Anne Frank (12 page)

Otto replies that he has received many letters in his life, but this is the most unpleasant. The remainder of his response, which Anne reports in direct dialogue, is such a model of forbearance and understanding, so thoroughly infused with a guilt-inducing sense of injury (how could Anne mistreat the loving
parents who have done nothing but help and defend her?) that she caves in from remorse, just as she was meant to. “This is certainly the worst thing I have ever done in my life…to accuse Pim, who has done and still does do everything for me—no, that was too low for words…And the way Daddy has forgiven me makes me feel more than ever ashamed of myself.”

Less than a week later, the tension has dissipated, and we see the attic residents celebrating Otto’s birthday, for which he receives, among other gifts, a book on nature and a biography of Linnaeus. Anne makes it clear that her love of literature is part of what she shares with her father, who suggests that she and Margot list all the books they read in hiding. In Anne’s daily schedule, time was allotted for reading, and on Saturdays, the Dutch helpers brought more books, which the attic residents eagerly anticipated. In addition to books about history and geography, biographies, a five-volume history of art, a children’s Bible, compendiums of mythology, and what we would now call “young-adult novels,” Anne mentions works by Oscar Wilde, Thackeray, the Brothers Grimm, and Alphonse Daudet.

Anne conveys her mother’s character, as she does her father’s, primarily through dialogue and action supplemented by commentary. One of Anne’s earliest mentions of Edith occurs in an entry dated October 29, 1942, as Anne describes literary gifts from both parents. Otto has given her the plays of Goethe and Schiller, from which he plans to read to her every evening, starting with
Don Carlos.
“Following Daddy’s good example”—note the pointed irony of that phrase, which underlines the passage’s significance—“Mummy has pressed her prayer book into my hand. For decency’s sake I read some of the prayers in German; they are certainly beautiful but they don’t convey much to me. Why does she force me to be pious, just to oblige her?”

Regardless of the degree to which Otto’s editing modulated
Anne’s criticisms, her estrangement from her mother is a constant theme, and is reflected in the novel on which she was at work in early 1944,
Cady’s Life,
a portion of which appears in
Tales from the Secret Annex.
The book begins when Cady, who has been hit by a car, complains to a friendly nurse about her mother’s tactlessness. Anne uses the license of fiction to be even harsher about a troubled mother-daughter relationship than she is in the diary.

“She talks so unfeelingly about the most sensitive subjects,” complains Cady. “She understands nothing of what’s going on inside me, and yet she’s always saying she’s so interested in adolescents…. She may be a woman, but she’s not a real mother!” In response, the wise Nurse Ank (much like the “nice Anne” who Anne claims to keep hidden) replies, “Perhaps she’s different because she’s been through a lot and now prefers to avoid anything that might be painful.”

A late diary entry (which Otto omitted from the edited version) includes an outline for the ending of
Cady’s Life.
This summary follows the well-known passage in which Anne mentions her desire to become a journalist and her plans to publish
Het Achterhuis.
In the narrative Anne sketches, Cady marries a “well-to-do farmer” though she remains infatuated with her former sweetheart, Hans, whom she initially broke up with because he sympathized with the Nazis. The entry concludes, “It isn’t sentimental nonsense for it’s modeled on the story of Daddy’s life”—a line that has been taken to mean that Anne knew, or at least believed, that the love of Otto’s life was a woman he had known before Edith, and that his marriage to Edith had had more to do with her convenience than with passion.

When Anne tries to find the source of her antipathy to her mother, she dredges up a memory of Edith forbidding her to come along on a shopping expedition with Margot. Anne also
refers to the maddening maternal sermons that remind her of how different she and her mother are. But unlike Mrs. Van Pels, whose irritating habits and character traits are documented by the many annoying things she says and does, “Mama Frank, champion of youth” behaves quite admirably at almost every juncture. We observe Edith defending her daughters from Pfeffer and the Van Pelses, keeping the peace, making sure that her children eat well, and so forth.

Part of what makes the diary feel so authentic is that, despite all her resolutions to improve her character, Anne makes only the most pro forma teenage effort to be fair and impartial about her mother. Edith gets no credit when she insists (over Otto’s objections) that a candle be lit to comfort Anne, who has been frightened by the rattle of machine-gun fire. “When he complained, her answer was firm: “After all, Anne’s not exactly a veteran soldier,’ and that was the end of it.” Nor is Edith pitied when Anne’s coldness makes her cry. Anne blames her mother for the distance between them, a gap that has been widened by Edith’s thoughtless comments and tactless jokes, presumably at her daughter’s expense. “Just as I shrink at her hard words, so did her heart when she realized that the love between us was gone. She cried half the night and hardly slept at all.”

Miep Gies observed that Edith Frank often seemed depressed and withdrawn; when Miep left the annex, Edith would follow her downstairs and just stand there, waiting. Eventually, Miep realized that Edith wanted to talk to her in private. Unlike the others, who enjoyed discussing what they planned to do when the war ended, Edith was afraid that the war would never end.

In the diary, Edith can do nothing to mollify Anne, whose contempt for her mother has as much to do with who her mother
is
as with anything she
does.
Anne is appalled by the thought of
growing up with the limited horizons, ambitions, and expectations of the women around her, and laments her own inability to respect her mother or to see her as a role model. Anne writes that she hopes to spend a year in Paris or London, studying languages and art history—an ambition she compares, with barely veiled contempt, to Margot’s desire to go to Palestine and become a midwife.

In an essay entitled “Reading Anne Frank as a Woman,” a feminist interpretation of Anne as “a woman who was censored by male editors,” Berteke Waaldijk, a professor of Women’s Studies at the University of Utrecht, points out a long and almost entirely overlooked passage that Otto Frank excised from the final section of the diary. Perhaps Otto assumed that a lengthy disquisition on women’s rights might distract the reader heading into the final pages in which Anne is unknowingly hurtling toward her doom. At a point during which Anne was simultaneously writing new material and rapidly revising, she devoted a remarkable amount of space to the question of why women are treated as inferior to men:

“Presumably man, thanks to his greater physical strength, achieved dominance over women from the very start; man, who earns the money, who begets children, who may do what he wants…It is stupid enough of women to have borne it all in silence for such a long time, since the more centuries this arrangement lasts, the more deeply rooted it becomes. Luckily schooling, work and progress have opened women’s eyes. In many countries…modern women demand the right of complete independence!”

All along, we have sensed that Anne’s rage at her mother and at Mrs. Van Pels has involved their inability to be—or even to seem—as brave and sensible and competent as the men. Only late in the diary does Anne understand that there is an
actual person behind the abstract symbol of female limitation and servitude that she has so despised. Her digression about the problems of, and the disrespect for, women ends by suggesting that those who have gone through childbirth are entitled to gratitude and sympathy on that score alone. Anne seems to have realized that her mother is not entirely to blame for the ways in which she had been conditioned to behave, and for her stunted ambitions and expectations.

Almost a year and a half after writing a particularly furious passage in which she describes forcing herself to remain calm and having to suppress the desire to slap her mother, Anne had second thoughts about including it in
Het Achterhuis.
In the meantime, she had undergone the change that John Berryman considered the turning point in her child-into-adult conversion, which immediately followed her vision of her friend Lies and her dead grandmother. “I was very unhappy again last evening. Granny and Lies came into my mind. Granny, oh darling Granny, how little we understood of what she suffered, or how sweet she was…And Lies, is she still alive? What is she doing? Oh, God, protect her and bring her back to us. Lies, I see in you all the time what my lot might have been.”

In an entry dated three days later, January 2, 1944, Anne remarks that she has been rereading her diary and is shocked by the “hothead” sections about her mother. She blames her bitterness on “moods” that prevented her from seeing a situation from another person’s point of view and from realizing that she might have hurt Mummy or made her unhappy. Her mother had responded in kind, and the result was “unpleasantness and misery rebounding all the time.”

In the aftermath of her vision of Lies, Anne vows to improve. She promises herself that she will stop making her mother cry. She herself has grown more mature, and her mother is no
longer quite so anxious. But a few days later, Anne is unable to refrain from returning to the theme of how hard it is to respect her mother and how little she wishes to follow her example.

The winter of 1944 marked the start of an acutely introspective period during which Anne looked back and measured the person she had become against the girl she was: “If I think of my life in 1942, it all feels so unreal. It was quite a different Anne who enjoyed that heavenly existence from the Anne who has grown wise within these walls. Yes, it was a heavenly life. Boyfriends at every turn, about 20 friends and acquaintances of my own age, the darling of nearly all the teachers, spoiled from top to toe by Mummy and Daddy, lots of sweets, enough pocket money, what more could one want?…I look now at that Anne Frank as an amusing, jokey, but superficial girl who has nothing to do with the Anne of today.”

Had Anne survived, or had she been able to stay in contact with the wider world, she might have taken consolation from the discovery that many, if not most, teenage girls come into conflict with their mothers. Isolated in the attic, Anne could only examine her own history and her own conscience, and try to locate the wellspring of her sadness and her rage.

J
UST
as Anne finds a shorthand in which to express her complex relations with her parents by recording her response to their tastes in reading—Goethe versus the prayer book—so she introduces the Van Pelses by describing their arrival at the secret annex with Mrs. Van Pels’s pottie in a hatbox, and her husband carrying a folding tea table under his arm. The Van Pelses begin their new lives with a noisy quarrel of the sort that Otto and Edith would never have had, and would certainly never have allowed to be overheard. Coarse, selfish about trivial matters, unembarrassed to squabble over plates and sheets, yet ultimately sympathetic, the Van Pelses do one thing after another that
arouses, in the reader, amusement and affection commingled with annoyance. They are
characters.

Because the Van Pelses are so much more transparent than the Franks, we can more easily watch them weakening and falling apart. By the last summer in the attic, Mrs. Van Pels is talking about hanging, suicide, prison, a bullet in the head. “She quarrels, uses abusive language, cries, pities herself, laughs, and then starts a fresh quarrel again.”

Anne’s response to Mrs. Van Pels is quite different from the helpers’ memories of her real-life model, whom Miep Gies called, “a very uncomplicated person, anxious and cheerful at the same time.” Miep came to see Mrs. Van Pels as not only realistic but prescient. “If anyone had a premonition of how badly it would all end, she was the one.” Anne seems not to have known that, for Miep’s birthday in February 1944, Auguste van Pels—who, in the diary, we see greedily holding on to every possession—gave Miep an antique diamond-and-onyx ring as a “way to express the inexpressible.”

Mr. Van Pels grows more fractious as his cigarette supply dwindles. He is careless in ways that endanger the Jews and their helpers. Yet another crisis, marked by yet another fight, erupts when the Van Pelses’ money runs out and they must sell Mrs. Van Pels’s fur coat. It is a tribute to the vividness of Anne’s writing that readers can recall the drama surrounding the loss of the coat decades after reading the diary. All over Europe, families were deciding what to sell or keep or barter as they struggled to survive. But of all those painful conversations, the one we hear about in detail is the one that Anne describes in a few lines. The argument erupts over a rabbit-skin coat that Mrs. Van Pels has worn for seventeen years, and for which her husband has received the impressive sum of 325 florins. Having hoped to save the money in order to purchase new clothes after the war, Mrs. Van Pels is enraged by her hus
band’s insistence that the money is deperately needed by the household.

“The yells and screams, stamping and abuse—you can’t possibly imagine it! It was frightening. My family stood at the bottom of the stairs, holding their breath, ready if necessary to drag them apart!”

How humiliating for the Van Pelses to have such a squalid fight with another family listening, and not just any family but the
perfect
Franks. In many ways, the Van Pelses are the more well drawn and rounded of the two couples in the secret annex, since—unlike the angelic Pim and (in Anne’s view) the unfeeling Mummy—the Van Pelses are alternately and sometimes simultaneously maddening and touching.

The gunfire that frightens Anne terrifies her neighbor: “Mrs. Van Daan, the fatalist, was nearly crying, and said in a very timid little voice, “Oh, it is so unpleasant! Oh, they are shooting so hard,” by which she really means “I’m so frightened.” There’s something affecting about her husband’s hypochondria, the “tremendous fuss” he makes about a little cold, rubbing himself with eucalyptus and gargling with chamomile tea. Anne’s dual portrait captures so much that, even as enforced intimacy enrages her, we can see the Van Pelses’ charm and vulnerability shining through.