Written by Jan Lanicek
Her photo is well-known. For some, it depicts Miss Quack Quack’s mischievous smile as a small child. Others see the picture as a mysterious shroud of mystery, reminiscent of Leonardo Da Vinci’s Mona Lisa.
Millions of people have read her journal, seen many versions of her narrative on TV and in theaters, or gone to exhibitions that focus on her life. The house in Amsterdam, where she spent 760 days in the secret annex, hiding from the Gestapo and their Dutch collaborators, had thousands of people waiting in front of it.
Despite everything, I still think that humans are nice at heart, according to the most well-known phrase from her journal that was immortalized in the Hollywood movie.
Three weeks before to the Nazis capturing her family, in July 1944, 15-year-old Jewish girl Anne Frank wrote the sentence. It symbolizes the simplicity or innocence of a teenager who, following the war, rose to prominence as one of the most recognizable representations of the Nazi Holocaust.
The quote conveys the universal idea that goodness will ultimately triumph. As a result, Anne’s legacy has become a widely used cliché that advances political agendas and activists. However, who was Anne Frank in reality? What distinguishes her from the Anne Franks that have surfaced since the war’s conclusion?
Anne Frank: Her Many Lives Ruth Franklin (Press of Yale University)
In her most recent book, renowned author Ruth Franklin delves into these difficult issues. She deserves praise for trying to capture Anne’s character and charm as closely as possible while handling a challenging issue with tact.
Franklin takes two routes. She starts by piecing together Anne’s life from her journal and the memories of those who knew her. In the second section, she discloses Anne Frank’s and the diary’s afterlife in various settings and on various platforms.
She comes to the conclusion that the girl who lived in the secret annex and wrote the journal is very different from the Anne that most people know or imagine.
The story
A wealthy, assimilated German-Jewish family welcomed Annelies Marie Frank into the world in 1929 in Frankfurt am Main. Her parents, Otto and Edith, made the decision to move Anne and her older sister, Margot, to the Netherlands following the ascent of Hitler and the implementation of the first racial legislation. Even after the German invasion in 1940, they remained in Amsterdam in spite of the increasing danger. Emigration attempts to the United States were unsuccessful.
Their lives continued to be restricted by the growing persecution. The Nazis started organizing the expulsion of Jews to the east in early 1942. The family made the decision to hide when Margot got a call in July asking to be sent to occupied Poland.
After more than two years in the covert annex, they took in four additional fugitives: dentist Fritz Pfeffer and the van Pels family, which included their adolescent son Peter. A number of people, most notably Miep and Jan Gies, backed them.
In early August 1944, the gang ran out of luck due to the ongoing pressures of living in the cramped environment. After being deceived, the Nazis moved them to Westerbork, a transit camp, from where they boarded the final train to Auschwitz. A month later, Margot and Anne were taken from their mother and taken to the central German city of Bergen-Belsen.
Their mental and physical health quickly declined. Later, a Belsen survivor recalled the two slender, shaven-headed individuals that resembled frigid little birds.
Anne and Margot were victims of typhus, which broke out in the crowded camp just before the war ended. Out of the eight people who hid in the secret annex, Otto was the only one who survived Auschwitz.
The diary
Shortly before relocating to the hidden annex, Anne received the red-checkered diary on her thirteenth birthday. Although she only wrote sometimes, the diary quickly became her daily companion. She was able to communicate her emotions there.
The diary, which Franklin identifies as a character from Cissy van Marxveldt’s well-known children’s books, provides a detailed reconstruction of life in hiding by detailing the daily routine in letters to an imaginary companion named Kitty. Additionally, it gave Anne a way to express her aggravation over her ongoing arguments with Pfeffer, Mrs. van Pels, and her mother.
Her developing bond with Peter, which ultimately became romantic, was another notable aspect that dominated subsequent depictions.
The exiled Dutch education minister, Gerrit Bolkestein, implored listeners to preserve documentary records of their lives under the Nazis in a radio broadcast that Anne heard in March 1944. Anne started rewriting her journal, this time with the goal of publishing it. According to Franklin, this transformed the work into a diary-style memoir.
The raid interrupted Anne’s work before she could finish. The diary did not survive in its entirety. Although it is absent from the original volumes, which span more than a year, it is present in the version Anne wrote after March 1944.
Several versions
In June 1945, Otto went back to Amsterdam. Miep Gies gave them Anne’s papers, which she had discovered in the annex, once they had confirmation that Anne had not survived. Otto chose to publish the journal, but he betrayed Anne’s legacy in what Franklin refers to as the most ambiguous and contentious part of her life.
Otto merged the two diary entries. He went back to the parts of the text that Anne had cut out, the parts about her love affair with Peter. He tempered his criticism of Mr. and Mrs. van Pels and Anne’s mother.
Franklin thinks Otto did this out of consideration for the victims. Only decades after Otto’s passing were the final pages of Anne’s diary, which contained negative remarks regarding her parents’ marriage, made public.
It took nearly 40 years for Dutch scholars to create a critical edition that compared all of the diary’s variants. This inevitably begs the question of how much Anne Frank, as she lived in hiding and died at Belsen, differs from the Anne Frank people as they know her from Otto’s version.
Afterlife and projection
The diary quickly gained popularity despite early skepticism, particularly in the US. Soon after, attempts were made to adapt it into a movie and a play. Otto consented as he required funds to maintain the house and its addition.
The Hollywood feature film debuted in 1959, whereas the Broadway play debuted in 1955. In the following decades, Anne s story inspired scores of authors, but also activists who referred to the public icon in support of their agenda.
There were some controversies despite the massive exposure. Franklin claims that it has caused Anne to become whatever and whatever we need her to be. Such initiatives continue to emerge. Franklin is right to criticise those who deliberately aim to provoke, for example, by using Anne s image in anti-Zionist campaigns.
The original theatre and film representations, according to some, intentionally universalised Anne s story, suppressing her Jewish identity. This, according to Franklin, made the story more palatable to the American audience and reflected the American Jewish ideal at that time of full assimilation into American society.
Yet although Anne s diary can speak to a multitude of audiences, it is a deeply Jewish story. Anne s relation with her Jewish identity and Zionism was ambiguous, though she was aware of her background and wrote that they will always remain Jews . Margot, her sister, wanted to go toMandatory Palestineas a maternity nurse; Otto in his later life was supportive of the Zionist project.
Another affair, more recently, focused on the parts of the diary where Anne expressed her desire to touch her female friend s breast and kiss her. She also wrote about her attraction to female nudity in art.
There were accusations that Ottocensored these parts of the diary, in an effort to deny the coming out of his daughter. This is unfair criticism. As Franklin shows, Otto included the entries, slightly modified, in the first US edition, even though Anne had removed them from the rewritten version of her diary.
Ironically, conservative circles in the United States have called for aban of a graphic novelbased on the book, calling it Anne Frank pornography . Franklin cautions us against such projections and reading too much into these comments. We simply don t know enough about Anne and about how her sexuality would develop. In the diary, she repeatedly expressed attraction to several boys, including Peter van Pels.
The raid
These efforts only show how the popularised image of Anne keeps attracting attention. We still want to know more about her and solve all mysteries. In 2022, a Canadian author Rosemary Sullivan, in cooperation with a former FBI special agent, published a book that claimed to solve the mystery of Anne s betrayal.
Until today, the culprit has not been identified. According to Sullivan, the Annex eight were betrayed by a member of the DutchJewish Council. This compulsory community body has often been accused of collaboration.
The publication triggered a quick response from Dutch Holocaust historians who, in along rebuttal, rejected Sullivan s claim, calling it a baseless fabrication. Dutch and German publisherswithdrew the book.
Who was the real Anne Frank?
The question ultimately remains unresolved.
Is it the girl who penned the first version of her diary to cope with the persecution and isolation in the annex? Is it the young woman, author of the second version, who matured too quickly because of a lack of contact with her peers? Is it the Anne that Otto, grieving after the loss of his whole family, reconstructed from the pages saved by Miep Gies?
Or is she one of the versions of her story produced at Broadway, Hollywood, by countless writers, and now even political activists?
We all suffer from cognitive dissonance. The only photos we have of Anne are those of a young girl from the time before the family went into hiding. But the Anne who wrote the diary was older, almost womanlike, physically and mentally. Miep Gies recalled that she had arrived a girl, but she would leave a woman .
Reading the diary, even though we know the end, we hope she will survive. We don t want to know what happened after their capture. We don t want to see her bald and emaciated in Auschwitz or Belsen.
At the same time, we know the story will end there. Franklin bitterly remarks that readers already perceive Anne as if she were a figure in a book rather than a real person. To just about everyone, her life is of secondary importance to what we make of it.
Perhaps we should just conclude, together with Franklin that Anne was a talented girl and an accomplished and sophisticated writer a deliberate, literary witness to Nazi persecution . She had many virtues and vices.
She can inspire us, we need to learn about her, but we should respect her. We should not project onto her our current agenda, concerns or political views. We should restore her as a human being , and that s exactly what Franklin does.
Jan Lanicek is Associate Professor in Modern European History and Jewish History at UNSW Sydney.
