Viktor Frankl’s Man’s Search for Meaning has sold over sixteen million copies. It offers a compelling thesis: that even in the most extreme circumstances, we retain the freedom to choose our attitude, and that finding meaning in suffering is the path not just to survival but to flourishing. Those who maintained purpose in the concentration camps, Frankl observed, were more likely to endure.
This has become our dominant cultural narrative about resilience. It’s seductive because it offers agency. Find your purpose. Choose your attitude. Meaning-making becomes the technology for getting through.
But there’s a shadow in this story. And at least two other Auschwitz survivors – Jean Améry and Primo Levi -illuminate what it conceals.
Frankl’s account isn’t wrong, exactly. But it’s partial in ways that matter.
The first problem is survivorship bias. We hear from those who found meaning and lived to write about it. We don’t hear from those for whom meaning-making failed – because they didn’t survive to tell us. The thesis validates itself through the voices of its successes.
The second problem is deeper. Frankl’s framework locates resilience primarily inside the individual. Purpose, attitude, choice – these are positioned as portable assets, independent of circumstance. This carries an uncomfortable implication: that those who couldn’t sustain life after liberation somehow failed to find meaning. That survival is, as Holocaust scholar Lawrence Langer accused, “a matter of individual mental health.”
Améry and Levi trouble this narrative. Both survived Auschwitz. Both became significant writers and witnesses. Both eventually took their own lives -Améry in 1978, Levi in 1987. If meaning-making were sufficient, these men should have been its exemplars. They were intellectuals, writers, witnesses. They found purpose in testimony. And yet.
Jean Améry’s At the Mind’s Limits is not a failure of meaning-making. It’s a refusal to pretend that meaning remained available after what the camps revealed.
Améry argued that Auschwitz didn’t just traumatise individuals – it destroyed the relational infrastructure of European intellectual life: the shared assumptions, the connective tissue, the cultural fascia that held the Enlightenment project together. The values of reason, culture, and human dignity were not merely ineffective against the Nazi state; they were perverted by it – their forms preserved while their substance was hollowed out, refilled with domination. The language of law, order, and national greatness was maintained; the content became exclusion and, ultimately, annihilation. This territory is not entirely unfamiliar today.
For someone whose identity was rooted in that tradition, this was not a wound to be healed. It was a revelation to be borne. Améry described reciting Hölderlin in the camp and finding the poem “no longer transcended reality” – words stripped of their capacity to illuminate or console. The intellectual, he argued, was actually disadvantaged in the camps. The mind that seeks meaning is tormented by meaninglessness in ways the pragmatist is not.
Améry insisted on ressentiment – moral memory, the refusal to let the world move on without reckoning. Post-war Europe wanted normalisation, forgetting. He experienced this as a second betrayal. The collective wanted to heal; he refused to let the wound close prematurely. This stance isolated him. He was left holding what others wished to put down.
Primo Levi’s final work, The Drowned and the Saved, shows a man who wanted to believe in the power of witness – and was undone by its limits.
Unlike Améry, Levi retained faith in reason, communication, testimony. He believed that documenting what happened could prevent its recurrence. His writing is marked by extraordinary clarity – a chemist’s attention to the mechanics of survival and destruction.
But his final essays reveal growing disillusionment. Testimony did not create moral repair. The world listened politely, then compartmentalised. Auschwitz became history, metaphor, curriculum – not an ongoing moral rupture demanding response.
Levi’s concept of the “grey zone” further complicated his reception. He insisted on the moral ambiguity of survival – the compromises, the collaborations, the ways the camp system conscripted victims into their own destruction. Societies prefer clear victims and villains. Levi offered something harder: compromised humans navigating impossible choices.
Levi was not without hope; he was without reciprocity. He extended toward a collective that did not extend back.
What emerges from reading Améry and Levi together is not a story about individual psychological failure. It’s a story about collective failure.
Resilience is not stored inside individuals. It’s distributed across relationships, institutions, narratives, and moral commitments. It depends on what I’ve elsewhere called “mattering” – the sense that one belongs, is recognised, has a place in something larger than oneself.
Améry and Levi were left without a “we” that could carry the memory without neutralising it. The burden of truth became individually unbearable because no collective was willing to hold it intact. Post-war Europe wanted to move on. These men were left as solitary witnesses to what everyone else preferred to forget.
This reframes the question entirely. Instead of asking “why couldn’t they find meaning?” we might ask “what failed to hold them?”
Frankl’s meaning-making, viewed through this lens, wasn’t purely internal. He imagined future audiences, reunion with his wife, his identity as a psychiatrist—all relational, all dependent on contexts that would receive him. His apparent individual capacity was collective in nature, projected across time.
When context is sufficiently destroyed—when the entire framework within which one made sense of the world is revealed as a lie—there may be nothing left to make meaning with.
If Améry and Levi represent the cost of unflinching witness without collective reception, Albie Sachs and Nelson Mandela represent something different. Not forgiveness – neither man centres that. But something that might be called transcendence.
Sachs, the South African freedom fighter who lost his arm and sight in one eye to a car bomb, wrote The Soft Vengeance of a Freedom Fighter. The title is instructive. His vengeance is “soft” – not retribution, but continuation. Living well, writing, contributing to the new South Africa. Not as a response to the violence, but as a continuation of what the violence tried to stop.
The crucial insight: Sachs doesn’t centre the perpetrator. Forgiveness, as a frame, keeps the self oriented toward the harm. Sachs shifts focus from the wound to the ongoing work. His arm was gone but the project wasn’t.
Mandela’s twenty-seven years on Robben Island produced a similar insight. His statement about leaving hatred at the prison gate wasn’t forgiveness – it was pragmatic liberation. Carrying hatred would have made him a prisoner of what was done to him long after the physical prison opened. Putting it down wasn’t for his captors; it was for himself and for the work ahead.
Crucially, neither man was operating in isolation. They were embedded in ongoing collective projects that wanted what they had to give. The ANC, the struggle, the new constitutional order -these were communities that required memory, that built institutions to carry it, that created roles for survivors as contributors rather than relics. Sachs’s testimony wasn’t filed away -it became constitutive of the new order.
If forgiveness is not transcendence, what happens to the anger? This is the question of agency -of righteous anger and where it goes, of rage as fuel or as fire that consumes the vessel that holds it.
Améry insisted on ressentiment as moral duty – a refusal to let the perpetrators off the hook. His anger was fidelity to what had happened. But anger held this way becomes all-consuming. Without a collective to receive it, without structures to transform it into accountability, it turns inward. Améry’s anger kept the wound open but offered no path through. Sachs and Mandela didn’t suppress anger. They redirected it. Anger as fuel, not destination. Anger that moves through rather than settling in.
In a recent dialogue, Justice Albie Sachs, Naila Farouky, and Halima Mahomed explored what Sachs called the “productive uses of anger.” Anger, he suggested, is information -it tells you something has been violated. The question is what you do with that information.
Forgiveness, in this framing, is the wrong question. It centres the perpetrator, asks the wounded to do additional labour. Transcendence asks something different: not “can you forgive?” but “can you get the enemy out of your head? Can you re-orient toward what you’re building rather than what was destroyed?”
This isn’t suppression. It’s redirection. And it’s only possible when there’s something to redirect toward – a project, a community, a future that claims you.
There’s a parallel from a different context that seems, at first, to vindicate Frankl.
Admiral James Stockdale, the highest-ranking American POW in Vietnam, spent over seven years in the “Hanoi Hilton.” When asked who didn’t survive, his answer was surprising: the optimists. Those who said “we’ll be out by Christmas” – and died of broken hearts when Christmas came and went.
His formula – now known as the Stockdale Paradox – was this: confront the brutal facts of your reality, and at the same time retain faith that you will prevail. Not hope tied to timelines. Not optimism that could be crushed. Disciplined realism paired with unconditional commitment to endurance.
This sounds Frankl-ish, but there’s an important difference. Stockdale drew on Stoic philosophy – particularly that of former slave, Epictetus. The Stoic frame is less about finding purpose in suffering and more about distinguishing what you can and cannot control. Stockdale wasn’t transcending his circumstances through meaning; he was refusing to lie to himself about them.
The question isn’t whether you feel rage, but whether there’s anywhere for it to go. Améry’s ressentiment had no outlet. Sachs’s rage became the Constitutional Court. Mandela’s became a presidency. The difference wasn’t the presence or absence of anger – it was whether a collective existed that could receive it.
And Stockdale himself didn’t survive on inner discipline alone. He came home to a country that honoured POWs as heroes. His survival wasn’t just Stoic practice; it was Stoic practice met by a context that wanted what he carried.
Václav Havel, who knew something about endurance under oppression, drew a distinction that matters here: “Hope is not the conviction that something will turn out well, but the certainty that something makes sense, regardless of how it turns out.” The optimists in Stockdale’s prison died because their hope was actually optimism – tied to outcomes, to timelines. When the timelines failed, they had nothing left. Hope, in Havel’s sense, is more durable: an orientation toward what makes sense to do, regardless of whether you’ll see the result. This is closer to what Sachs and Mandela carried – not confidence in victory, but commitment to the work.
The deepest lesson from these lives is that resilience is co-produced. It emerges in the interaction between person and context. It depends not only on individual capacities but on whether there are structures capable of receiving what survivors carry.
Améry and Levi show us the cost of asking individuals to bear what should be held collectively. They were not weak; they were unmet. The post-war world wanted their testimony but not their ongoing moral demands. They refused that bargain, and the weight of refusal became unsustainable.
Sachs and Mandela show us what becomes possible when collectives build structures adequate to moral injury. The TRC wasn’t perfect, but it was something – an institutional acknowledgment that what happened required public reckoning, that survivors’ testimony mattered, that the new order would be built on truth rather than amnesia.
This has implications far beyond Holocaust studies or transitional justice. Our cultural obsession with individual resilience – grit, meaning-making, positive psychology – may be asking the wrong questions. Instead of “how do we build more resilient individuals?” we might ask “what contexts enable people to continue? What structures hold people when individual strength isn’t enough?”
There are losses for which no meaning can or should be made. There are wounds that don’t heal into wisdom. There are experiences that permanently change what is possible for a person.
The meaning-making framework, taken too far, becomes another form of violence – a demand that the wounded perform redemptive labour, extract lessons from what should never have happened. Sometimes the most honest response to atrocity is to refuse that demand.
But refusal alone is not sustainable. Améry and Levi show us that. Holding the wound open requires either a collective willing to hold it with you or a solitude that eventually becomes unbearable.
The path that Sachs and Mandela found was not forgiveness. It was relocation – a shift in the centre of gravity from what was done to what is being built. Not closure, but continuation. Not healing, but redirection.
This requires something beyond individual will. It requires communities capable of receiving witness, institutions that carry memory, projects that give survivors a role in building what comes next. It requires a “we” adequate to the weight of what must be borne.
I don’t offer this as resolution. It reflects a journey of processing my own grief and anger. The question of how we hold unbearable knowledge – individually and collectively – remains open.
But I’ve come to believe that the Frankl narrative, for all its comfort, points us in the wrong direction. It locates the work inside the individual and calls it meaning-making. It suggests that the right attitude can carry us through anything.
Améry and Levi knew better. They knew that some things destroy the very frameworks through which meaning becomes possible. They knew that survival without collective reception is its own form of solitary confinement.
And Sachs and Mandela knew something else: that transcendence isn’t escape from anger but its transformation. That getting the enemy out of your head isn’t forgiveness but freedom. That the question isn’t whether you can make meaning of what happened but whether there’s something still being built that you can join your life to.
Resilience, in the end, may be less about what we carry inside us and more about what carries us. Less about the meaning we make and more about the structures that make meaning possible.
The question for any of us facing unbearable loss isn’t only “what can I do with this?” but “who will hold this with me? What am I still part of that continues to call me forward?”
Those are harder questions. They implicate not just the wounded but the world that receives them.
And perhaps that’s exactly where the questions belong.
**
Resilience Revisited is an occasional blog series reflecting on the need for a deeper understanding of the concept of resilience, one that inspires an exploration of its complexities and a conscious, intentional shift towards achieving strong resilience – and sustainability -individually and collectively. It is a way of articulating my thoughts on my PhD journey. Whilst it is my primary authorship, it comes from the synthesis of many conversations and experiences for which I am immensely grateful. This piece in particular draws on recent dialogue with Justice Albie Sachs, Naila Farouky, Halima Mahomed and Gerry Salole and on a dinner discussion with Beto Bedolfe and Jim Simon as well as on my reading of Jean Améry and Primo Levi alongside Viktor Frankl. You can see a summary of that dialogue here.
The themes of forgiveness and grief have preoccupied some of my thinking in recent years – what forgiveness really means, whether it is the right frame for what we ask of the wounded, how it can be achieved in the face of relational disintegration. Albie’s notion of transcendence, not forgiveness, provides much food for thought for me – and a future dialogue. It resonates with ideas of resilience as including metamorphic transformation: not a return to what was, but a becoming of something different. More to follow. Comments welcome.