READING | VIKTOR FRANKL: NEVERTHELESS, SAY “YES” TO LIFE
In the 1920s, Viktor Frankl (1905 – 1997) founded the “Third Viennese School of Psychotherapy”, the so-called logotherapy or existential analysis. In his approach to therapy, he focused on meaning and value. Having survived the Holocaust as the only one of his immediate family, Frankl reflected upon his experiences in the concentration camps in his famous book Man’s search for Meaning which has become one of the ten most influential books in the United States. Lesser known is his play Synchronization in Birkenwald: A Metaphysical Conference, which he wrote in 1946. On the occasion of Frankl’s 85th birthday in 1990, Gregorij von Leitis, Founding Artistic Director of Elysium, presented the world premiere of this play in New York. Soon after the Holocaust, Frankl advocated for reconciliation as the only way out of the destructive catastrophe of war. The experience of meaning even while suffering, and reconciliation with oneself and with the world as a precondition for healing the world and society: those aspects of Frankl’s work are more important than ever in today’s broken world.
PROGRAM
Gregorij von Leitis will read Frankl’s texts.
Michael Lahr will introduce Frankl’s life and work and his continuing relevance.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Viktor Frankl was born in Vienna in 1905 into a Jewish family. He studied medicine and later became a neurologist and psychiatrist. In his early formative years he was in close contact with Sigmund Freud and Alfred Adler, but later diverged from Freud’s psychoanalysis and Adler’s individual psychology. In his own approach, logotherapy, Frankl accentuated the importance of meaning and value. As a medical student, his research interest was in depression and suicide. Noticing the high suicide rate among high school students around the time of receiving their report cards, Frankl developed a special youth counseling program that helped to reduce the suicide rate among Viennese high school students to zero.
A year before Hitler’s invasion of Austria, Frankl opened his own private practice. But right after the “Anschluss” he was immediately prohibited from treating “Aryan” patients. In 1940, Frankl became the Head of Neurology at the Rothschild Hospital, Vienna’s last remaining hospital, where Jewish patients could be treated. There he does everything in his power to sabotage the Nazi euthanasia program.
He could have gotten an entry visa for the United States and thus saved his life, but abstained from doing so, as he didn’t want to leave his parents behind in Vienna.
In 1941 he married Tilly Grosser. On September 25, 1942, he, his wife and his parents were deported to Theresienstadt. Frankl’s father died there in 1943, his mother was murdered in Auschwitz, and his wife in Bergen-Belsen. With one of the last transports to the East – on October 19, 1944 – Frankl was deported to Auschwitz. On April 27, 1945, he was liberated by the US-army in Türkheim, a satellite camp of Dachau. After having endured three years of suffering in the concentration camp he returned to Vienna and lectured about his own approach to psychological healing, validating his thesis, that even in the most painful and dehumanizing situation, life has potential meaning.
Frankl published more than 39 books which have been translated into 40 languages. He lectured all over the world, and several times was invited as a visiting professor to leading American universities.
Viktor Frankl died in 1997.
GREGORIJ VON LEITIS
Gregorij von Leitis, Founding Artistic Director of Elysium, has been working as a director at various theatres in Europe and the US for over 40 years. In 1985 he received the New York Theater Club Prize for this direction of Bertolt Brecht’s The Jewish Wife. In July 2003, he was awarded the Knight’s Cross of the Order of Merit by German Federal President Johannes Rau for his merits in promoting understanding between peoples by way of art. In April 2016, the President of the Republic of Austria, Dr. Heinz Fischer, bestowed the Austrian Cross of Honor for Science and Art on him. In 1983, he founded the Elysium Theater Company in New York, which he headed as Artistic Director till 1990, when he was called to be the Intendant (Artistic Director) of the Landestheater Mecklenburg, Neustrelitz. Since 1993 he has been Artistic Director of Elysium – between two continents. In 1985, Gregorij von Leïtis founded the Erwin Piscator Award Society, which annually confers the Erwin Piscator Award. Since 1987, Gregorij von Leitis has been committed to the integration of marginal social groups by way of theater. In 1989, Gregorij von Leitis, with the Elysium Theater Company, created the program Theater for the Homeless. “In a city where high-style but meaningless shows easily cost $50 per ticket, while next door hundreds stand in line to get a little pasta and an apple, it is encouraging to realize, that a theater makes its talents available to people who can’t very often get to see a play,” wrote the Village Beat in 1990 about the Theater for the Homeless. In 1989 the New York paper Villager wrote: “In the classic tradition of the German avantgarde theaters of Piscator and Brecht, a socially relevant theater exists under the direction of Gregorij von Leïtis. Gregorij von Leïtis deserves applause for holding fast to his ideals.”
Since 1992 Gregorij von Leïtis had been active as guest director, first at the State Theater in Linz, later also at the State Theater in Bregenz. In 1998 he produced Kafka’s A Report to an Academy at London’s Bloomsbury Theater, Ullmann’s opera The Emperor of Atlantis at the Guggenheim Museum and at the Miller Theater in New York, as well as the Italian premiere of Krenek’s chamber opera What Price Confidence? The New York Times wrote about The Emperor of Atlantis: “This production provided a chance to hear this deeply moving opera”. Corriere della Sera commented on the Rome premiere of Krenek’s chamber opera What Price Confidence? “The deciding factor in conveying the spirit of this chamber opera is the direction of Gregorij von Leïtis”.
In 1997, he recited the New York premiere of The Lay of Love and Death of the Cornet Christoph Rilke, one of the last works which the composer Viktor Ullmann was able to finish in the ghetto and concentration camp Theresienstadt, before he was deported to Auschwitz in October 1944 and murdered there. Since then, he has performed this composition for speaker and piano internationally in more than 30 cities. The concert on October 18, 2015, at the Roedde House Museum in Vancouver, was his 50th performance of Ullmann’s Cornet. The New York Times praised the strong, moving performance of the Cornet, and called Gregorij von Leïtis and the accompanying pianist “effective advocates for this music.”
Since 1997, Gregorij von Leïtis’ work has emphasized staging again the works of composers and writers who had been persecuted and silenced by Hitler’s executioners. In the summer of 2005, he directed the premiere of Egon Lustgarten’s opera Dante in Exile in Bernried, and later on in New York. In regard to the Lustgarten premiere, the Süddeutsche Zeitung wrote: “Rebirth of a forgotten work of opera (…) under Gregorij von Leïtis sensitive direction”.
With Michael Lahr, he founded the Lahr von Leïtis Academy & Archive in 1995, whose president he is.
MICHAEL LAHR
Michael Lahr studied philosophy and adult education at the College of Philosophy in Munich and at the Jesuit University Centre Sevres in Paris. He is the author and editor of the book The Erwin Piscator Award, and a co-author of the volume of essays Bilder des Menschen (Images of Man). In the Karl Jaspers Yearbook 2014, Offener Horizont, he published an essay on Erwin Piscator and World War I: Reconstructing the birth of his Political Theater. As a specialist in Erwin Piscator, the founder of the political and epic theater, he curated the exhibit Erwin Piscator: Political Theater in Exile, which so far has been seen in Bernried, New York, Catania, Salzburg, and Munich.
As the program director of Elysium, he has unearthed numerous works by artists who had to flee their home country under the pressure of the Nazi regime, or who were murdered. Many of these compositions were performed for the first time in concerts in Europe and the U.S. He gives introductory lectures for all Elysium programs. At the same time, he lectures regularly on questions of general social and political significance. Among other places, he has lectured at St. Norbert’s College in De Pere, WI, at the American Academy Berlin, at the Leo Baeck Institute New York, at the Ludwig Maximilians University Munich, at Deutsches Haus at NYU, at the university in Catania, at the Mozarteum University in Salzburg, at the Vytautas-Magnus University Kaunas, at the University in Daugavpils / Latvia, and at the University of the State of Florida in Tallahassee.
More information:
www.lahrvonleitisacademy.eu
www.elysiumbtc.org