Cinematography of the Holocaust

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THE DIARY OF ANNE FRANK D: Stevens (USA, 1959)

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Saving the Child

The "Universalisation" of Anne Frank

by Hanno Loewy


The name and fate of Anne Frank became, in the course of the 1950s - and thus long before the word Holocaust (or the word Shoah), indeed even before the name Auschwitz - a synonym for the crime of which she was one among millions of victims, the National-Socialist annihilation of the Jews and Judaism. The adaptation of her diary for the stage and the screen, and above all the accompanying phenomena linked to the adaptations, were occasionally ridiculed in Germany as American trivialisation provoking friendly condescension among educated German spectators. Simultaneously, however, it was precisely the reduction of the dimension of the horror to the personalised world of family experience, with which the once murdered and now resuscitated child invited her readers to identify, which was welcomed with such enthusiasm in Germany. This ambivalent stance is more than familiar to us from the German reception of more recent, indeed very recent media events.
The fulminant circulation, the almost euphoric comprehension of this text in Germany, may have had much to do with this detour across the surface of the earth. The translation of Anne Frank's experiences into a frame of interpretation understood to be "universal" appears effectively to be the key to the effect it had in Germany. Which brings me directly to my first hypothesis:

The Americanisation of Anne Frank's diary, so accurately described by Lawrence Langer in his essay "The Americanisation of the Holocaust on Stage and Screen" [1], was, seen from another vantage point closer to home, in fact a Germanisation by other means. Americanisation signifies, approximately translated, wish-fulfilment; and in this case, the authorisation of a manipulation for which one was reluctant to assume responsibility, but which brought to light in the material at hand exactly what the public wished to find there. And all this despite the lurking sentiment of unease accompanying the experience, such as one might feel when committing an improper act.
Broadway and Hollywood are, to speak polemically, for the German reception of Anne Frank's diary, something like NATO for the young Federal Republic. And this is to be taken more literally than might initially appear.

In contrast, it has been only in the USA (or more accurately, in English-speaking circles) that a critical discussion of the diary and of its publishing- and reception-history took place; and ('naturally', one almost wishes to add) it was primarily Jewish authors who participated in the debate. As representative participants one could name Lawrence Langer, Alvin H. Rosenfeld, Bruno Bettelheim, Hannah Arendt, Sander Gilman, James Young, George Steiner [2] - and in his own way, Philip Roth, who has Anne Frank come back to life in his satirical novel The Ghost Writer [3], as the young mistress of an elderly writer. This Anne Frank believes herself to be a survivor of the Holocaust, and obsessed by this conviction, watches as she herself becomes stylised as an icon of the Holocaust, knowing full well that she could never become as successful in life as in death.

It is not Anne Frank's death, much less the circumstances of her starvation in Bergen-Belsen which is responsible for the success of her diary. It is much more the fact that as one who has historically disappeared, has been violently obliterated, she cannot hinder her own ongoing and idealised ressurrection. Thus the New York Post could write, after the premiere of the play The Diary of Anne Frank, by Francis Goodrich and Albert Hackett, on 8 October 1955, "[the play] brought about the reincarnation of Anne Frank - as though she'd never been dead." [4]
This judgement, read together with similar critical evaluations, proves to be more than mere conventional homage to a theatrical raising-back-to-life. Walter Kerr wrote on 23 October 1955 in the Herald Tribune: "Anne is not going to her death; she is going to leave a dent on life, and let death take what's left." [5] And Garson Kanin, who was responsible for the first performance of the play at the Cort Theatre in New York, wrote as late as 1979: "Anne lives on. She remains for us ever a shining star, a radiant presence who, during her time of terror and humiliation and imprisonment, was able to find it within herself to write in her immortal diary, 'in spite of everything I still believe that people are good at heart'." [6]
On 2 October 1955, only a few days before the premiere, he had pithily summed up his attitude for the Herald Tribune: "Looking back, Anne Frank's death doesn't seem to me a wasteful death, because she left us a legacy that has meaning and value to us..." [7]
She did not die in vain, she died for us, leaving behind a message addressed to us.

The "message of Anne Frank" has become a standard topos.
Moreover, the Diary of Anne Frank has led to the creation of a globally active institution, the Anne Frank Foundations in Amsterdam and Basel, which administrate the income from the various editions of her diary in more than 55 languages, whose reprints are hardly worth counting as they multiply as rapidly as the population of the globe.
The message of Anne Frank, or at any rate, what has been made into her message, is definitively equated with the closing words of the stage-play whose history I will examine in more detail in what follows: "In spite of everything, I still believe that people are really good at heart."

Anne Frank's "message" encompassed simultaneously, at least in the opinion of her father Otto Frank, the only member of the family to survive Nazi extermination, nothing less than "international cooperation, mutual understanding, tolerance, modern upbringing, youth problems, modern art, the race-question and the fight against illiteracy." [8]
The small "Anne Frank House" in Amsterdam is visited by more than half a million people a year (about the same number as the Memorial in Auschwitz), there are streets, schools, squares, competitions, literary prizes and international travelling exhibitions named after or devoted to Anne Frank, and the Anne Frank Foundation issues each year a brightly illustrated "Anne Frank Newspaper", in which people report how, in South Africa and Sarajevo, Australia or Brooklyn, Anne Frank apparently rallies the struggle against racism and nationalism, oppression and poverty, violence and ignorance. At the same time, the name "Anne Frank" must constantly be protected from plagiarism or misuse, similarly to any other trade-mark, for instance when a textile manufacturer in China puts T-shirts on the world market carrying the label "Anne Frank".

To ask, pedantically, to what extent this form of collective memory actually has anything to do with Anne Frank's real experience and the text of her diary, indeed, with the questions that personally preoccupied her, may seem, in view of the quantifiable "success" of her moral commercialisation, almost improper. Whether the universalism that Anne Frank has genuinely achieved through her diary corresponds to the superficial universalisation of Jewish suffering, or rather with the precise form of power relations seeking to define Jewish identity from outside and to extinguish it once and for all - this question cannot be answered here.

What was, then, Anne Frank's message, what did she write about in her diary, what did she suffer, what did she hope for, what did she believe in?

Not only the play and the film, but the diary as well, devoured by several generations of readers, was a delicately purged corpus.
Only in 1986 in the Netherlands, and in 1988 in German translation, did the "complete" Diary of Anne Frank, encompassing also the various versions left by Anne herself of some diary entries, appear; already in 1944 Anne Frank had actually begun to rework her diary for possible subsequent publication. But not even this voluminous annotated genetic edition [9], now also available in German as a new, expanded paperback edition, is completely free of censorship. Even in the critical edition, occasional passages have been cut, with explanatory references to the wishes of the Frank family, and to the "incorrect" or "unfriendly" picture Anne gave of her parents.

Upon returning to Amsterdam from Auschwitz in Autumn 1945, Otto Frank received from Miep Gies (one of the group of Dutch friends and helpers who assisted in hiding the Franks) the diary kept by his daughter Anne, found in the "Secret Annexe" after the family's arrest. Reading the diary must have been unspeakably excruciating for him, reminding him not only of the loss of his two daughter, his wife and the other persons hidden in the refuge at the back of the house: Anne Frank had entrusted to her diary her struggles with the family, her fight for independence and her discovery of her own personality. It contained the story of an adolescence, in which, initially, the relationship with the mother deteriorated to the point of mutual animosity and the father was set up as an idealised and contrasting instance of understanding - until ultimately this trustful relationship was also lost. For at this point a lad of the same age, or perhaps one should say a young man, entered the protagonist's relational world; through the relationship with him, Anne was able to distance herself from the "adult's world".
The threat from outside and life in the "Secret Annexe", the impossibility of freely chosen relationships, the constant fear of being discovered or of endangering one's own life and that of all the others through a false move, and lastly the endless hours of each day, hours in which no noise could be made, in which there was time to write, all these factors lay like a burning-glass upon experiences of the young girl growing to womanhood. Anne Frank simultaneously held a mirror up to her self, with a mix of childish narcissism and merciless self-scrutiny which justly raises her diary above all other comparable texts.
Her theme is not the Holocaust, but rather her struggle for her own selfhood in a world in which parents continually betrayed the very moral codes which they preached - in the larger world, but no less so in the "Secret Annexe". Her theme is that of a gifted child who sees her youthful ideals betrayed by the very persons who represent for her the world of morals, of values and rules.
Otto Frank decided, despite or perhaps because of his probable feelings of guilt towards his daughter - a daughter whom he had not been able to save, and whose inner landscape was now abruptly opened up to him - Otto Frank decided, within a surprisingly short space of time to publish Anne's diary, opting thus for attack as the best means of defence, as it were. The entries in Anne's diary where she spoke of her literary ambitions, of her hopes for the time after the war, or indeed of the efficacy of her literary work after her death, may have appeared to the father to possess the force of moral imperative.
Otto Frank undertook significant cuts to the diary. In 1947 the Diary appeared in Dutch, the language in which Anne Frank had composed it. In 1950 the Diary was published in French; and in German translation by Anneliese Schütz, with the publisher Lambert Schneider. The total print-run of 4 500 copies was modest but not pitiful.
Otto Frank's revisions to his daughter's diary initially appeared to concern to two themes in particular. He did not want to spoil the memory of his wife and Anne's mother Edith. Nothing more than faint traces of Anne's conflict with Edith Frank remained visible in the text. Other passages which were cut or reworded concerned Anne's liberal approach to her own physical and sexual development. Otto Frank rightly feared that some of Anne's innocent statements would put the book on the Index.

Other corrections, however, only become visible upon minute examination of the text. Of special interest for us in this context are the changes evident in the German edition, though of course it is impossible to say whether these were the work, in the last instance, of Otto Frank or of the translator. In his analysis, Alvin H. Rosenfeld has correlated a series of minimal changes, all connected with the use of the word "German". Numerous references to the collective identity of those responsible for the Holocaust in particular are censored. Thus in one passage, "die Deutschen" [the Germans] are replaced by "die besetzende Macht" [the occupying power] (entry for 18 May 1943), or even "die Unterdrückung" [the oppression] (28 January 1944). [10] In another place, "gibt es keine größere Feindschaft auf dieser Welt als zwischen Deutschen und Juden" ["in fact, Germans and Jews are the greatest enemies in the world" - DAF, 274] is transformed into "die Feindschaft zwischen diesen Deutschen und den Juden" [the animosity between these Germans and the Jews] (9 October 1942); the inserted word is italicised. Anne Frank's comment in her "Prospectus and Guide to the secret Annexe", "Erlaubt sind alle Kultursprachen, also kein Deutsch" ["All civilized languages are permitted, therefore no German!" - DAF, 313] became "Alle Kultursprachen, aber leise!!!" ["All languages of culture, but quietly!!!"].
Interestingly, indications that Anne Frank herself was of German origin, and that the Franks had strong links to German culture, were expunged from the text. For example, the passage already cited above ending with a reference to "animosity", was manipulated in another significant respect. Where Anne Frank goes as far as to remark upon the fact that, although she has been made stateless by Hitler, she too actually still belongs to the German people, the translation gives "Und dazu gehörte ich auch einmal" ["And I too once belonged to it"]. Similarly purged from the text were references to her mother urging German prayers upon Anne (29 October 1942), or noting that her father had written a poem in German (13 June 1943). Obviously it appeared advisable to dissolve the concrete character of the real conflict and its reflection in the diary, and to replace the sobering references to the betrayed belief in a "common history" by abstractions. In order for an identification with Anne Frank on the part of German readers to take place, hints of her real proximity to the Germans had to be minimised. Finally, references to the extermination of the Jews, which already occur in Anne Frank's diary from 1942 onwards and are repeated again and again, are became abstractions. Thus (once again in the entry of 9 October 1942) "Polen" [Poland] becomes "die Ferne, wohin sie verschickt werden" ["that far away place where they are sent"] and the sentence: "Wir nehmen an, daß die meisten Menschen ermordet werden" ["We assume that most of them are murdered" - DAF, 273] disappears entirely, while paradoxically, mentions of the gas-chambers are left intact.

The Diary of Anne Frank was finally published as a Fischer paperback in 1955. However, this edition was only moderately successful. A year later, The Diary was performed in Germany as a stage-play, and with the play came the book's rise to best-seller status. The stage-play was a German translation of the American stage version mentioned above, and premiered simultaneously in seven German theatres (in Hamburg, West-Berlin, Aachen, Düsseldorf, Konstanz, Karlsruhe and Dresden) on 1 October 1956. This was a major event in the politics of German theatre, not least because of the simultaneous premiere in the GDR. This event was in fact hushed up considerably, for reasons that we will come back to.

Where Otto Frank and the translator of the German version, Anneliese Schütz, proceeded with comparative caution, the stage-play (and later the film) converted the diary in many respects into its very opposite. The stage-adaptation had been preceded by the drama of a tragic conflict over copyright and translation rights, one which would last well into the 1960s, indeed until the death of the principal actors. Not only personal vanity and personal pride were at stake in this conflict, but also wider issues of guilt and reparation.
In 1950 Meyer Levin, at the time a well-known Jewish-American writer, was given the French translation of The Diary of Anne Frank by his wife Tereska.
Meyer Levin had been a war correspondent in 1944 and 1945 for American and Jewish press agencies, had reported on the last months of the war, the Battle of the Bulge, the liberation, on the fate of the survivors, and of the Germans he met. He had written about relations between Jewish and non-Jewish, and Negro and white soldiers in the American Army, and had devoted much soul-searching to his own Jewish-American identity. The encounter with the genocide of the concentration camps was a turning point in his life. To speak on behalf of the victims of that genocide was to become what one might term his obsession.
In 1949 Meyer Levin wrote in his autobiography, "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, for the survivors have an augmented view we cannot attain. Some day a teller would arise from amongst themselves." [11] The voice of Anne Frank seemed to him to be the first genuine voice of the victims of the Holocaust, and "the voice reached me from the pit." [12]
Already in September 1950 Meyer Levin was writing to the French publisher, and was able to contact Otto Frank and succeeded in gaining the latter's interest in a stage-version of the diary. Otto Frank was carrying on negotiations, at the time still without success, with publishers in England and the USA, for an English translation. Meyer Levin offered him support in this undertaking. Meyer Levin's enthusiastic review in The New York Times Book Review in June 1952 was to make a major contribution to the massive success of the American edition of The Diary of Anne Frank, whose first print-run sold out on the day of publication. In the space of few weeks, three print-runs, totalling 45 000 copies, had been sold.
Levin not only attempted to act more or less as Otto Frank's agent in the search for a producer for the possible stage-adaptation of the diary, he also involved himself in no uncertain fashion by putting himself forward as the author, a conflict of roles which would soon prove to be fatal. Otto Frank's trust in the novelist cum journalist and as-yet-untested dramatist soon turned out to have its limits. The saga of the growing tension between Meyer Levin and Otto Frank, leading eventually from a friendly relationship to hatred, then to court cases, press campaigns and a life-long animosity, cannot be recounted here. It has been told in detail by Lawrence Graver in his book An Obsession with Anne Frank: Meyer Levin and the Diary. [13]
In the second half of 1952, the negotiations between Otto Frank, Meyer Levin, various Broadway producers, publishers, agents and lawyers reached their peak. Meyer Levin had the chance of writing a draft of a stage-play, but this option was not taken particularly seriously by others involved in the project. Not only was his draft received without enthusiasm; some of those involved in the undertaking had had serious reserves from the beginning. Eventually he was permitted to search for a producer among a previously determined list which, however, carefully omitted those directors who were prepared to accept his draft. To what extent questions of marketability, of "performability", and in the last instance, of the contents of the draft, particularly concerning Anne's Jewish origins and identity, had a role in this can only be assessed with utmost prudence. [14]
Meyer Levin, who was reluctant to give up his battle for the rights to an adaptation of the original diary-material, continued to search for a means to put his version on the stage. He signed contracts and settlements which he did not honour, invented conspiracy theories in which he saw himself as the victim of carefully-planned anti-Jewish intrigues, where in fact common interests and ideological interpretations were quite adequate to present him as a trouble maker and to keep him at arm's length. Right up until his death in 1981 in Israel, a year after that of Otto Frank, Meyer Levin was unable to disentangle himself from these conflicts.
Debates over the interpretation of The Diary of Anne Frank continue today to turn upon this conflict. Most recently, in a 1995 publication, Vincent C. Frank-Steiner, the President of the Anne Frank Foundation in Basel (not a relative of the Franks) could write: "The question of the significance of Judaism for Anne Frank has not as yet been resolved" [15] - and in the same breath, contemptuously pass judgement upon Meyer Levin: "And therein lies the true origin of the conflict with Meyer Levin. That author saw in Anne Frank a religious, Zionist Jewish girl. This narrow point of view is certainly false. Levin's play was never accepted by the public and rarely performed - and with good reason, in my opinion. Meyer Levin was unable to get over this and was broken by this dilemma." The infamy of such a sentence does not make Levin's conspiracies any more plausible, but it does justify his despairing rage.
Meyer Levin's play Anne Frank was never performed, at least by a professional theatre company, for one simple reason: Otto Frank and his successor, the Anne Frank Foundation in Basel mentioned above, forbade performance. Precisely this embargo was the crux of the legal conflict with Meyer Levin. Where the public did indeed have the chance to see the play, in a more or less illegal production by the amateur company Israel Soldiers' Theatre in Tel Aviv in 1965, the audience responded with enthusiasm, though this is of course in no way a representative indicator of the literary value of Levin's stage-adaptation.
Meyer Levin was indeed a supporter of Zionism, but the Anne Frank he wanted to portray on the stage was not. There is no mention of a Jewish Sate in Levin's adaptation. Palestine is mentioned once, but in the very same context as in Anne Frank's diary, in which she mentions her sister Margot's plans to become a nurse in Palestine after the war. However, Meyer Levin's Anne Frank does confront her religion and Jewish identity. Levin succeeded in weaving a large number of Anne's diary-entries into lively conversations between the inmates of the "Secret Annexe" - entries in which Anne tries, according to her own personal beliefs, to defend herself against the mechanical recitation of prayers demanded by her mother, entries in which she maintains the individualism of her religious feelings. Meyer Levin was far from attempting to write a form of Jewish traditionalism into Anne Frank's words. He did however stage a Chanuka-celebration which fills the second act - and which also occupies a central place in the Goodrich and Hackett play - and takes on epic proportions as a drama of newly discovered identity. At the end of the scene, all the inmates of the conflict-ridden "Secret Annexe" draw together as they sing an emotional Chanuka song. There is no textual precedent for this scene in the diary. Rather, Chanuka appears in Anne Frank's descriptions as a routine occasion of little emotional significance. "We didn't make much fuss about Chanuka: we just gave each other a few trifles and then we had the candle." The non-Jewish friends who looked after the family in the "Secret Annexe" also caused them to celebrate Christmas, about which Anne wrote: "Saturday, the evening of St. Nicholas Day, was much more fun. Bep and Miep had made us much more inquisitive [...]" (7 December 1942 - DAF, 321). [16]
But what Meyer Levin also wanted to do was to bring to the stage one entry whose fate effectively can be seen to be symptomatic of the further saga of adaptations of diary.
On 11 April 1944 Anne Frank wrote in her diary:

"We have been pointedly reminded that we are in hiding, that we are Jews in chains, chained to one spot, without any rights, with a thousand duties. [...] Sometime this terrible war will be over. Surely the time will come when we are people again, and not just Jews!
Who has inflicted this upon us? Who had made us Jews different from all other people? Who has allowed us to suffer so terribly up till now? It is God that has made us as we are, but it will be God, too, who will raise us up again. If we bear all this suffering and if there are still Jews left, when it is over, then Jews, instead of being doomed, will be held up as an example. Who knows, it might even be our religion from which the world and all peoples learn good, and for that reason, and for that reason only do we have to suffer now. We can never become just Netherlanders or just English or any other nation for that matter, we will always remain Jews, we must remain Jews, but we want to, too. [...] God has never deserted our people; right through the ages there have been Jews, through all the ages they have had to suffer, but it has made them strong too..." (DAF, 600)

Out of this passage cited by Levin, [17] the 1955 Broadway version created the following sentence: "We're not the only people that've had to suffer. There've always been people that've had to... sometimes one race... sometime another..." [18]

In 1953 Otto Frank and his producer Kermit Bloomgarden had found the authors for the stage-adaptation: Francis Goodrich and Albert Hackett, two Hollywood scriptwriters not known for original work, but rather for screenplays which became notable as box-office hits: musicals and comedies such as It's a Wonderful Life or Easter Parade.
In October 1955, their version having passed through at least eight revisions in the meantime, the play was premiered at the Cort Theatre in New York, becoming what Otto Frank had hoped: a world-wide success. In all likelihood, it was the optimistic tone of the adaptation which was responsible for this success, an optimistic tone largely arising out of the emphasis placed on Anne's tender love affair with Peter, the son of the second family living in the "Secret Annexe". It was in reality a relationship characterised by many sad, indeed desolate facets, which Meyer Levin had tried, in his adaptation, to present in all their contradictory aspects. Whereas in Levin's play, as at the end of the diary, Anne begins to withdraw from Peter, suffering under his weakness of character and insecure identity, the close of the Goodrich and Hackett play has the couple standing together at the window, arm in arm, looking towards the sky. The last scene in the "Secret Annexe", that of their arrest, follows.
The closing words are given to Otto Frank himself, and return to his motives for devoting himself to the work of publishing and promoting his daughter's diary. The frame-plot of the play, Otto Frank's return to Amsterdam in Autumn 1945, at which point he received the diary, provides the context for the last scene of the play. Otto Frank comes to the end of his reading of the diary in 1945 in the former "Secret Annexe". He tells Miep Gies and Kraler of Anne's journey to the concentration camp. We are not told of her state of mind there, but rather: "It seems strange to say this, that anyone could be happy in a concentration camp. But Anne was happy in the camp in Holland where they first took us. After two years of being shut up in those rooms she could be out... out in the sunshine and the fresh air that she loved." [19]
He flicks through the diary and finds the passage that would become the catch-phrase describing the entire play. Anne's voice is heard: "In spite of everything, I still believe that people are really good at heart." But one more line is given to Otto Frank: "She puts me to shame", a line in which there are perhaps more levels of meaning than the authors suspected. [20]
The hints given by Anne in her diary concerning her approaching fate, her knowledge of the gas-chambers, of the extermination and of the concentration camps, but also about the conditions in Westerbork, the Dutch transit camp for deportees, her feelings of guilt regarding the girl-friends of whose deportation she heard - all these horrors, still contained in the abridged version of the diary, were almost completely banished from the scenery of the play.

A year later, in October 1956, the play premiered on German stages, and sales of the Diary soared. Perceptions of what was to be read in the book were strongly influenced through the filter of the stage-play. In 1958-1959 the Diary was made into the film THE DIARY OF ANNE FRANK in the USA by George Stevens, which was shown with great success in Germany in 1959.

Anne's statement to the effect that she believed, despite everything, in the good in human beings, was now elevated to canonical status. In the Diary itself, and at risk of labouring the point, in Levin's play too, this line is followed by an extremely ambivalent passage:

"I simply can't build up my hopes on a foundation consisting of confusion, misery, and death, I see the world gradually being turned into a wilderness, I hear the ever approaching thunder, which will destroy us too, I can feel the suffering of millions and yet, if I look up into the heavens, I think that it will all come right, that this cruelty will end, that peace and tranquillity will return again. (15 July 1944 - DAF, 694)

In another place, she formulated the alternation between dark and light in an even more fatalistic manner:

"I don't believe that the big men, the politicians and the capitalists alone are responsible for the war, oh no, the little man is just as guilty [...]. There's in people simply an urge to destroy, an urge to kill, to murder and rage and until all mankind without exception, undergoes a great change wars will be waged, everything that has been built up, cultivated and grown will be cut down and disfigured, to begin all over again after that!" (3 May 1944 - DAF, 628)

These contradictions ought not to be allowed to overshadow the message of Anne Frank.
German newspapers devoted to the theatre and cinema premieres articles with titles such as: "Testimony to the good in man", "Compassion in the midst of hatred", "Testimony of a pure heart in a time of horror", "Moment of reflection on human anguish".
Again and again, the reviews emphasised how closely Goodrich and Hackett had kept to the original text of the diary, obviously a well cultivated rumour. "Almost always", according to the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung of 3 October 1956, "the original text is allowed to be heard."

The theatre performances from October 1956 on assumed the character of a memorial ceremony, as minutes of silence followed the curtain fall. On some occasions, the programme went as far as prohibiting applause, with the effect of removing any possibility of expressing consent or dissent towards the play. The audiences reacted, as one might expect, in a deeply emotional manner, and when questioned upon the reasons for the strength of their feelings, naturally replied with extremely contradictory statements, ranging from admissions of guilt to claims to recognise in the play themselves and their fate as the victims of bombing raids and of exile from the former German provinces in Eastern Europe.
Once again, the published reactions turned around a few staple phrases, exemplified by the following sample: "In the suffering Jewess the suffering human as such is to be recognised"; "Anne Frank was a person of love - goodness triumphs over hatred"; "At last a play not obsessed with revenge"; "We are saved by Anne Frank's unassailable belief in human goodness"; "Together we made ourselves guilty. Remembrance of that fact will bring about the spiritual reunification of Germany"; "We suffered in comparable ways, and today those on the other side of the iron curtain continue to suffer to the same extent". Such phrases ranged from abstract or humanistic confessions of faith to the aggressive slogans of the Cold War, a diversity which by no means entails that such sentiments contradicted one another.

The general tone of subsequent German reception had been set early on by Albrecht Goes' preface to the 1955 paperback edition of the Diary. There he announced a document which portrayed "humanity in emergence." [21] Who had imposed upon Anne Frank her "moral confrontations", he enquired in rhetorical fashion? "The epoch? Her particular fate? They came from the innermost being of her own life," he replied, concluding with the words: "This is necessary in the world of 1955, no less a world of concentration camps and torture now than then." [22]
In 1959 after the premiere of the film, the tone of reviews became in this regard much more cutting. The Basle National-Zeitung said: "The rest is with the audience: a deep silence, the awareness that Anne Frank, fifteen years after the end of the war, still has fellow sufferers. The terror has remained the same. Only the colour has changed, and the people in today's 'Secret Annexe' are protected neither by race nor religion." [23]
The film was praised for being, "of all manifestos against the Nazi dictatorship, the one least tarnished by impulses of hate and revenge." "The essence of the play is to be found in the father Otto Frank's words to the effect that the deceased Anne Frank puts him to shame through her inability, even in the darkest hour of fear, to desire revenge." The critics were grateful to George Stevens for sparing the audience the sight of "screaming SS-officers, jackboots and goosestep-marches", for offering instead a "multi-layered, complex" portrayal of the Nazi terror. Even the two police officers seen in the film were merely "in the service of a bestial will, that of the devil presiding above, and whose voice we repeatedly hear in the minature radio."

In 1956 Gert Kalow appeared to argue in a quite different direction in the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, interpreting a common admission of guilt as the sign of a spiritual reunification: "There was hardly a West- or East-German theatre that didn't advertise, or make part of the season's programme this call to reflection on the past: a element of reunification, spiritual reunification, conferred by a thirteen year-old Jewish girl who was murdered by us in Belsen concentration camp (let us not say 'by the evil Nazis', as if we could place the burden of guilt upon an authority which has already become part of the past, but rather let us say 'by us'). No-one, not even the old anti-fascist resistance-fighter, not even the former Nazi, can look into this mirror reflecting bottomless suffering borne without hatred, without being deeply shocked. No-one, however energetically he might deny it, comes away from the performance unchanged." [24] A few years later, as the cold war reached its climax, such a verdict would perhaps no longer have been possible.
The catharsis sought for here, and the national subtext associated with it both point to the desire for a successful self-purification of "German character" which was to lay bare the buried substance of German cultural nationhood. And this project would not be abandoned. [25]

Werner Hess, at the time director of Radio Hessen, achieved, apparently without effort, a synthesis of these contradictions in a 1962 address given in the context of Anne Frank Memorial Ceremony which by then took place yearly in the Great Hall of the University of Frankfurt.
The stage play had brought in its wake a series of new forms of remembrance, for instance, pilgrimages involving thousands of Hamburg school-children, organised by the Association for Christian-Jewish Co-operation, to Bergen-Belsen. In Frankfurt, from 1957 onwards, Anne Frank's birthday was celebrated as a day of remembrance; we will come back to this yearly occasion later on.
On 24 June 1962 - Anne Frank's first birthday after the construction of the Berlin Wall - Werner Hess made the link between admissions of guilt and the Cold War, or more particularly, the new historical duty of German culture.
He opened by saying that the youth of today did not want to know about the past, did not want to deal with the cultural inheritance of their fathers' generation. He claimed, with a reference to the trial of Eichmann by an Israelite (sic) court, that it was not possible "to sneak past this cliff-like monolithic obstruction of wrong-turns and guilt, and to make one's own private way through the jungle of our times. No, there is no choice, if we want to live - or more accurately, if we want to live as a people - but consciously to move this mountain out of the way with our own bare hands, and to attempt to manage our future." Then he spoke more directly:
"This is the horror that emanates from the young girl Anne Frank and from her fate. For it does not belong to the past, but continues precisely, in another place, under a different sign, and continues to grow, this nihilistic disregard for all that is human, for all that is relationship or community, for all that is made in God's likeness, and which appropriates human sacrifices in the name of some ideology [...]. Have we really come so far as to be able to say, today, in this moment of remembrance, that this belongs, for once and for all, to the past: the era of the concentration camps and of arbitrary and cynical genocide, the era of the nightly bombing-raids, of the refugee-treks, the era in which the four occupation-zones accepted twelve-and-a-half million so-called refugees. What has changed since then? Up to 13 August 1961, 2.6 million people from the Soviet zone applied for asylum in the West, and since the erection of the wall, one hears the shots of the uniformed hunters pursuing human game, a prey whose only crime is that of wanting to transfer from German fatherland to German fatherland [...]. And once again the dead hang on the barb-wire, innocent people, nameless people, people like you and I and Anne Frank."

His address took in such faraway lands as Tibet and Laos and ended on a self-confident moral tone: "We have a message for this grandiose future, a message being announced in the outside world, a message for our youth, who ought to be proud to carry it forth from Germany precisely into a new world in the process of taking shape [...]. Metaphysical connections open up here, about which we in particular as Germans have something to say." [26]

In the meantime, the GDR - which was never named, except metaphorically, in these West German discourses - had not been idle in replying with its own version of Anne Frank. Of particular interest here is the Film EIN TAGEBUCH FÜR ANNE FRANK (A Diary for Anne Frank) produced in 1958 by the East German DEFA documentary service.
EIN TAGEBUCH FÜR ANNE FRANK opens with the enthusiasm of a young girl who has been selected to play the part of Anne Frank in the Deutsches Theater in Berlin (Capital of the GDR). A fatherly voice from off-stage joins in her jubilation, but then draws her attention to Anne's fate after the close of the diary: her arrest, deportation and murder. This, of course, is merely the opening of a film which must be seen in the larger context of a series of DEFA documentaries made at the end of the 1950s, and which returned to the theme of the Holocaust after a decade's silence, not of course without utilising this aspect of German history as a pointed critique of the West.
EIN TAGEBUCH FÜR ANNE FRANK (a somewhat deceptive title, as the film is in no way concerned with some sort of a personal relationship to Anne Frank) concentrates above all on the concrete identification of the individual actors responsible for Anne Frank's death, and on revealing their post-war careers in the Federal Republic. Naturally the prominent firm IG Farben is a particular target of the film's scrutiny. The film is refreshing direct as the gentlemen in question are tracked down in the opulence of their Starnberger Lake mansions or caught emerging from their garages in sleek cars, or as their addresses are made public to the audience.
Unsurprisingly, Anne Frank was of only marginal interest for the authors Joachim Hellwig and Günther Deicke.
Also published in 1958 in the GDR was by Bruno Apitz's novel Nackt unter Wölfen (Naked among Wolves). It is unlikely that the writing of the book was influenced by the success of The Diary of Anne Frank in West Germany; Apitz himself had spoken of his work on the novel since 1955. In retrospect, of course, one can speak of Apitz's novel as almost a counterpoise to The Diary of Anne Frank. Nackt unter Wölfen became one of the most-read novels written in the GDR, particularly as a school text. In Nackt unter Wölfen too, the situation in the concentration camp and the fate of the victims are developed around the figure of a Jewish child. The child itself, however, remains merely the object of a rescue mission on the part of the communist-led resistance cell in the camp, and which culminates in a description of the liberation of the camp's inmates by the resisters. The child, usually referred to simply as "the Polish child", appears, moreover to be caught within a network of animal epithets, as Korinna Hennig has pointed out in a recent essay on the novel: "like a curled-up insect", "like a beetle", "like a worm", "like a trusting dog", "like a little bear." "Mostly it lies curled up there, like an embryo, it remains passive as an animal might, cries or whimpers seldom, utters not a word throughout the whole events." [27]
The resisters succeed in reconciling the human impulse to save the child and the demands of intrigue and underground struggle, in bringing together the humane and the political. The child (and thus the Jew) is saved - without becoming a subject; it serves as medium for the self-discovery, and thereby restoration to full humanity, of the resistance fighters, as the obligation of political struggle. Saving the child becomes a myth of salvation from deepest barbarism, from the threat of one's own brutalisation through the oppressor's terror.

In the West, in contrast, Anne Frank the innocent victim had to be dead, in order to be able to be brought back to life every year. The annual event in the Great Hall of the University of Frankfurt soon followed a rigidly set plan which we all know well. A speech of welcome by a politician was followed by a memorial address such as the one cited above by Werner Hess; others were given by Eugen Kogon, Fritz Bauer, Robert Kempner or Max Horkheimer. Lastly there was generally a musical programme, a sort of birthday serenade for Anne Frank. Every now and then disapproving noises would be made about the absence of the youth, for example in 1970. In that year, of course, most of the elderly participants were also absent, so that the seventy or so participants, on average around sixty years of age, hardly filled the Great Hall. The yearly ritual of the birthday celebration was discontinued, and a silence settled over Anne Frank.
The silence was not interrupted for some years. Only in 1979, as Anne Frank's fiftieth birthday approached, was she talked of again in Frankfurt. But by then it was too late for a memorial ceremony.

In 1957 it was still customary for a symbolic birthday gift, a bunch of colourful summer flowers, to be placed on the speaker's desk. And the Frankfurter Neue Presse reported the twenty-eighth birthday with the following words: "The little Jewish girl, about whom we don't even know the manner of her death, has triumphed."
Norbert Mühlen, who had conducted a larger number of interviews with audiences at the play, expressed himself similarly in a 1957 report for the Anti Defamation League.
"The extent to which Anne Frank has become a symbol struck me again when a young Berlin dancer - a girl raised in a strong Nazi home but without any political interests - said on mention of Anne Frank's name: 'Isn't it wonderful that a girl who went through so much suffering could still stay, 'I believe in the goodness of man'.'
The dancer had never read the book or seen the play, yet she repeated the quotation accurately. For Anne Frank's influence has been infinitely wider than the immediate audience for the play and book. Anne Frank has become a witness and a teacher to her survivors. Thus her homecoming to the country which expelled her and then killed her has become a strange but heartening kind of triumph."28

Alvin Rosenfeld, to whom I owe this quotation, draws an other, more bitter conclusion from Mühlen's observations: "In a word, Anne Frank has become a ready-at-hand formula for easy forgiveness. Far from this development representing her triumphant homecoming to the country that first expelled and then killed her, it represents quite the reverse: the triumph of Anne Frank's former countrymen over her. In her name, they have, after all, forgiven themselves."29

The "universalisation" of Anne Frank, and here I wish to reach my conclusion, betrays the universalism against which Anne Frank herself struggled in her diary.
The "universalisation" of the Jews, most obviously as the incorporation of evil itself, as the ostensible inventors of conscience, had been carried out by the Nazis, and since time immemorial by all forms of anti-Semitism. The Jews were not one religion among others, nor one race among others, but rather, the ghost of a principle of opposition at work behind the "mask" of reality, through whose extinction the inner unity and victory of the German character was to be achieved.
To this extent, what the Nazi attempted to put into practice was a founding sacrifice, a negative universalisation.

Anne Frank herself observed, half jokingly, half in earnest, that the Jewish race's status as the chosen people might also for a change turn out for the good. She was everything but a martyr, especially upon the occasions when she wrote of the persecution she suffered as if it was an adventure. And when she spoke of wanting to writing something, achieve something that would survive her own death, this by no means entails that she wanted to die for something.
The notion that the Jewish victims could provide an exemplary role for the people of the world after the catastrophe, as Anne Frank sometimes dreamed, strikes one as a helpless attempt to give meaning to her own suffering. And the same might be perhaps said of Meyer Levin's efforts to place Anne Frank's diary within a Jewish perspective.
It is something quite different to set her up as a "mirror" in which everyone, including her executioners, can see themselves. The "humanism" which embarks upon such a project merely perpetuates, more or less willingly, the annihilation of the face which gazes back at it, rather than contradicting that annihilation. The "universalisation" of Anne Frank is thus not merely grave-robbery, it is the completion of her extermination.

And Anne Frank's message for world youth? Anne Frank was not only confronted, in the "Secret Annexe", with the increasingly questionable world of adults, with its prohibitions and jealousies, its hypocrisies and prayers, its morals and prudery. The "Secret Annexe" was unbearable for Anne Frank, and the diary her salvation, because everything bad in the world, all persecution and fear, all restrictions, both "reasonable" ones and those arising from egoism, were represented for her by people she loved, or at least wanted to love; because she wanted to, indeed, had to free herself from those persons, the very selfsame persons together with whom she feared for her life day in day out.
Anne Frank is not permitted to die, must be saved anew every day, for the simple reason that she cannot be allowed to remain a child, to be childishly rebellious, aggressive or moody or imaginative. She ought to grow up, help the adults, put the world to right, preach morality to the young, fight violence, keep hatred in check. She ought to act as a sedative for this world gone crazy. She ought not to leave Otto Frank alone with his guilt, his non-existent guilt without which he would not have been able to keep on living, his guilt which he needed in order to maintain any sort of human relationship to the events he had lived through.
Harry Mulisch once wrote, expressing a scornful hope, that the Diary was a "powerful weapon against Fascism"; that the fact that "Auschwitz happened is the most effective preventative against its happening again."30 In contrast, Primo Levi has argued in a more fatalistic tone: "It happened, therefore it can happen again."31
In the production of the play by the Habimah in Tel Aviv at the end of the 1950s, Otto Frank did not utter, following Anne's expression of faith in the goodness in humanity, the sentence prescribed by the play, "She puts me to shame", but rather the words, "I don't know, I don't know."
It is precisely this scepticism which emanates from the diary, and which Anne's self-proclaimed saviours attempt to drown out so vociferously. Perhaps, however, The Diary and its millions of readers communicate with each other, secretly and quite innocently, in very different ways to those intended by the interpreters of the text. But to go into that would be another story altogether.

Translated by Russell West


From: Marginal Voices, Marginal Forms: Diaries in European Literature and History, Ed. Rachel Langford and Russell West. Amsterdam, Atlanta: Rodopi, 1999, pp. 156-174 (Internationale Forschungen zur Allgemeinen und Vergleichenden Literaturwissenschaft).

  1. Lawrence Langer, "The Americanization of the Holocaust on Stage and Screen", Admitting the Holocaust: Collected Essays (New York, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995), pp. 157-177.
  2. Lawrence Langer, "The Americanization of the Holocaust on Stage and Screen"; Alvin H. Rosenfeld, "Popularization and Memory: The Case of Anne Frank", in Lessons and Legacies: The Meaning of the Holocaust in a Changing World, Ed. Peter Hayes (Evanston: University of Illinois Press, 1991), pp. 243-278; Bruno Bettelheim, "The Ignored Lesson of Anne Frank", Surviving and Other Essays (New York: Knopf, 1979), pp. 246-257; Sander L. Gilman, "The Dead Child Speaks: Reading The Diary of Anne Frank", Jewish Self-Hatred (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1986), pp. 245-360 (the German translation of this work contains one of the only German language contributions to the debate over the reception of Anne Frank's diary: see Jüdischer Selbsthaß: Antisemitismus und die verborgene Sprache der Juden [Frankfurt/Main: Jüdischer Verlag/Suhrkamp, 1993]); James E. Young, "Das Anne Frank Haus", in Mahnmale des Holocaust, Ed. James E. Young (München: Prestel, 1993), pp. 107-113; George Steiner, "The Hollow Miracle", Language and Silence: Essays 1958-1966 (London: Faber, 1985), pp. 117-132.
  3. 3 Philip Roth, The Ghost Writer (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1979).
  4. Cited by Alvin H. Rosenfeld, 'Popularization and Memory: The Case of Anne Frank', p. 252.
  5. Rosenfeld, 'Popularization and Memory: The Case of Anne Frank', p. 252.
  6. Rosenfeld, 'Popularization and Memory: The Case of Anne Frank', p. 253.
  7. Rosenfeld, 'Popularization and Memory: The Case of Anne Frank', p. 253.
  8. Otto Frank upon the opening of the Museum in the "Anne Frank House" and the "International Youth Centre" in the neighbouring house in 1960, cited by James E. Young, "Das Anne Frank Haus", p. 110.
  9. The Diary of Anne Frank: The Critical Edition, Prepared by the Netherlands State Institute for War Documentation, Ed. David Barnouw and Gerrold Van der Stroom, Trans A. J. Pomerans and B. M. Mooyaart-Doubleday (New York: Doubleday, 1989). References in the text follow the abbreviation DAF.
  10. Citations are taken from Anne Frank's diary in the newly translated 1992 edition (Anne Frank, Tagebuch, Trans. Mirjam Pressler [Frankfurt am Main: Fischer, 1992]), which in turn is based on the "complete" edition of 1988 referred to above (German edition: Die Tagebücher der Anne Frank, Ed. Rijksinstituut voor Oorlogsdocumentatie, Trans. Mirjam Pressler [Frankfurt am Main: Fischer, 1988]); the quotations are compared to the corresponding passages in the earlier 1955 paperback edition (Das Tagebuch der Anne Frank [Frankfurt am Main: Fischer, 1955]), which in turn follows the first German translation undertaken in 1949 by Anneliese Schütz.
  11. Meyer Levin, In Search (Paris: Author's Press, 1950), pp. 173-174.
  12. Quoted in Lawrence Graver, An Obsession with Anne Frank: Meyer Levin and the Diary (Berkeley/Los Angeles/London: University of California Press, 1995), p. 15.
  13. See footnote 12.
  14. Meyer Levin, Anne Frank: A Play by Meyer Levin. Adapted from The Diary of Anne Frank (Privately printed, no date). Levin's version remains to this day unpublished. In the 1970s, Levin himself published cheap copies of the text which were never circulated commercially, and bearing, for legal reasons, the notation "Privately published by the author for literary discussion." This version is evidently that of Batya Lancet's and Peter Frye's adaptation for the Israel Soldiers' Theatre. I refer here to a copy made available to me by Meyer Levin's son Mikael Levin.
  15. Vincent C. Frank-Steiner, "Der kleinste gemeinsame Nenner des Humanen", in Anne Frank und wir, Ed. Stapferhaus Lenzburg (Zürich: Chronos, 1995), p. 188.
  16. The question of the significance of this Christmas celebration, which occurred almost on the same date as Chanuka in 1942, has preoccupied various interpreters. Sander Gilman draws the overstated conclusion that Anne Frank was "typical of assimilated Jews, who adopted Christian religious observations without any religious overtones in lieu of a Jewish religious celebration" (Gilman, "The Dead Child Speaks: Reading The Diary of Anne Frank", pp. 349-50. But Anne Frank also said why Christmas and St. Nicholas, which non-Jewish friends wanted to celebrate with her, were more interesting for her: this celebration had the attraction of novelty: "In any case it was a nice idea and as none of us had ever celebrated St. Nicholas, it was a good way of starting" (7 December 1942 - DAF, 323.) Two days earlier, before her encounter with the St. Nicholas celebrations, she had written in her diary: "Last night it was wonderful, first we lit candles and then we went upstairs for the distribution of presents" (This entry of 5 December 1942 is only to be found in DAF, 321.) Meyer Levin, in contrast, complains in his autobiography The Obsession, regarding Goodrich and Hackett's adaptation: "Something seemed wrong to me. The way they had done it was more like Christmas" (The Obsession [New York: Simon and Schuster, 1973], p. 121). This, however, would hardly contradict the actual habits of many assimilated Jewish families. Obviously religious festivals had no great significance beyond presents and candle-light for Anne Frank, at least from what she says in her diary.
  17. Levin's text gives, for example: "Who knows, perhaps the whole world will learn, from the good that is in us, and perhaps for that reason the Jews have to suffer now. Right through the ages there have been Jews, through all the ages they have had to suffer, and it has made us strong" (Levin, Anne Frank, p. 75). Meyer Levin reproduces here Anne Frank's own attempts to invest her life with meaning and to interpret Jewish fate as "exemplary", an aspect of Anne Frank's Diary which, thus openly stated and thereby open to discussion and criticism, may have provoked unease at the time.
  18. Frances Goodrich and Albert Hackett, The Diary of Anne Frank (New York: Random House, 1956), p. 168. The German translation appeared in 1958 with the title Das Tagebuch der Anne Frank. Ein Schauspiel (Frankfurt am Main: Fischer, 1958).
  19. Goodrich and Hackett, The Diary of Anne Frank, pp. 172-73.
  20. Goodrich and Hackett, The Diary of Anne Frank, pp. 168, 174.
  21. Albrecht Goes, Preface to Das Tagebuch der Anne Frank (Frankfurt am Main: Fischer, 1955), p. 5.
  22. Albrecht Goes, Preface, p. 6.
  23. Gerty Agoston, "Anne Frank: Menschenliebe aus der Fülle von Hass", National-Zeitung Basel, 20 June 1959.
  24. Gert Kalow, "Lob eines Zimmerspiels", Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, 28 December 1956.
  25. It becomes clear on several occasions how sarcastically Anne Frank herself regarded the character of the German resistance to Hitler and the resisters' conceptions of the German nation as it was to be re-established following the downfall of the Nazi regime, perhaps most conclusively in this entry of 21 July 1944, as she commented upon the news of the assassination attempt against Hitler with the following words: "Anyway, it certainly shows that there are lots of officers and generals who are sick of the war and would like to see Hitler descend into a bottomless pit, to set up a military dictatorship and make peace with the allies, then to rearm and start the war again in about 20 years' time" (DAF, 695).
  26. Werner Hess, Speech on the occasion of the Anne Frank Gedenkfeier 24 June 1962, unpublished manuscript, Press Archive of the Hessischer Rundfunk.
  27. Korinna Hennig, "Das Prinzip Hoffnung. Zur Funktion von Kinderfiguren bei Bruno Apitz und Jurek Becker", in Literatur und Holocaust, Ed. Claude Conter, Fußnoten zur Literatur, Heft 38 (Bamberg: Universität Bamberg, 1996), pp. 81-91.
  28. Norbert Mühlen, "The return of Anne Frank", The ADL Bulletin (June 1957), p. 2.
  29. Alvin Rosenfeld, "Popularization and Memory: The Case of Anne Frank", p. 271.
  30. Harry Mulisch, "Das Mädchen und der Tod. Anne Frank zum Gedenken", in Die Zeit, 18 April 1986. Reprinted in Mulisch, Die Säulen des Herkules (Münich and Vienna: Hanser, 1997), pp. 172-83.
  31. Primo Levi, The Drowned and the Saved, Trans. Raymond Rosenthal (London: Abacus, 1989), p. 167.