NOTES

1. Zyklon B (originally a pesticide) was the brand name of the highly poisonous hydrogen cyanide gas used by the Nazis for mass murder at Auschwitz and other death camps.

2. Bertolt Brecht (in collaboration with Kurt Weill), The Threepenny Opera, 1928.

3. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749–1832), German author (Weimar Classicism), scientist, and statesman.

4. Friedrich Hölderlin (1770–1843), German Romantic poet and philosopher.

5. Christian Friedrich Hebbel (1813–1863), German poet and dramatist.

6. General paralysis is now known as tertiary syphilis or neurosyphilis. Penicillin was not yet used to cure syphilis in Austria in 1946, hence the reference to malarial therapy, which was still widely used.

7. Allusion to “O Herr, gib jedem seinen eigenen Tod . . .” (“Oh Lord, give to each his own death . . .”) in Rainer Maria Rilke, Das Stundenbuch (The Book of Hours), 1905.

8. The early talkie Atlantik (1929), directed by E. A. Dupont, was based on a stage play about the Titanic disaster. English, French, and German versions were produced with different casts.

9. The author refers to the embattled Jewish population of Vienna following Kristallnacht (the November Pogroms) in 1938.

10. Ernst Kretschmer (1888–1964), German psychiatrist who categorized people by body build and linked these types to personality traits and mental illness.

11. “Cycloid personality,” now known as cyclothymia, is a mood disorder similar to, but often milder than, bipolar disorder.

12. “Himmelhoch jauchzend, zum Tode betrübt” (rejoicing to high heaven, or in the depths of despair), from Goethe’s play Egmont (1788), has become a common German saying.

13. Proverbs 13:12.

14. A conclusive experiment to prove that a particular hypothesis is true.

15. Viktor Frankl, Gesammelte Werke, Band 1: Trotzdem Ja zum Leben sagen und ausgewählte Briefe (1945–1949) [Collected works, vol. 1: Say yes to life in spite of everything and selected letters (1945–1949)], ed. A. Batthyany, K. H. Biller, E. Fizzotti (Vienna: Böhlau Verlag, 2005).

16. Wiener Kurier, March 23, 1946.

17. Viktor Frankl, Trotzdem Ja zum Leben sagen/Drei Vorträge [Say yes to life/Three lectures] (Vienna: Franz Deuticke, 1946).

18. Frankl, Gesammelte Werke, Band 1, 184.

19. “Workers’ Day, April 14, 1934,” in Gabriele Vesely-Frankl, ed., Viktor E. Frankl: Frühe Schriften, 1923–1942 [Viktor E. Frankl: Early writings, 1923–1942] (Vienna: Maudrich, 2005).

20. V. E. Frankl, Zur geistigen Problematik der Psychotherapie [On the spiritual problem of psychotherapy], Zentralblatt für Psychotherapie und ihre Grenzgebiete 10 (1938): 33–45.

21. Viktor Frankl, Dem Leben Antwort geben: Autobiografie [Recollections: An autobiography] (Weinheim: Beltz, 2017).

22. In the ten years after the book’s publication, more than thirty reviews were published in a variety of magazines and newspapers in Austria, including the Wiener Zeitung, Die Österreicherin, and Österreichische Ärztezeitung.