Anne Frank (3 page)

The first was the diary that has had, and continues to have, such a powerful effect on readers, the book that has been adapted for Broadway and Hollywood, and that is still taught in classrooms everywhere. That is the so-called “c” version. Any discussion of Anne’s influence, of the intensity with which her diary has been taken to heart by its fans, and of the ways in which her “message” has been interpreted requires us to look at the “c” version (regardless of what we might think of the successive drafts, or of Otto Frank’s editing) as if it
were
the only version of the diary. Which, in effect, it is—except for the few readers, among millions, who have professional or private reasons for wanting to study the published diary alongside the alternate drafts.

At the same time, it seemed unfair to Anne Frank as a writer to ignore what the variant drafts provide: evidence of her creative process, of her gifts for revision, of her first and second thoughts about how she wanted to portray herself and those around her. What was added to, and lost from, the book
during those final months as Anne feverishly rewrote—on the loose colored sheets—the observations, reflections, and self-representation of an earlier self?

But that was only part of the complexities involved. When I began to consider writing about the diary, I had only a vague notion of the controversies it had inspired. I knew that Anne’s work and her symbolic significance have incited battles extending far beyond the book itself. I had heard that the diary’s journey from the printed page to the stage and screen was a rocky one, but I’d had no idea that it involved lawsuits, betrayals and alliances, accusations of plagiarism and breach of contract, and obsessive paranoia concerning Zionist or Stalinist plots. Few other writers have given rise to such intense emotion, such fierce possessiveness, so many arguments about who is entitled to speak in her name, and about what her book does, and doesn’t, represent. Few have had such an effect on the world, and inspired the sort of devotion that more often surrounds the figure of a religious leader, or a saint.

I
F ONE
hallmark of a masterpiece is the burrlike tenacity with which it sticks in our memory, Anne Frank’s journal claims that status as a consequence of the indelible impression that its “plot” and “characters” leave on its readers. Decades after the diary’s publication, the entrance to the secret annex remains the door through which new readers, many of them young, will first enter the historical moment in which it was written. When the book is taught in classrooms everywhere, all sorts of lessons—frequently improving, occasionally peculiar, and often quite unlike anything Anne Frank could have intended—are extracted from its pages. Anne’s diary is one of the texts most frequently read and studied by incarcerated men and women in prisons throughout the United States.

The book has been translated into dozens of languages;
tens of millions of copies are in print. The extent to which the figure of Anne Frank has permeated world culture can perhaps be seen in the fact that, in Japan (where the book was an enormous success, selling 116,000 copies in its first five months in print), to have one’s “Anne Frank day” became a euphemism for menstruation, a subject Anne mentioned in her journal. A variety of rose named after Anne Frank now grows all over Japan.

A further measure of the book’s currency is the excitement generated by each new revelation about Anne’s life or about her diary. On September 10, 1998, the
New York Times
ran a two-thousand-word essay, beginning on the front page, headlined “Five Precious Pages Renew Wrangling over Anne Frank” and subtitled: “A long-withheld page from Anne Frank’s diary reveals difficulties with her mother: “I am unable to talk with her. I cannot look lovingly into those cold eyes. I cannot, never!” It’s hard to think of another literary text—a lost Shakespeare sonnet? a previously unknown verse of the Bible?—whose discovery would have received such prominent coverage, especially if the passage concerned a young girl’s view of her parents’ marriage.

Yet another major news story broke in 2005 when a cache of letters was discovered at New York’s YIVO Institute, correspondence documenting Otto Frank’s desperate attempts to find asylum for his family in the United States or Cuba. These letters inspired a Long Island congressman to campaign—in vain—to have Anne Frank granted honorary U.S. citizenship as partial atonement for our government’s refusal to save the Franks.

A range of films and plays have attempted to tell Anne’s story, with varying degrees of success. Jon Blair’s
Anne Frank Remembered
won an Academy Award for Documentary Feature in 1996. Films and docudramas have included “re-creations” in which actors played the Franks and their neighbors, and one made-for-television film,
Who Betrayed Anne Frank?,
frames
the story as a detective procedural with the sort of ominous sound track we associate with shows about the riddle of the Mayans’ disappearance. At the 2007 New York Fringe Theater festival,
Days and Nights: page 121, lines 11 and 12
featured actors recognizable as the characters in Anne’s diary, but who—in Marc Stuart Weitz’s play—passed their time in the attic reciting Chekhov’s
The Seagull.
The 2003 hip-hop film,
Anne B. Real,
centers on a female rapper who finds inspiration in Anne Frank’s story, while the popular book
The Freedom Writers Diary
and the subsequent film,
Freedom Writers,
describes how an inner-city classroom was energized by a journal kept during a war that few of the students had known much about. Anne’s story has even been made into a Japanese anime cartoon,
Anne no Nikki.

In 1998, the indie band Neutral Milk Hotel released
In the Aeroplane over the Sea,
an album of songs partly inspired by Anne Frank’s life and death. Ten years later, a musical adapted from the diary—
The Diary of Anne Frank: A Song to Life
—opened in Madrid. A puppet show of the diary has appeared to sellout crowds in Atlanta, while an episode of
60 Minutes
reported that North Korean schoolchildren were being assigned to read Anne’s journal with instructions to think of George W. Bush as Hitler and of the Americans as the Nazis who wished to exterminate the North Koreans.

Books of nonfiction and fiction have expanded upon, and been inspired by, what Anne confided to her journal. Periodically, the publishing industry discovers the war diary of some hapless young person and promotes its author as the Anne Frank of Serbia, or Poland, or Vietnam, or the latest place where children are the victims of their elders. Philip Roth’s 1979 novel,
The Ghost Writer,
includes a sustained meditation about Anne and her diary occasioned by Nathan Zuckerman’s fantasy that the beautiful mistress of his literary idol is Anne Frank, who has not only survived the camps but has come to America,
where she is living under a pseudonym and has landed a job archiving manuscripts for her lover. Roth’s Anne Frank character, Amy Bellette, reappears, older and infirm, in his 2007 novel,
Exit Ghost.

That same year, newspapers around the world reported that, weakened by age and disease, the chestnut tree outside the secret annex was in danger of being cut down. Emotions ran high during the debate about whether the leafy messenger that had brought Anne news about the changing seasons could be saved. As I write this, the valiant old tree struggles on in the courtyard of the former warehouse where the Frank family hid, and plans are being made to import and plant ten saplings from the tree in the United States.

ONE PROBLEM CONFRONTING EVERY WRITER OF FICTION
or nonfiction is the question of background. How much must a reader know in order to make sense of what the author is trying to convey? In a diary entry dated June 20, 1942, but written almost two years afterward, Anne acknowledges the necessity of giving Kitty, her invented confidante, enough information to enable her to follow the narrative. “I don’t want to set down a series of bald facts in a diary like most people do…but no one will grasp what I’m talking about if I begin my letters to Kitty just out of the blue, so I’ll start by sketching in brief the story of my life.”

We’ll return to this entry later, but, in passing, let’s note the phrase: “no one will grasp what I’m talking about if I begin my letters to Kitty just out of the blue.” Not only does it suggest that this is something other than a girl confiding in her diary, but it contradicts what Anne says in the same entry: “I don’t intend to show this cardboard-covered notebook, bearing the
proud name of ‘diary,’ to anyone, unless I find a real friend, boy or girl, probably no one cares.”

The sketch that ensues, presumably intended for that “real friend,” and in truth for a wider audience, could hardly be more economical or concise. Anne begins by explaining that her father was thirty-six when he married her mother, who was twenty-five, that Anne’s sister, Margot, was born in 1926 in Frankfurt am Main, and that Anne herself—Annelies Marie Frank—was born three years later, on June 12, 1929.

In May 1944, Anne asks Kitty if she has ever really told her anything about her family and proceeds to flesh out her earlier outline. She explains that her father was born in Frankfurt am Main, where her grandfather Michael Frank owned a bank. As a boy, Otto attended dances, and there were parties every week. Surrounded by beautiful girls, he enjoyed waltzing and lavish dinners. After her grandfather’s death, much of the money was lost; war and inflation took what was left. Her mother wasn’t quite so rich, Anne informs Kitty, but still there was plenty of money, and Edith often delighted her daughters with stories about engagement parties attended by 250 guests.

Anne’s uncharacteristic longing for her parents’ lost wealth and their privileged childhoods has been precipitated by the deterioration of living conditions in the annex. Since the arrest of Miep’s trusted black-market coupon dealer, the hidden Jews have either starved or been forced to eat spoiled food. In case their diet isn’t demoralizing enough, Miep—meaning well, as always—has tried to cheer them up with a story about an engagement party she attended. At the celebration, her hosts served vegetable soup with meatballs, cheese, rolls, roast beef, cakes, and wine; this enviable menu inspired, in the hungry young writer, an uncharacteristic joke at the expense of her beloved helpers (“Miep had ten drinks and smoked 3 cigarettes; can that be the woman who calls herself a teetotaler? If Miep
had all those, I wonder how many her spouse managed to knock back?”) that Otto cut from the published diary.

In any case, Miep’s description led Anne to compare the delights outside the annex with the privations inside it, and the present with the past. “Miep made our mouths water telling us about the food they had…. We, who get nothing but two spoonfuls of porridge for our breakfast and whose tummies were so empty that they were positively rattling, we, who get nothing but half-cooked spinach (to preserve the vitamins!) and rotten potatoes day after day, we, who get nothing but lettuce, cooked or raw, spinach and yet again spinach in our hollow stomachs. Perhaps we may yet grow to be as strong as Popeye, although I don’t see much sign of it at present!

“If Miep had taken us to the party we shouldn’t have left any rolls for the other guests. If we had been at the party we should undoubtedly have snatched up the whole lot and left not even the furniture in place…. And these are the granddaughters of a millionaire. The world is a queer place!”

T
HOUGH
not quite the millionaire his granddaughter imagined, Michael Frank was the founder of the Bank Michael Frank, based in Frankfurt, where Otto grew up in a close-knit, assimilated German-Jewish community, surrounded by art and good furniture. Servants.
Parties every week.

After one semester at Heidelberg, Otto left the university and traveled to New York with a school friend, Nathan Straus, whose family owned Macy’s department store. Otto worked at the store until, in 1909, he was called back to Germany to deal with the family finances in the aftermath of his father’s sudden death. Like his brothers Herbert and Robert, Otto served in the German army during World War I. As part of a range-finding unit, Otto fought with an infantry corps composed largely of surveyors and mathematicians. By the time the war ended, he
had been promoted to lieutenant, and in 1925 he married Edith Hollander, whose father ran a successful business dealing in scrap iron.

Otto spent his early adulthood attempting to save the family bank as it gradually went under, weakened by political and personal crises: the war, hyperinflation, the stock market crash, the Great Depression, a scandal in which Otto’s brother Herbert was accused of illegal dealings in foreign securities, and the end of Weimar democracy.

Though he has been charged with an ostrichlike refusal to understand the implications of the rise of National Socialism and to foresee the threat it would pose to his livelihood and his family, in fact Otto had a talent for apprising his situation and for operating under stress. Many years later, the producer and playwrights who brought Anne’s diary to Broadway remarked that Otto was not only the loving, grieving father of a murdered girl, but a gifted businessman who grasped the practical and financial ramifications of her diary’s success.

Having opened and then liquidated a branch of the Michael Frank bank in Amsterdam, in the 1920s, Otto knew and liked the Dutch capital. He had made contacts there who would prove useful when, in 1933, Hitler was appointed chancellor and the Nazis’ increasingly vicious anti-Jewish laws convinced him that the wisest option was to leave Germany and move his wife and daughters to the deceptive safety of Holland.

Anne concludes the passage about the engagement party that Miep describes and about the Frank family’s fall from grace: “Daddy was therefore extremely well brought up and he laughed very much yesterday, when, for the first time in his fifty-five years, he scraped out the frying pan at the table.”

T
HE ENTRY
dated June 20, 1942, continues: “…
as we are Jewish, we emigrated to Holland in 1933
…” Like any skilled writer
wisely determined to omit unnecessary details, Anne brings us directly to the emigration that became urgent
as we are Jewish.

In 1933, around the time that Nazi storm troopers initiated a boycott of German-Jewish businesses, the Franks bid good-bye to Frankfurt. Otto shut down the Michael Frank bank, left Edith and the girls with his mother-in-law in Aachen, and went ahead to Amsterdam. There, with the help of his brother-in-law, Erich Elias, who had emigrated to Basel and was employed by the Swiss branch of a German company selling jelling agents for jams and preserves, Otto established a branch of the Opekta pectin supplier, with a limited marketing range restricted to private customers. A few years later, Otto formed an additional company, Pectacon, trading in seasonings and spices. He had been raised to run a bank, but business was business, and he could adapt. He could protect and support his family, which, for Otto, was always the highest priority.

A short time later, Edith—who had made several trips to help Otto find new quarters—rejoined her husband. In December, Margot was reunited with her parents in Amsterdam. In February 1934, the Franks decided that Anne should appear as the surprise birthday present for her older sister; the family story was that little Anne was plunked on the table as a gift. So she joined the rest of her family in their home at 37 Merwedeplein, in a newly developed South Amsterdam district, the River Quarter, which had become a magnet for German-Jewish refugees.

The neighborhood, and the Frank home, became the center of a community. The parents of Anne’s playmates visited on weekends and holidays. On Purim, in either 1938 or 1939, as reports of the Nazi anti-Jewish violence in Germany were growing more disturbing, the father of one of Anne’s friends startled and amused the other parents by dressing up as Hitler
and standing at full attention when they came out to see who had rung the doorbell.

Already a reader, Anne was enrolled in the progressive Montessori kindergarten, a short walk from the Franks’ new apartment. Soon, far more rapidly than her mother, she learned to function in a new language.

A demanding and often sickly baby, Anne grew into a challenging child—mercurial, moody, humorous, alternately outgoing and shy. A natural performer, she liked to pop her elbow out of its socket to get her friends’ attention. She was bossy, theatrical, and outspoken. She was only four when she and her beloved grandmother Oma Hollander boarded a crowded Aachen streetcar, and Anne demanded, “Won’t someone offer a seat to this old lady?”

In Amsterdam, she grew close to Hanneli Goslar, the “Lies” about whom Anne would later have the waking nightmare she describes in the diary. (“I saw her in front of me, clothed in rags, her face thin and worn.”) A German refugee who had arrived in Holland around the same time as Anne, Hanneli met Anne in a grocery store; their mothers were glad to find someone with whom they could speak German. The Franks called on Hanneli Goslar’s parents every Friday evening, and the two families celebrated Passover together. Eventually, Hanneli’s mother, Ruth, would say about Anne, “God knows everything, but Anne knows everything better.”

At the Montessori kindergarten, the prevailing theory was that adults should encourage children to flourish and grow and have a voice in deciding what they wished to do—and what sort of person they wanted to become. Otto and Edith Frank agreed; later, in the annex, the Van Pelses would often criticize the Franks for their “modern” ideas about childrearing.

By nature more lenient than his wife, Otto was, perhaps consequently, more popular, not only with his daughters but
also with the girls’ friends. Good looking, tall, patient, and courtly, Otto was the kind of father who taught the neighborhood children how to ride their bikes. How one pities the conventional, anxious Edith Frank, not confident, stiff, and far outmatched by her firecracker of a daughter, whom her husband adored.

The day after she and Anne met in the grocery, Hanneli began at the Montessori kindergarten, where, not knowing the language or any of the other children, she was hugely relieved to see Anne, from the back, playing music with bells. Anne turned, saw Hanneli, ran over to her, and threw her arms around her. “From then on we were friends.” Anne’s friendships, like those of many girls her age, had the intensity of love affairs, with all the concomitant jealousies, quarrels, separations, and reconciliations. Her high spirits and affectionate, impulsive generosity put her at the center of a tight clique that included Hanneli Goslar and Susanne Lederman. Their exclusive little trio was known, in their neighborhood, as Anne, Hanne, and Sanne.

Eva Geiringer-Schloss, Anne’s near neighbor on Merwedeplein, arrived from Vienna, via Brussels, in 1940. After the war, her mother, Fritzi, would marry the widowed Otto Frank. In her memoir,
Eva’s Story,
Anne’s former classmate describes the “inseparable” Anne-Hanne-Sanne troika as being more sophisticated, more like teenagers, than the other girls, whom the chosen three—giggling about boys and fashion and film magazines—viewed with barely concealed disdain. They were famously boy crazy, especially Anne. One friend remembered Anne assuming that every boy wanted to be her boyfriend. Hanneli Goslar remarked that Anne was “always fussing” with her long hair. “Her hair kept her busy all the time.”

Eva’s memories of the enviably stylish Anne Frank include this revealing story:

Interviewed by Ernst Schnabel, a novelist and dramatist who served in the German navy during World War II and who wrote the 1958 book
Anne Frank: A Portrait in Courage,
the mother of Anne’s friend Jopie van der Waal (Schnabel employed the pseudonym used in Anne’s diary for Jacqueline van Maarsen) also remembered making dresses for Anne. But what she mostly recalled is Anne’s forceful personality, her desire to be a writer, and her precocious sense of self. The phrase, “She knew who she was,” recurs, like a refrain, throughout the conversation, during which Mme. Van der Waal described the ceremony and the theater with which Anne arrived to spend the weekend:

“When Anne came to stay with us, she always brought a suitcase. A suitcase, mind you, when it wasn’t a stone’s throw between us. The suitcase was empty of course, but Anne insisted on it, because only with the suitcase did she feel as if she were really traveling.”

A
FLICKER
of a home movie. June 22, 1941. The whole thing lasts ten seconds.

The bicycles slipping by provide the only indication that we are in Holland. The brick Merwedeplein apartment block looks more like married students’ housing on an American state university campus than the quaint center-city canal houses we associate with Amsterdam.