Incident At Vichy Quotes & Sayings

There is a scene in Arthur Miller's play Incident at Vichy in which an upper-middle-class professional man appears before the Nazi authority that has occupied his town and shows his credentials: his university degrees, his letters of reference from prominent citizens, and so on. The Nazi asks him, "Is that everything you have?" The man nods. The Nazi throws it all in the wastebasket and tells him: "Good, now you have nothing." The man, whose self-esteem had always depended on the respect of others, is emotionally destroyed. Frankl would have argued that we are never left with nothing as long as we retain the freedom to choose how we will respond. — Viktor E. Frankl

Incident at Vichy, one of my favorite Arthur Miller plays, is a play in which you look at all of the different perspectives of this moral question. And it isn't so easy to decide which position is correct. — David Bezmozgis