Frederick Franck's 2001 World Citizenship Award Acceptance Speech:
"The Search for What it Means to Be Human"

"I am immensely grateful for this honor, this "World Citizenship Award." I cannot but recall the shock that made me, involuntarily, into a world citizen around the time I entered the first grade. I was born precisely on the border between Holland and Belgium and just a few miles West of the German frontier, where on August 4, 1914, the German armies invaded and World War I started. From our attic window I saw the town of Vise just across the border, already burning fiercely. Our house was shaking by the booming of the German field guns. The barbarous 20th Century had started in earnest.

Holland, this time, could preserve its shaking "neutrality." From my fifth to my ninth year, I sat peering from our neutral grandstand into hell. Day after day, endless files of refugees from burning villages, of wounded and dying soldiers on improvised ambulances, pushcarts and farm wagons, passed our house. A little German biplane with an open cockpit violated our neutral airspace. Right over my head I saw the pilot, all leather and goggles, drop a little egg-shaped bomb on our playground. It did not explode.

It may be at this moment that I began my questioning about what it might mean to be human and what was definitely less than human, the question that has never ceased plaguing me. For hardly had the first great blood-letting ended, when it was followed by riots across the border, by hunger and deflation of the German Mark. The first rumblings of Nazi and Fascist barbarism were soon faintly audible, then became terrifyingly deafening. The European mind seemed infected: even some of my most admired writers showed signs of intoxication with racist cliches. I developed a severe allergy against all physical violence. It became chronic and so I felt the Second World War approaching inexorably. I was called a pessimist, obsessed: "Don't exaggerate! Nobody wants another war!" But I had no doubt and took a boat.

This meaning of being human, the nausea at each explosion of inhumanity, constitutes my true autobiography. So I will not tell stories about how privileged I was to work (1958-1961) on the medical staff of Albert Schweitzer, the man who for sixty hears lived with his motto "Reverence for Life" in practice in his legendary jungle hospital on the Equator. Nor will I explain why I, religiously unaffiliated, had to fly to Robe for Pope John XXIII's Second Vatican Council (1962-1965), which I succeeded to gatecrash to draw all aspects and personalities of this event. Over one hundred of these drawings are now in the collection of the University of Nijmegen in Holland.

Pope John XXIII wrote in his last Encyclical: "God has imprinted on the human heart a Law man's conscience impels him to obey." Having studied for many years and almost daily the writings of Daisetz T. Suzuki on Zen Buddhism, I read Pope John XXIII's "imprinted on the human heart" as equivalent to what Zen refers to as "the Original Face," our specifically human core that differentiates us from the "Naked Ape," the anthropoid.

And so it happened-to my own wonder-that a Protestant doctor, a Catholic pope and a Buddhist sage inspired me to build Pacem in Terris, converting the ruin of an 18th Century watermill in Warwick, New York into a trans-religious sanctuary, a work of art in many media, a tiny oasis of quiet and sanity in a deranged world.

It was at age 85 that I started on my latest book, What Does It Mean to Be Human? Reverence for Life Reaffirmed (St. Martin's Press, 2000), in which almost one hundred people, among them six Nobel Laureates, answer this question each in his own voice, confirming the criteria on which our survival as a Human species depends. Contributors include the Dalai Lama, Archbishop Desmond Tutu, Elie Wiesel, Oscar Arias, Raimon Panikkar, Seyyed Hossein Nasr, Huston Smith, James parks Morton, Robert Aitken, Cornel West, Rustum Roy, Satish Kumar, Daniel Berrigan, harvey Cox, my son Lukas and many others.

Looking back, it is indeed as if my entire life of over ninety years has been no more than an attempt to solve the riddle of what it means to be Human."