Description
Your exam will consist of 5 questions, each of which you can answer in about a 2-3 paragraph-length response (250-350 words per question if you’re efficient; you’re allowed to go a bit longer on a couple question if you wish). Make sure that you quote from or refer to the Diary and other sources (Diary: page number AND dates, using the edition that we used in class; articles that we discussed together in class: page number; videos: title) to support the arguments you are making, and do evaluate the trustworthiness of the source, as needed. Do not state just your opinion—“show your work” by quoting from or referring to the resources we’ve discussed in the course of the semester. In each item, present a clear, well-reasoned answer, and offer arguments and evidence in support of your answer.
Expectations for all responses:
— You must use our class materials, including our textbook) in your answers.Failure to do so will lead to a failing grade. The point of this final exercise is to assess what you learned in this class. (Quotations from the Diary: Page number from our textbook AND date of diary entry!) The textbook is called Anne Frank, the Collected Works. London: Bloomsbury Continuum, 2019
–the position taken and the writing of the response is coherent
— the position taken and the writing of the response is well-argued (Thesis clearly articulated, supported by relevant and reliable evidence (think “show, don’t just tell”)
— facts are accurate (and relevant to the point you’re making!)
–the response offers appropriate evidence, using class materials
–the evidence used is appropriately documented
Each answer should be 250-350 words (more if needed)
At the end of the semester, we watched George Stevens’ production of the screenplay by Frances Goodrich and Albert Hackett, based on their (theatre) play. Describe how the play presents the material found in Anne Frank’s Diary of a Young Girl in this other medium. How does this film (or a play) reframe the material to present the narrative, and/or to communicate the messages? Mention some strengths and weaknesses. If you can cite examples from scenes in the film, please do so. Feel free to focus on one or two scenes, so you can be specific in your descriptions. In your view, do Meyer Levin’s arguments about representation in the Goodrich/Hackett play hold true? Please explain, with examples.
Anne Frank as a writer, literary analysis: select a passage from the Diaries that demonstrates Anne’s skill as a writer—Choose your own; do not recycle one that we discussed in class on a Thursday. Comment on the content of your selection and analyze in some detail how it demonstrates Anne’s skill. Tip: Don’t just quote from AF and then state that it is good writing—show, don’t just tell, how the passage communicates effectively. Consider commenting on any of the following that apply to the passage you chose: 1. how the passage fits into the arc of the story. 2. how she builds her paragraphs or entries. 3. how her choice of vocabulary supports her message and the effectiveness of her narrative.
A. Consider a passage from: The Diary of Anne Frank: The Revised Critical Edition (Arnold J. Pomerans (Translator), B. M. Mooyaart-Doubleday (Translator), Susan Massotty (Translator), Harry Paape (Introduction), Gerrold van der Stroom (Introduction), David Barnouw (Introduction), H. J. J. Hardy (Collaborator); Doubleday; Revised & updated edition (—pdf #1 supplied here): Anne Frank Quotations #1 for final exam 2023.pdf Analyze the text: 1) explain the context of the passage, 2) discuss its meaning, and 3) explain what versions A, B and C are, then comment in detail on the differences between version A and B (and C, if relevant). What do these differences mean, and why do they matter to the reader? Be specific and use all your knowledge about the publication history of the Diaries.
Why does literature matter, and what can reading a literary text thoughtfully accomplish? The Diary of Anne Frank (often the ‘expurgated’ version, and sometimes just an excerpt) is often used to teach children and young people about the Holocaust/Shoah. What value is there for adults? Does it help communicate meaningfully what happened, and why it matters? List three reasons why it does, and at least one limitation. Then explain your reason for mentioning each in some detail. (You’re welcome to refer to your own experience of reading the definitive version of the Diary this semester). In doing so, refer to at least one of the scholars or historical figures whose work/arguments we’ve discussed this semester.
Reflect on the samples of scholarly articles (such as by Brenner, Langer, DaCosta, Ozick, Prose) that we read this semester:What role can scholarship play in helping us understand the meaning and place of Anne Frank’s work in history? Mention two insights that you gathered from these readings (specify and explain), and how they enriched your reading.
You can use this website https://libgen.rs/ to download the version of the diary: Anne Frank, the Collected Works.London: Bloomsbury Continuum, 2019
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Meyer Levin’s Anne Frank obsession | Broad Street Review
https://www.broadstreetreview.com/editors-corner/meyer_levin…
BroadStreetReview.com
M e y e r L e v i n ‘ s A n n e F ra n k o b s e s s i o n
Who owns Anne Frank?
Dan Rottenberg
March 07, 2011 in Editor’s Corner
Suppose you had a vision
that you were forbidden to
express? Or suppose the
law prevented you from
observing the vision of an
artist you admire and
respect?
Rinne Groff’s Compulsion,
currently at the Public
Theater in New York,
concerns the author Meyer
Levin’s long struggle to
stage his own idiosyncratic
vision of The Diary of Anne
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Frank. To Carol Rocamora,
writing last week in BSR,
Groff’s play “serves as a
sobering reminder of the
fine line between
dedication and fanatical
obsession (in the theater as
well as in politics and
history).”
M a n d y Pa t i n k i n a s L e v i n , w i t h t h e ‘ g h o s t ‘ o f A n n e F r a n k : A h u m a n o r a
s y mb ol?
But to my mind, there’s a
larger point to Levin’s
travails. The aggrieved
party in this case isn’t merely Meyer Levin but anyone who’s curious to sample Levin’s vision of the
Holocaust heroine Anne Frank, as opposed to the “authorized” version. For the last 30 years of his
life, Levin was like a mother carrying an unborn child— and an unborn child diminishes us all, for
who knows what that child might have contributed to the world?
No Jewish market?
Levin (1905-1981) is best remembered today as a moderately successful novelist, especially for
Compulsion, his 1956 novelization of the Leopold-Loeb murder case of 1924. As a teenager, Levin
resolved to become a great American writer; but the subject closest to his heart and mind— the
tensions of American Jewish life— held little interest to book and magazine publishers of the
1920s and ’30s (hard as that may be to imagine today, when Jews buy 25% of all hard-cover books
published in the U.S.).
“It was felt that non-Jewish readers would not care to identify with Jewish fictional characters,”
Levin recalled in 1970, “and that even Jewish readers preferred to identify with “‘real Americans’ in
fiction.”
As a correspondent in Europe during World War II, Levin was among the first Americans to see the
dead bodies and walking skeletons at Buchenwald, Dachau, Bergen-Belsen and other Nazi
concentration camps. In his horror Levin believed he had found his mission in life: to bear witness
to what he called “the greatest systematic mass murder in the history of mankind.”
Yet despite the steady stream of dispatches he sent back to America, Levin later confessed, “From
the beginning I realized I would never be able to write the story of the Jews of Europe. This tragic
epic cannot be written by a stranger to the experience.” Some day, he hoped, “a teller would arise”
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Meyer Levin’s Anne Frank obsession | Broad Street Review
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from amongst the victims.
The diary’s rejection
When Levin read a French translation of The Diary of Anne Frank in 1950, he concluded that here
was the “teller” he was searching for. At that time, the Dutch text of the diary had been translated
into French and German, but in England and America it had been rejected by 15 publishers, largely
in the belief that no market existed for “special-interest war books.” Thus Levin seized upon the
Diary as a means of performing a mitzvah and promoting his own flagging literary career
simultaneously.
Levin wrote to Otto Frank, Anne’s surviving father and the custodian of the book, offering to
translate the Diary into English and to promote it in the U.S. He also offered to adapt the Diary for
stage or screen— an idea that hadn’t occurred to Frank.
In the next months, Levin wrote scores of magazine articles about the Diary as well as letters to
agents, producers and directors. When his lobbying finally helped attract a publisher, Levin—
without divulging his personal interest in the work— wrote a rapturous front-page review in the
New York Times Book Review that transformed the Diary into a nationwide sensation virtually
overnight.
The blander gentile version
But Levin’s draft of a stage adaptation was subsequently rejected by Broadway producers, with Otto
Frank’s tacit consent. The successful play that opened on Broadway in 1955 and enjoys constant
revivals even today was written by the gentile husband-and-wife team of Frances Goodrich and
Albert Hackett.
Levin took this rejection personally at two levels. It was not merely that he felt cheated out of his
rightful due by a powerful cabal consisting of producers, law firms, publishers and Otto Frank
himself; it was also that his gritty and unabashedly Jewish vision of Anne Frank had been elbowed
to the sidelines by a blander and more commercially palatable Anne. In his fury he came to believe
that his play had been “killed by the same arbitrary disregard that brought an end to Anne and six
million others.”
In 1952 Levin filed a lawsuit that wasn’t legally settled until 1959 and, indeed, was never morally
settled as far as Levin was concerned: Although Levin at that point signed away any rights to the
Diary or to produce his play, he continued to revisit the dispute in a novel (The Fanatic, 1964), in a
memoir (The Obsession, 1973), and by encouraging bootleg performances of his stage version of The
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Diary of Anne Frank.
Conflicting visions
The story of this obsession embraces the full complexity of the human creative process. Levin’s
problem with his perceived tormentors (unlike Anne Frank’s problem with Hitler) was not a matter
of villains and victims; it was a conflict among fallible but well-intentioned humans holding valid
but different approaches to a literary work.
To Levin, one generation removed from the shtetl, Anne Frank symbolized the six million innocent
Jews who were slaughtered solely because they were Jewish; her diary was a distinctly Jewish
document; and only a Jewish writer could do justice to her persecution. To Otto Frank, a middleclass German Jew thoroughly assimilated into gentile society (notwithstanding his persecution by
Hitler), Anne’s story was not specifically Jewish but universal, and for that reason he preferred the
perspective of a gentile playwright. To the sophisticated but also commercially savvy Garson Kanin,
who directed the Broadway production, the Diary was not a depressing book about Jewish
persecution but “an exalting comment on the human spirit.”
These disagreements should surprise or disturb no one: Any genuine work of art, by definition, will
inspire multiple interpretations. The problem— the obsession— arose from the fact that Levin the
artist was legally precluded— first by copyright laws and later by the terms of his settlement—
from expressing and staging a vision that had gripped his psyche.
“‘Like suing Joan of Arc’
Levin’s 1952 stage adaptation was in fact more honest and more faithful to Anne Frank’s book than
the sanitized Goodrich-Hackett version, and more successful in conveying the political and religious
context of her predicament. By contrast, the feel-good script produced three years later by Goodrich
and Hackett was hokey and watered down, but it did reach a huge audience. Beyond that, the
Goodrich-Hackett play caused audiences the world over (and especially in Germany) to accept the
reality of the Holocaust, thereby creating a market for the abundance of Holocaust literature that
has flourished ever since.
Of course Levin was wacky to equate his suffering with Anne Frank’s; and filing a lawsuit against
Anne Frank’s father, as Levin’s friend Harry Golden told him, was a public relations blunder
equivalent to suing Joan of Arc’s father. But Otto Frank and the play’s Broadway producers were
equally myopic to treat Anne’s diary as a mere commercial property. Levin’s lawsuit was no less
ludicrous than his adversaries’ belief that they could or should legally prevent Levin from
expressing his vision of a cultural icon.
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A symbol or a human?
Yet in another sense Otto Frank and Garson Kanin were right to reject Levin’s “special pleading”
(Kanin’s phrase) in behalf of Jews and to universalize Anne Frank’s story to embrace all human
suffering. How, after all, can we justify the survival of Judaism (or any philosophy or civilization)
unless it offers something meaningful to the world beyond its immediate constituency?
Levin was also mistaken to perceive Anne Frank as a symbol of Holocaust victims. She wasn’t a
symbol; she was a unique human being, just like the six million other victims. Yet in the hands of
Levin and subsequently of the Hacketts and many other writers, her words and ideas did indeed
force the world to confront first the Holocaust, then the meaning of contemporary Jewish identity
and ultimately the aspirations and neuroses of human civilization.
The ultimate issue here is not whose interpretation of Anne Frank was correct. To quote a character
in Inherit the Wind— another 1950s Broadway play that pasteurized a historical event (the Scopes
trial) for mass consumption— “Ideas are like babies; they have to be born.” Meyer Levin’s allotted
three-score-and-ten expired in a paranoiac funk in 1981, but as Groff’s play amply testifies, the
labors of this quintessentially unreasonable man are still bearing fruit beyond, I suspect, his wildest
imaginings.♦
To read responses, click here.
♦
More in Editor’s Corner
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The Misuse of Anne Frank’s Diary | The New Yorker
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A Critic at Large October 6, 1997 Issue
Who Owns Anne Frank?
The diary has been distorted by even her greatest champions. Would history have been better served if it had
been destroyed?
By Cynthia Ozick
September 29, 1997
To believe that the diary was “a song to life” is to stew in an ugly innocence. Photograph from UPI / Corbis-Bettmann
I
f Anne Frank had not perished in the criminal malevolence of Bergen-Belsen early in 1945, she would have marked her sixtyeighth birthday last June. And even if she had not kept the extraordinary diary through which we know her it is likely that we
would number her among the famous of this century—though perhaps not so dramatically as we do now. She was born to be a
writer. At thirteen, she felt her power; at fifteen, she was in command of it. It is easy to imagine—had she been allowed to live—a
long row of novels and essays spilling from her fluent and ripening pen. We can be certain (as certain as one can be of anything
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hypothetical) that her mature prose would today be noted for its wit and acuity, and almost as certain that the trajectory of her work
would be closer to that of Nadine Gordimer, say, than to that of Francoise Sagan. As an international literary presence, she would
be thick rather than thin. “I want to go on living even after my death!” she exclaimed in the spring of 1944.
This was more than an exaggerated adolescent flourish. She had already intuited what greatness in literature might mean, and she
clearly sensed the force of what lay under her hand in the pages of her diary: a conscious literary record of frightened lives in daily
peril; an explosive document aimed directly at the future. In her last months, she was assiduously polishing phrases and editing
passages with an eye to postwar publication. Het Achterhuis, as she called her manuscript, in Dutch—“the house behind,” often
translated as “the secret annex”—was hardly intended to be Anne Frank’s last word; it was conceived as the forerunner work of a
professional woman of letters.
Yet any projection of Anne Frank as a contemporary figure is an unholy speculation: it tampers with history, with reality, with
deadly truth. “When I write,” she confided, “I can shake off all my cares. My sorrow disappears, my spirits are revived!” But she
could not shake off her capture and annihilation, and there are no diary entries to register and memorialize the snuffing of her
spirit. Anne Frank was discovered, seized, and deported; she and her mother and sister and millions of others were extinguished in
a program calculated to assure the cruellest and most demonically inventive human degradation. The atrocities she endured were
ruthlessly and purposefully devised, from indexing by tattoo through systematic starvation to factory-efficient murder. She was
designated to be erased from the living, to leave no grave, no sign, no physical trace of any kind. Her fault—her crime—was having
been born a Jew, and as such she was classified among those who had no right to exist: not as a subject people, not as an inferior
breed, not even as usable slaves. The military and civilian apparatus of an entire society was organized to obliterate her as a
contaminant, in the way of a noxious and repellent insect. Zyklon B, the lethal fumigant poured into the gas chambers, was,
pointedly, a roach poison.
Anne Frank escaped gassing. One month before liberation, not yet sixteen, she died of typhus fever, an acute infectious disease
carried by lice. The precise date of her death has never been determined. She and her sister, Margot, were among three thousand six
hundred and fifty-nine women transported by cattle car from Auschwitz to the merciless conditions of Bergen-Belsen, a barren
tract of mud. In a cold, wet autumn, they suffered through nights on flooded straw in overcrowded tents, without light, surrounded
by latrine ditches, until a violent hailstorm tore away what had passed for shelter. Weakened by brutality, chaos, and hunger, fifty
thousand men and women—insufficiently clothed, tormented by lice—succumbed, many to the typhus epidemic.
Anne Frank’s final diary entry, written on August 1, 1944, ends introspectively—a meditation on a struggle for moral transcendence
set down in a mood of wistful gloom. It speaks of “turning my heart inside out, the bad part on the outside and the good part on
the inside,” and of “trying to find a way to become what I’d like to be and what I could be if . . . if only there were no other people
in the world.” Those curiously self-subduing ellipses are the diarist’s own; they are more than merely a literary effect—they signify a
child’s muffled bleat against confinement, the last whimper of a prisoner in a cage. Her circumscribed world had a population of
eleven—the three Dutch protectors who came and went, supplying the necessities of life, and the eight in hiding: the van Daans,
their son Peter, Albert Dussel, and the four Franks. Five months earlier, on May 26, 1944, she had railed against the stress of living
invisibly—a tension never relieved, she asserted, “not once in the two years we’ve been here. How much longer will this increasingly
oppressive, unbearable weight press down on us?” And, several paragraphs on, “What will we do if we’re ever . . . no, I mustn’t write
that down. But the question won’t let itself be pushed to the back of my mind today; on the contrary, all the fear I’ve ever felt is
looming before me in all its horror. . . . I’ve asked myself again and again whether it wouldn’t have been better if we hadn’t gone into
hiding, if we were dead now and didn’t have to go through this misery. . . . Let something happen soon. . . . Nothing can be more
crushing than this anxiety. Let the end come, however cruel.” And on April 11, 1944; “We are Jews in chains.”
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The building that Anne Frank considered her cage. Photograph from The Granger Collection, N.Y.
The diary is not a genial document, despite its author’s often vividly satiric exposure of what she shrewdly saw as “the comical side
of life in hiding.” Its reputation for uplift is, to say it plainly, nonsensical. Anne Frank’s written narrative, moreover, is not the story
of Anne Frank, and never has been. That the diary is miraculous, a self-aware work of youthful genius, is not in question. Variety of
pace and tone, insightful humor, insupportable suspense, adolescent love pangs and disappointments, sexual curiosity, moments of
terror, moments of elation, flights of idealism and prayer and psychological acumen—all these elements of mind and feeling and
skill brilliantly enliven its pages. There is, besides, a startlingly precocious comprehension of the progress of the war on all fronts.
The survival of the little group in hiding is crucially linked to the timing of the Allied invasion. Overhead the bombers, roaring to
their destinations, make the house quake; sometimes the bombs fall terrifyingly close. All in all, the diary is a chronicle of
trepidation, turmoil, alarm. Even its report of quieter periods of reading and study express the hush of imprisonment. Meals are
boiled lettuce and rotted potatoes; flushing the single toilet is forbidden for ten hours at a time. There is shooting at night. Betrayal
and arrest always threaten. Anxiety and immobility rule. It is a story of fear.
But the diary in itself, richly crammed though it is with incident and passion, cannot count as Anne Frank’s story. A story may not
be said to be a story if the end is missing. And because the end is missing, the story of Anne Frank in the fifty years since “The
Diary of a Young Girl” was first published has been bowdlerized, distorted, transmuted, traduced, reduced; it has been infantilized,
Americanized, homogenized, sentimentalized; falsified, kitschified, and, in fact, blatantly and arrogantly denied. Among the
falsifiers have been dramatists and directors, translators and litigators, Anne Frank’s own father, and even—or especially—the
public, both readers and theatregoers, all over the world. A deeply truth-telling work has been turned into an instrument of partial
truth, surrogate truth, or anti-truth. The pure has been made impure—sometimes in the name of the reverse. Almost every hand
that has approached the diary with the well-meaning intention of publicizing it has contributed to the subversion of history.
The diary is taken to be a Holocaust document; that is overridingly what it is not. Nearly every edition—and there have been
innumerable editions—is emblazoned with words like “a song to life” or “a poignant delight in the infinite human spirit.” Such
characterizations rise up in the bitter perfume of mockery. A song to life? The diary is incomplete, truncated, broken off—or,
rather, it is completed by Westerbork (the hellish transit camp in Holland from which Dutch Jews were deported), and by
Auschwitz, and by the fatal winds of Bergen-Belsen. It is here, and not in the “secret annex,” that the crimes we have come to call
the Holocaust were enacted. Our entry into those crimes begins with columns of numbers: the meticulous lists of deportations, in
handsome bookkeepers’ handwriting, starkly set down in German “transport books.” From these columns—headed, like goods for
export, “Ausgangs-Transporte nach dem Osten” (outgoing shipments to the east)—it is possible to learn that Anne Frank and the
others were moved to Auschwitz on the night of September 6, 1944, in a collection of a thousand and nineteen Stücke (or “pieces,”
another commodities term). That same night, five hundred and forty-nine persons were gassed, including one from the Frank
group (the father of Peter van Daan) and every child under fifteen. Anne, at fifteen, and seventeen-year-old Margot were spared,
apparently for labor. The end of October, from the twentieth to the twenty-eighth, saw the gassing of more than six thousand
human beings within two hours of their arrival, including a thousand boys eighteen and under. In December, two thousand and
ninety-three female prisoners perished, from starvation and exhaustion, in the women’s camp; early in January, Edith Frank expired.
But Soviet forces were hurtling toward Auschwitz, and in November the order went out to conceal all evidences of gassing and to
blow up the crematoria. Tens of thousands of inmates, debilitated and already near extinction, were driven out in bitter cold on
death marches. Many were shot. In an evacuation that occurred either on October 28th or on November 2nd, Anne and Margot
were dispatched to Bergen-Belsen. Margot was the first to succumb. A survivor recalled that she fell dead to the ground from the
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wooden slab on which she lay, eaten by lice, and that Anne, heartbroken and skeletal, naked under a bit of rag, died a day or two
later.
To come to the diary without having earlier assimilated Elie Wiesel’s “Night” and Primo Levi’s “The Drowned and the Saved” (to
mention two witnesses only), or the columns of figures in the transport books, is to allow oneself to stew in an implausible and ugly
innocence. The litany of blurbs—“a lasting testament to the indestructible nobility of the human spirit,” “an everlasting source of
courage and inspiration”—is no more substantial than any other display of self-delusion. The success—the triumph—of BergenBelsen was precisely that it blotted out the possibility of courage, that it proved to be a lasting testament to the human spirit’s easy
destructibility. “Hier ist kein Warum,” a guard at Auschwitz warned: here there is no “why,” neither question nor answer, only the
dark of unreason. Anne Frank’s story, truthfully told, is unredeemed and unredeemable.
These are notions that are hard to swallow—so they have not been swallowed. There are some, bored beyond toleration and callous
enough to admit it, who are sick of hearing—yet again!—about depredations fifty years gone. “These old events,” one of these
fellows may complain, “can rake you over only so much. If I’m going to be lashed, I might as well save my skin for more recent
troubles in the world.” (I quote from a private letter from a distinguished author.) The more common response respectfully
discharges an obligation to pity: it is dutiful. Or it is sometimes less than dutiful. It is sometimes frivolous, or indifferent, or
presumptuous. But what even the most exemplary sympathies are likely to evade is the implacable recognition that Auschwitz and
Bergen-Belsen, however sacramentally prodded, can never yield light.
T
he vehicle that has most powerfully accomplished this almost universal obtuseness is Anne Frank’s diary. In celebrating Anne
Frank’s years in the secret annex, the nature and meaning of her death has been, in effect, forestalled. The diary’s keen lens is
helplessly opaque to the diarist’s explicit doom—and this opacity, replicated in young readers in particular, has led to shamelessness.
It is the shamelessness of appropriation. Who owns Anne Frank? The children of the world, say the sentimentalists. A case in point
is the astonishing correspondence, published in 1995 under the title “Love, Otto,” between Cara Wilson, a Californian born in
1944, and Otto Frank, the father of Anne Frank. Wilson, then twelve-year-old Cara Weiss, was invited by Twentieth Century Fox
to audition for the part of Anne in a projected film version of the diary. “I didn’t get the part,” the middle-aged Wilson writes, “but
by now I had found a whole new world. Anne Frank’s diary, which I read and reread, spoke to me and my dilemmas, my anxieties,
my secret passions. She felt the way I did. . . .I identified so strongly with this eloquent girl of my own age, that I now think I sort
of became her in my own mind.” And on what similarities does Wilson rest her acute sense of identification with a hunted child in
hiding?
I was miserable being me. . . . I was on the brink of that awful abyss of teenagedom and I, too,
needed someone to talk to. . . . (Ironically, Anne, too, expressed a longing for more attention from
her father.) . . . Dad’s whole life was a series of meetings. At home, he was too tired or too
frustrated to unload on. I had something else in common with Anne. We both had to share with
sisters who were prettier and smarter than we felt we were. . . . Despite the monumental
differences in our situations, to this day I feel that Anne helped me get through the teens with a
sense of inner focus. She spoke for me. She was strong for me. She had so much hope when I was
ready to call it quits.
A sampling of Wilson’s concerns as she matured appears in the interstices of her exchanges with Otto Frank, which, remarkably,
date from 1959 until his death, in 1980. For instance: “The year was 1968—etched in my mind. I can’t ever forget it. Otis Redding
was ‘Sittin’ on the Dock of the Bay’ . . . while we hummed along to ‘Hey Jude’ by the Beatles.” “In 1973-74,” she reports, “I was
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wearing headbands, pukka-shell necklaces, and American Indian anything. Tattoos were a rage”—but enough. Tattoos were the
rage, she neglects to recall, in Auschwitz; and of the Auschwitz survivor who was her patient correspondent for more than two
decades, Wilson remarks, “Well, what choice did the poor man have? Whenever an attack of ‘I-can’t-take-this-any-longer’ would
hit me, I’d put it all into lengthy diatribes to my distant guru, Otto Frank.”
That the designated guru replied, year after year, to embarrassing and shabby effusions like these may open a new pathway into our
generally obscure understanding of the character of Otto Frank. His responses—from Basel, where he had settled with his second
wife—were consistently attentive, formal, kindly. When Wilson gave birth, he sent her a musical toy, and he faithfully offered a
personal word about her excitements as she supplied them: her baby sons, her dance lessons, her husband’s work on commercials,
her freelance writing. But his letters were also political and serious. It is good, he wrote in October, 1970, to take “an active part in
trying to abolish injustices and all sorts of grievances, but we cannot follow your views regarding the Black Panthers.” And in
December, 1973, “As you can imagine, we were highly shocked about the unexpected attack of the Arabs on Israel on Yom Kippur
and are now mourning with all those who lost members of their families.” Presumably he knew something about losing a family.
Wilson, insouciantly sliding past these faraway matters, was otherwise preoccupied, “finding our little guys sooo much fun.”
The unabashed triflings of Cara Wilson—whose “identification” with Anne Frank can be duplicated by the thousand, though she
may be more audacious than most—point to a conundrum. Never mind that the intellectual distance between Wilson and Anne
Frank is immeasurable; not every self-conscious young girl will be a prodigy. Did Otto Frank not comprehend that Cara Wilson
was deaf to everything the loss of his daughter represented? Did he not see, in Wilson’s letters alone, how a denatured approach to
the diary might serve to promote amnesia of what was rapidly turning into history? A protected domestic space, however
threatened and endangered, can, from time to time, mimic ordinary life. The young who are encouraged to embrace the diary
cannot always be expected to feel the difference between the mimicry and the threat. And (like Cara Wilson) most do not. Natalie
Portman, sixteen years old, who will début as Anne Frank in the Broadway revival this December of the famous play based on the
diary—a play that has itself influenced the way the diary is read—concludes from her own reading that “it’s funny, it’s hopeful, and
she’s a happy person.”
Otto Frank, it turns out, is complicit in this shallowly upbeat view. Again and again, in every conceivable context, he had it as his
aim to emphasize “Anne’s idealism,” “Anne’s spirit,” almost never calling attention to how and why that idealism and spirit were
smothered, and unfailingly generalizing the sources of hatred. If the child is father of the man—if childhood shapes future
sensibility—then Otto Frank, despite his sufferings in Auschwitz, may have had less in common with his own daughter than he was
ready to recognize. As the diary gained publication in country after country, its renown accelerating year by year, he spoke not
merely about but for its author—and who, after all, would have a greater right? The surviving father stood in for the dead child,
believing that his words would honestly represent hers. He was scarcely entitled to such certainty: fatherhood does not confer
surrogacy.
Otto Frank’s own childhood, in Frankfurt, Germany, was wholly unclouded. A banker’s son, he lived untrammelled until the rise of
the Nazi regime, when he was already forty-four. At nineteen, in order to acquire training in business, he went to New York with
Nathan Straus, a fellow student and an heir to the Macy’s department-store fortune. During the First World War, Frank was an
officer in the German military, and in 1925 he married Edith Holländer, a manufacturer’s daughter. Margot was born in 1926 and
Anneliese Marie, called Anne, in 1929. His characteristically secular world view belonged to an era of quiet assimilation, or, more
accurately, accommodation (which includes a modicum of deference), when German Jews had become, at least in their own minds,
well integrated into German society. From birth, Otto Frank had breathed the free air of the affluent bourgeoisie.
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Anne’s childhood, by contrast, fell into shadows almost immediately. She was not yet four when the German persecutions of Jews
began, and from then until the anguished close of her days she lived as a refugee and a victim. In 1933, the family fled from
Germany to Holland, where Frank had commercial connections, and where he established a pectin business. By 1940, the Germans
had occupied the Netherlands. In Amsterdam, Jewish children, Anne among them, were thrown out of the public-school system
and made to wear the yellow star. At thirteen, on November 19, 1942, already in hiding, Anne Frank could write:
In the evenings when it’s dark, I often see long lines of good, innocent people accompanied by
crying children, walking on and on, ordered about by a handful of men who bully and beat them
until they nearly drop. No one is spared. The sick, the elderly, children, babies, and pregnant
women—all are marched to their death.
And earlier, on October 9th, after hearing the report of an escape from Westerbork:
Our many Jewish friends and acquaintances are being taken away in droves. The Gestapo is
treating them very roughly and transporting them in cattle cars to Westerbork. . . .The people get
almost nothing to eat, much less to drink, as water is available only one hour a day, and there’s only
one toilet and sink for several thousand people. Men and women sleep in the same room, and
women and children often have their heads shaved. . . . If it’s that bad in Holland, what must it be
like in those faraway and uncivilized places where the Germans are sending them? We assume that
most of them are being murdered. The English radio says they’re being gassed.
Perhaps not even a father is justified in thinking he can distill the “ideas” of this alert and sorrowing child, with scenes such as these
inscribed in her psyche, and with the desolations of Auschwitz and Bergen-Belsen still ahead. His preference was to accentuate
what he called Anne’s “optimistical view on life.” Yet the diary’s most celebrated line (infamously celebrated, one might add)—“I
still believe, in spite of everything, that people are truly good at heart”—has been torn out of its bed of thorns. Two sentences later
(and three weeks before she was seized and shipped to Westerbork), the diarist
