

The second half sets out logotherapy, and it answers the camps almost point by point. The transports treated prisoners as interchangeable. Logotherapy insists that no one is. Every person, Frankl writes, has "a concrete assignment which demands fulfillment. Therein he cannot be replaced, nor can his life be repeated."

He describes two prisoners who had spoken of suicide. For one, the reason to go on was a child waiting in another country. For the other, it was a series of books that were still unfinished. "His work could not be done by anyone else," Frankl writes, "any more than another person could ever take the place of the father in his child's affections."

Those are two of his three sources of meaning: "creating a work or doing a deed," and "experiencing something or encountering someone." The third is "the attitude we take toward unavoidable suffering."

The best-known passage of the book belongs to the second. Digging in frozen ground at dawn, with no idea whether Tilly was alive, he kept talking to her in his mind. "Love goes very far beyond the physical person of the beloved," he wrote.

He also describes how he and other prisoners had to change the question they were asking. "It did not really matter what we expected from life," he wrote, "but rather what life expected from us."

It is the same phrase he used for the transports, "it did not really matter," turned the other way. The camps had decided it didn't matter which man went. Frankl decided that what mattered was what each man would do with what was left to him.

When the anonymous book became a bestseller

The anonymity comes back once more in the 1992 preface, because of what happened next. Frankl found it "both strange and remarkable" that, of the dozens of books he wrote, "precisely this one, which I had intended to be published anonymously so that it could never build up any reputation on the part of the author, did become a success."

He drew a lesson from it, and repeated it to his students. "Don't aim at success," he told them. "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."

John Stuart Mill reached a similar conclusion after his own crisis in 1826: that happiness comes to people whose minds are fixed on something else. We looked at Mill's version, and the psychology research that has tested it, here. Frankl's book is a case study of the idea. He aimed at the work, kept his name off the cover, and the success came anyway.

He wasn't flattered by it. When people congratulated him on writing a bestseller, he said he did not see it as "an achievement and accomplishment on my part but rather an expression of the misery of our time." If so many people reach for a book that promises to deal with the meaning of life, he wrote, "it must be a question that burns under their fingernails."

What his critics say

The book has serious critics, and they are worth hearing.

The Holocaust scholar Lawrence Langer saw Frankl as the father of what he called "redemptive memory," which he defined as "the pursuit of reassurance that however bad the Holocaust was, we can extract something meaningful from it," Moment magazine reports. "It distorts the nature of the experience," Langer wrote.

Others point to what the book leaves out. Writing in Tablet in 2020, the critic David Mikics noted that Frankl spent "only two or three days at Auschwitz." Kaufering, where he spent five months digging ditches and laying railway lines, and Theresienstadt, where he spent two years, are never named in the book, while Auschwitz appears again and again. Much of the digging that Number 119,104 describes happened at a camp most readers never learn the name of.

His biographer, the historian Timothy Pytell, author of Viktor Frankl's Search for Meaning, interviewed a man who had been imprisoned with him. According to Vox, the man recalled that Frankl was "not preaching heroic survival" in the camp, and was instead regretting that he hadn't left Vienna when he had the chance.

The hardest objection is moral. The scholar Richard Middleton-Kaplan, in an essay in the 2014 collection Jewish Resistance Against the Nazis, has argued that the book implies, whether Frankl meant it to or not, that those who died had given up.

Frankl's own text partly answers that. "We who have come back, by the aid of many lucky chances or miracles," he wrote near the start, "we know: the best of us did not return." By his own account, surviving was mostly luck.

I don't think the critics make the book worthless. They make it what it always was: one man's testimony, written fast and in grief, with his blind spots in it. It reads better that way than as a manual for resilience.

Living it, not just writing it

Most people who pick up Man's Search for Meaning today aren't in anything close to Frankl's situation. Many have simply reached a point where success, or the chase for it, feels thinner than they expected.

The book's answer isn't to try harder at being happy. It is to turn the question around and ask what life expects from you, which usually means a piece of work, or a person, that no one else can stand in for. Meaning, Frankl wrote, is found in "right action and in right conduct," not in "talk and meditation."

That is what the page in the dead man's coat had asked of him: to live his thoughts, not merely put them on paper. He lost the manuscript with his life's work in it, and spent the next six months in the camps, digging, starving and falling ill, and testing his ideas against all of it.

When he finally wrote them down again, he tried to keep his name off, because the book was never meant to be about him. Then he put it back, quietly, on the title page, because an idea about responsibility needs someone willing to answer for it.

The book is the part he put on paper. The living was the part that counted.