Dietrich von Hildebrand and Victor Frankl

Katie van Schaijik | Aug 4, 2014

Having heard somewhere that Dietrich von Hildebrand had "discovered" Victor Frankl, author of Man's Search for Meaning and founder of Logotherapy, I asked Alice von Hildebrand to tell me the story the other day.

Here is her ten-minute reply.

Some of her details are off. For instance, according to The Victor Frankl Institute website, he was in a concentration camp for 3, not 7 years. But the gist is true and touching.

N.B. "Gogo" was von Hildebrand's nickname.

Von Hildebrand's Wikipedia page mentions the journal in which he published Frankl's essay:

A vocal opponent of Hitler and Nazism, in 1933, upon Hitler's rise to power, Hildebrand fled from Germany, first to Italy, and then to Vienna in Austria. There, with the support of the Austrian Chancellor Engelbert Dollfuss, he founded and edited an anti-Nazi weekly paper, Der Christliche Ständestaat ("The Christian Corporative State"). For this, he was sentenced to death in absentia by the Nazis.