Reading List

Authors Like Viktor Frankl

When Viktor Frankl arrived at Auschwitz-Birkenau in 1944, he was made to throw away the manuscript he had carried from Vienna: the first version of The Doctor and the Soul, the book in which he had set out logotherapy, a term he had been using since 1926. He reconstructed it on scraps of paper in Türkheim, a Dachau subcamp, where American troops liberated him on 27 April 1945. Back in Vienna he learned that his wife Tilly had died in Bergen-Belsen; his father had died in Theresienstadt, and his mother and brother had been murdered in Auschwitz. In 1946 he dictated Ein Psychologe erlebt das Konzentrationslager in nine days. In English it became Man's Search for Meaning, published in the US in 1959, and by 2022 it had sold some 16 million copies in more than fifty languages. Readers come to him for a rare combination: a survivor's account of the camps, and a psychiatrist's argument, tested there, that the search for meaning is the deepest human drive and that the attitude we take to suffering is the one freedom nobody can remove. The writers below share one side of that or the other — witness to the twentieth century's camps, or the long tradition of thinking about meaning, freedom and how to bear what cannot be changed.

By Lisanne Swart · 10 authors · Holocaust testimony · Existential psychology · Updated October 2026

Quick answer

If you love Viktor Frankl, start with Edith Eger, the Auschwitz survivor and psychologist whose recovery began with his book. For the camps described with the same clarity but less hope, read Primo Levi; for inner freedom found before deportation, Etty Hillesum's diaries. For the therapy he helped found, Irvin Yalom and Rollo May. And for the oldest version of his argument, Marcus Aurelius.

10 authors like Viktor Frankl

01
Survivor and therapist · Closest match

Edith Eger

Hungarian-American · b. 1927 · Psychologist

Eger was born in Košice in 1927 and deported to Auschwitz at sixteen in May 1944; her parents were murdered on arrival. American troops liberated her at Gunskirchen, a Mauthausen subcamp, in May 1945. She emigrated to the United States in 1949, earned a doctorate in clinical psychology in 1978 and treated patients with post-traumatic stress for decades. The Choice (2017) won a National Jewish Book Award; she died in San Diego in April 2026, aged 98.

The closest thing to a sequel to Man's Search for Meaning. Reading Frankl helped Eger begin her own recovery, and he became her friend and mentor; The Choice takes his central claim — that the last freedom is the attitude you choose — and follows it through forty years of clinical practice. Frankl is shorter and more austere; Eger is warmer, more personal, and shows what the idea looks like over a whole life.

— Lisanne
02
The camp, observed exactly

Primo Levi

Italian · b. 1919 · Memoirist and chemist · Premio Strega 1979

Levi was a chemist from Turin, arrested as a partisan and deported to Auschwitz in February 1944, where he survived until the camp was liberated in January 1945. If This Is a Man was published in 1947 and reissued by Einaudi in 1958; The Periodic Table followed in 1975 and The Drowned and the Saved, his last book, in 1986. The Wrench won the Premio Strega in 1979. He died in Turin in 1987; the coroner ruled his death suicide, which some friends and commentators have disputed.

Both men were trained professionals who turned their discipline on the camp, but they reached different conclusions. Frankl finds a meaning that can survive anything; Levi describes the camp as a system, in calm and exact prose, and is far more doubtful that suffering teaches. The Drowned and the Saved, with its “grey zone”, is the necessary test of Frankl's hope.

— Lisanne

Every book by Primo Levi →

03
Testimony without a lesson

Elie Wiesel

Romanian-American · b. 1928 · Memoirist and novelist

Wiesel was born in Sighet in 1928 and deported to Auschwitz in May 1944 at fifteen; his father died at Buchenwald months before the camp was liberated in 1945. Night appeared first in Yiddish in 1956, then in a shortened French version, and in English in 1960. He became an American citizen in 1963, taught at Boston University, and was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1986.

The other Holocaust memoir most readers meet alongside Frankl's, and its opposite in purpose. Frankl builds from the camp toward a theory of meaning; Wiesel stays inside the experience of faith and family collapsing and refuses to draw a lesson from it. Read the two together for the argument between them — neither cancels the other.

— Lisanne

Every book by Elie Wiesel →

04
Inner freedom, before deportation

Etty Hillesum

Dutch · b. 1914 · Diarist

Hillesum was born in Middelburg in 1914 and kept a diary in Amsterdam from March 1941, much of it about her work with the psychotherapist Julius Spier and her growing spiritual life. She worked in the Westerbork transit camp and was deported from there on 7 September 1943; she died in Auschwitz on 30 November 1943. The diaries were published in Dutch as Het verstoorde leven in 1981 and in English as An Interrupted Life in 1983, followed by her Letters from Westerbork.

The book for readers who come to Frankl for the idea of an inner freedom no one can take away. Hillesum reaches it from inside a therapy and a spiritual awakening, under occupation rather than after liberation, and writes it with a young woman's intensity and doubt. She did not survive, which makes the diaries harder to read and impossible to treat as self-help.

— Lisanne
Every book by Etty Hillesum →
05
The other camps

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

Russian · b. 1918 · Novelist and historian · Nobel 1970

Solzhenitsyn was arrested in 1945, while serving as an army officer, for criticising Stalin in letters, and spent eight years in Soviet labour camps. One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich appeared in the journal Novy Mir in 1962 with Khrushchev's approval; The Gulag Archipelago followed in three volumes from 1973. He won the Nobel Prize in 1970, was expelled from the Soviet Union in 1974 and returned to Russia in 1994. His late two-volume history of Jews in Russia, Two Hundred Years Together, was criticised by many as antisemitic.

The same question Frankl asks, put in a different system of camps: what keeps a prisoner human? One Day answers it the way Frankl does, in small things — a bowl of soup eaten slowly, a wall laid well — and without ever stating a theory. It is fiction drawn from experience rather than memoir, and it reads in an evening.

— Lisanne
Every book by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn →
06
How it was done

Hannah Arendt

German-American · b. 1906 · Political philosopher

Arendt was a German Jewish philosopher who fled Germany after a brief arrest by the Gestapo, escaped an internment camp in southern France and reached the United States in 1941. The Origins of Totalitarianism (1951) was her first book in English. She covered the 1961 trial of Adolf Eichmann for The New Yorker, and the resulting book, with its phrase “the banality of evil” and its criticism of the wartime Jewish councils, caused a lasting controversy.

The view from outside the camp. Frankl describes what the system did to one mind; Arendt asks how a modern state built that system and what kind of man ran its timetables. Read Eichmann in Jerusalem knowing it is argued and contested — next to Frankl, it supplies the structure behind the testimony.

— Lisanne

Every book by Hannah Arendt →

07
Existential therapy, told as stories

Irvin Yalom

American · b. 1931 · Psychiatrist

Yalom was born in Washington, DC, in 1931 to Russian-Jewish immigrants and taught psychiatry at Stanford from 1962. Existential Psychotherapy (1980) is his textbook, organised around death, freedom, isolation and meaninglessness; Love's Executioner (1989) is a collection of ten case stories, and When Nietzsche Wept (1992) a novel. Staring at the Sun (2008) is about the fear of death.

The most readable heir to the tradition Frankl helped found. Yalom puts meaning alongside death, freedom and isolation as the questions that bring people into therapy, and writes his cases as stories, with his own failures on the page. There is no camp here, only ordinary lives — which is exactly where most readers try to apply Frankl. Start with Love's Executioner.

— Lisanne

Every book by Irvin Yalom →

08
Anxiety, freedom and courage

Rollo May

American · b. 1909 · Psychologist

May was born in Ohio in 1909 and trained at Union Theological Seminary, where the theologian Paul Tillich became a close friend and lasting influence. Eighteen months in a tuberculosis sanatorium in the 1940s shaped his view that anxiety is part of growth, the subject of The Meaning of Anxiety (1950). Love and Will (1969) became a bestseller and won the Ralph Waldo Emerson Award; The Courage to Create followed in 1975. He died in California in 1994.

With Frankl, one of the main figures of existential psychotherapy, and the one who carried it into American life. May covers the same ground — anxiety, freedom, meaning and the courage to face an uncertain existence — from the consulting room rather than the camp. Man's Search for Himself is the natural companion title, and a gentler way into the same ideas.

— Lisanne

Every book by Rollo May →

09
Meaning against the absurd

Albert Camus

French · b. 1913 · Novelist and essayist · Nobel 1957

Camus was born in French Algeria and made his name with The Stranger and The Myth of Sisyphus, both published in 1942, which set out his idea of the absurd: the gap between our need for meaning and a world that offers none. The Plague (1947), about a town under quarantine, is often read as an allegory of the occupation. He won the Nobel Prize in 1957 and died in a car accident in 1960.

Frankl's great contemporary on the same question, answered without God or therapy. Where Frankl says meaning is always there to be found, Camus says the world offers none and we must live lucidly anyway — and yet The Plague's doctor, who simply keeps working, is very close to Frankl's idea of responsibility. Reading both sharpens each.

— Lisanne

Every book by Albert Camus →

10
The oldest version of the argument

Marcus Aurelius

Roman · b. 121 · Philosopher and emperor

Marcus Aurelius was Roman emperor from 161 to 180 and spent much of his reign on campaign along the Danube. The Meditations, twelve books of private notes written in Greek and addressed to himself, were never meant for publication. They draw heavily on the Stoic teacher Epictetus, whom Marcus quotes and admires.

Frankl was not a Stoic, but his central claim — that when everything external is taken, the attitude you take to it is still yours — is the idea Marcus repeats most often. Marcus states it from absolute power; Frankl from the bottom of the world. The Meditations are the book most Frankl readers turn to when they want the idea as a daily practice.

— Lisanne

Every book by Marcus Aurelius →

Where to start if you loved Viktor Frankl

If you want the book his ideas made possible, read Edith Eger.

The Choice: a survivor who became a therapist, with Frankl as her guide.

If you want the camp without consolation, read Primo Levi.

If This Is a Man, then The Drowned and the Saved.

If you want inner freedom in its rawest form, read Etty Hillesum.

An Interrupted Life: the Amsterdam diaries, 1941–1943.

If you want logotherapy's ideas in ordinary lives, read Irvin Yalom.

Love's Executioner: ten cases, told as stories.

Frequently asked questions about authors like Viktor Frankl

Who should I read if I love Viktor Frankl?

Edith Eger first: an Auschwitz survivor who became a psychologist, and whose recovery began with Man's Search for Meaning. For Holocaust testimony, read Primo Levi, Elie Wiesel and Etty Hillesum. For the existential psychotherapy Frankl helped found, read Irvin Yalom and Rollo May. For the philosophy behind the idea of inner freedom, read Albert Camus and Marcus Aurelius.

What books are like Man's Search for Meaning?

Edith Eger's The Choice (2017) is the nearest: a survivor and psychologist on surviving the camps and what it taught her. Primo Levi's If This Is a Man (1947) and Elie Wiesel's Night are the essential camp memoirs. Etty Hillesum's diaries, An Interrupted Life, and Marcus Aurelius's Meditations share Frankl's idea of an inner freedom that circumstances cannot take away.

What is logotherapy?

Logotherapy is the school of psychotherapy Frankl founded, built on the idea that the search for meaning, rather than pleasure or power, is the central human motivation. He was using the term by 1926, long before the war, and the second half of Man's Search for Meaning gives a short outline of it. Its techniques include paradoxical intention and dereflection.

Is Man's Search for Meaning similar to Night?

Both are Auschwitz memoirs by Jewish survivors, but they do different things. Frankl moves from the camp toward a psychological theory of meaning; Elie Wiesel's Night stays inside the loss of faith and family and refuses to draw a lesson from it. Many readers find the two work best read together.

Is Frankl's account of Auschwitz accurate?

Frankl was deported to Theresienstadt in 1942 and to Auschwitz in 1944, then held at Kaufering and Türkheim, subcamps of Dachau, until liberation in April 1945. The historian Timothy Pytell has argued that Frankl spent only a few days at Auschwitz, as an unregistered transit prisoner, and that the book obscures this; the scholar Lawrence Langer has also criticised its framing of the camps. The Viktor Frankl Institute disputes Pytell's reading.

Did Edith Eger know Viktor Frankl?

Yes. Reading Man's Search for Meaning was an important step in Eger's recovery, and Frankl became a close friend and mentor who shaped her work as a psychologist. Her own memoir, The Choice, is the book most often read next.

Footnotes

  1. Viktor Emil Frankl: biography — Viktor Frankl Institut
  2. Viktor Frankl — Wikipedia
  3. Man's Search for Meaning — Wikipedia
  4. Rollo May — Wikipedia
  5. Irvin D. Yalom — Wikipedia
  6. Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn — New World Encyclopedia

List last reviewed 15 October 2026.

Written by Lisanne Swart, who has curated reading lists and author guides at lisanneswart.com since 2021. Every comparison here is a judgement about method and subject, not an algorithmic match. See more on her personal bookshelf.

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