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Anne Frank
BOOK REVIEW
Behind the curtain of
war, a search for answers
By Elie Wiesel, 6/1/2003
The Hidden Life of Otto Frank
By Carol Ann Lee
Morrow, 411 pp., illustrated, $26.95
I only met Otto Frank once. It was late in the 1960s. Invited to a French television broadcast, we had a brief and good conversation on our common concerns. They showed a film there of his daughter Anne. Beforehand, Frank wanted the audience to see him leave the theater. I understood. Undoubtedly, he wanted people to know that he couldn't stand to see an actress portraying his daughter. At the end, he reappeared.
And now, faced with Carol Ann Lee's book ''The Hidden Life of Otto Frank,'' I am confronted with an ethical problem: I found in it this Otto Frank quote that I didn't know: ''Anne's book is not a war book. War is the background. It is not a Jewish book either, though Jewish sphere, sentiment and surrounding are in the background. I never wanted a Jew writing an introduction for it.''
Several years ago, Penguin had asked me to write a preface for its new edition of ''The Diary of Anne Frank.'' And I wrote it. Would I do it today? I'm not sure. But since I did, in a way, thwart Otto Frank's wishes, do I have the moral right to express myself on a work that, on more than one level, will upset those who love Anne Frank and glorify her memory?
Yet, in this work, we also discover a lot of things that, drawn for the most part from existing sources, tell about the person: his environment, memories, nightmares, dilemmas, challenges, fights, and his loyalty to the memory of his beloved daughter. And his ''secret life'' as well. What exactly is this secret life? His lack of true and lasting love for Edith, his wife? His ambiguous and ambivalent relationship with the Jewish New York writer Meyer Levin, who with unbounded loyalty launched ''The Diary of Anne Frank'' to become a worldwide success?
Here, the story deals with the father and not his daughter. Are there in the biography of Otto Frank some dark areas, perhaps even prohibited and condemnable?
Disconcertingly, these questions follow each other: Why did Otto Frank leave so little money to Hermine ''Miep'' Santrouschitz, his main protector? Is it possible that he wanted to make a point of reproaching himself for a behavior more or less guilty, if not cowardly? In other words: Is it true that, during these years, Frank dreaded blackmail by a Gestapo collaborator, Tonny Ahlers, who was responsible for the arrests of many hidden Jews? Did he actually dread being denounced by Ahlers for having surrendered some important products to the Wehrmacht? How can one explain his many relationships with this dubious character after the war? Why did he write a letter to help SS Oberscharfuhrer Karl Josef Silberbauer, who had conducted the arrest of Frank's family in 1944? Was it only because, during the arrest of the family, he had behaved with less brutality than the others?
In a troubling passage in this book, Lee says, ''Otto Frank had made a deal with the devil, but the price can scarcely be imagined. In working with the enemy, Otto hoped to protect not only his company but also himself and his family. . . . Throughout the war years, Otto was to all intents and purposes leading a double life.'' Can you say he led a secret life, therefore he was guilty?
And this: Did Frank know the identity of his informer? If you believe Lee, the answer would be yes, and that could be qualified as slanderous. Is this why Frank never named him?
I must state clearly that nothing that I read in this work and in others would allow me to judge Otto Frank. To my eyes, nothing can cast a slur on his honor: Even if he felt obliged to engage in commercial relations with the German Army to protect his family, he deserves our understanding more than our severity. Moreover, as far as I'm concerned, I will never judge a survivor of Auschwitz, and certainly not someone who has dedicated his whole life to reminding the world of the ordeals inflicted on the Jewish people during the torment.
But precisely on this point, the question on the concept of memory as seen by Frank does not seem to me to be out of place. We know, in reading what he stated and restated on many occasions, that what concerns the book, the play, and the film, for which he holds the rights, what he believed to be his goal in broadcasting the message of his daughter, was to accentuate its universal and universalist aspect. Does it mean partial de-Judaization? But then, how was he able to forget and even eclipse his own description of Anne's diary? She wished to account and call to mind ''how we lived, what we ate, and what we talked about as Jews in hiding.'' Does that square with the broadened interpretation that her father gave to her project?
In reading this work, which treats equally the general situation of the Jews in Holland, one discovers important facts: Only 25 percent of Dutch Jews survived. Anti-Semitism there prevailed between the two wars and persisted also at another level, after the liberation. The official attitude toward the survivors there was worse than anywhere else in Western Europe.
But, we would be wrong to forget the following lesson: It was a Dutchman who, during the occupation, helped the Frank family, and it was a Dutchman who betrayed them.
And that is also part of the Jewish history.
Elie Wiesel is a professor in the humanities at Boston University.
Chicago Tribune
April 17, 2012
One girl's diary opened the world's eyes
By Pam Becker
Every so often
a book comes along that changes the world in some way. With Holocaust
Remembrance Day around the corner in the U.S. (April 19), it seems appropriate
to consider this one.
What it is: The book often called "The Diary of Anne Frank" was first
published in 1947 in the Netherlands under the title "The Secret Annex: Diary
Letters from June 14, 1942 to August 1, 1944." It was published in the U.S. in
1952 under the title "Anne Frank: The Diary of a Young Girl." It has
subsequently been published around the world.
How it changed the world: The diary, containing the personal musings of a
girl trying to negotiate the tumults of adolescence while hiding with her family
in fear for their lives, brought home the horrors of the Nazi Holocaust in a way
no news reports could.
"When you hear the voice of one girl who was in one of those camps, it's able to
touch you in a way more than all of those statistics," says Judith Jones, a
recently retired legendary book editor who, while working for Doubleday in Paris
after World War II, discovered the diary in a pile of rejects and insisted that
Doubleday publish it in the U.S.
"I think that nobody had grasped" what happened, she says. "I just think the
idea of destroying a whole race of people … was so appalling that people
couldn't believe it. Here was evidence of how it touched human lives."
The diary was one of the earliest Holocaust texts to reach American readers. And
today, "I think it still probably is the earliest text by which a new generation
comes to know something of the Holocaust, not only in the U.S. but in other
countries," says Emily Budick, who is serving a one-year fellowship in the
Center for Advanced Holocaust Studies at the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum in
Washington.
The diary had implications beyond the Holocaust. "It awakened (people) to the
horror of this kind of thinking and the lengths to which a crazy dictator could
go," Jones says.
The story: The diary begins in 1942 shortly before the Franks — mother
Edith, father Otto, Anne and her sister, Margot — go into hiding in Amsterdam
with four other people when it becomes evident that Jews are in mortal danger
from the Germans occupying the Netherlands. Anne writes movingly about daily
life in hiding, describing what they eat and how they obtain it, her dreams of
becoming a writer after the war, her fear of discovery. The family gets news of
the outside world via a radio and the people helping them hide.
"Terrible things are happening outside," she writes. "At any time of night and
day, poor helpless people are being dragged out of their homes. … Children come
home from school to find that their parents have disappeared."
The diary ends abruptly after about two years of entries; the Franks and their
companions were arrested Aug. 4, 1944, and transported to concentration camps.
In 1945 Anne and her sister died in Bergen-Belsen, in Germany, a few months
before the camp was liberated by British troops. Anne's father, Otto, was the
only one of the eight to survive the war. He devoted the rest of his life to the
publication and dissemination of his daughter's diary and its message, and died
in 1980 in Switzerland.
Why you should read it now: Though the Holocaust happened roughly 70
years ago, it remains a current topic. Virtually every day brings some mention
of it. A search of a database containing about 70 major world newspapers for the
dates March 18-31 of this year, for example, turns up 219 results for the word
"Holocaust" and 383 for "Nazi."
Beyond the fact that many people still living suffer from the Holocaust's
effects is the fact that the diary introduced the world at large to the concept
of genocide. "The Holocaust is a figure for genocide before we became conscious
of other genocides," Budick says.
The diary is relevant, too, in that it reminds the world what can happen if
ethnic, racial, religious and other forms of discrimination and hatred —
instances of which occur daily around the world — are allowed to go unchecked.
And there is one more reason to read the book: "It is itself a readable and
lovely text," says Budick, a literary critic researching fictionalized accounts
of the Holocaust.
What we think of it: When I first read the diary, as a girl about Anne's
age (13-15), the sadness I felt was not personal. I thought of it as a
historical event, distant from my own life. Never mind that the diary's events
occurred a mere 16 years before my birth, or that — unknown to me — members of
two families on the street where I then lived survived these experiences.
I couldn't have known then that I would marry into a family of Holocaust
survivors, and that the Holocaust would become a devastating part of my daily
life. Rereading the book now, I see that had Anne survived, she might now be
suffering through the same crippling symptoms I see in my in-laws: voracious
rage, insomnia, an inability to trust, paranoia and more. I know that it is
possible for survivors who were children in hiding then, like Anne, to literally
relive their pasts: to once again see yellow stars on clothing; to hear voices
threatening to beat them, spit on them, kill them; even to fear that their grown
children are in danger of starving, or worse.
Many people, however, have taken inspiration from the diary, which displays an
admirable intellect and spunk. Anne's hope was to publish her diary or a
fictionalized version of it after the war.
"Ten years after the war people would find it very amusing to read how we lived,
what we ate and what we talked about as Jews in hiding," she wrote.
If only she knew.
Remembering
The annual U.S. Holocaust Remembrance Day, established by Congress in 1980,
falls on Thursday this year. Activities and programs are held throughout that
week, known as the Days of Remembrance, by religious, community, government and
private institutions.
International Holocaust Remembrance Day, established in 2005 by the United
Nations, is held Jan. 27 each year, the date Soviet troops liberated the
Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp complex.
For more information, go to ushmm.org, the site of theU.S. Holocaust
Memorial Museum in Washington.
03. August 2006
Nr.
178 / Seite 33
Sieh mich nicht als Vierzehnjährige
Von Alexander Jürgs
„Laß mich einfach in Ruhe, wenn du nicht willst, daß ich für immer das Vertrauen in dich verliere", schreibt eine erboste Tochter an den Vater, der sich in ihr Liebesleben eingemischt hat. „Ich will meinen eigenen Weg gehen, dem Weg folgen, der mir richtig erscheint. Sieh mich nicht als 14jährige, denn all die Sorgen haben mich älter gemacht. Ich werde mein Verhalten nicht bereuen." Die wütende Tochter, die diese Zeilen im Mai 1944 verfaßt, ist Anne Frank. Seit beinahe zwei Jahren lebt sie mit ihrer Familie in dem Versteck im Hinterhaus der Firma Opekta in der Prinsengracht 163 in Amsterdam.
Diesen Brief, in dem sie ihrem Vater die Liebe zu dem ebenfalls im Versteck lebenden Peter van Pels gesteht und erklärt, zitiert Anne Frank auch in ihrem berühmten Tagebuch. Dort allerdings fällt ihre Wortwahl weniger drastisch aus als im Original. Und dort, im Eintrag vom 7. Mai 1944, steht auch, daß Otto Frank beschlossen hat, den Brief im Ofen zu verbrennen. Doch das hat er nie getan - und darum können die empörten Zeilen der Anne Frank, die Kurator Wouter van der Sluis „eine Unabhängigkeitserklärung" nennt, heute im Zentrum einer bemerkenswerten Ausstellung stehen, die zwanzig bislang unpublizierte und größtenteils noch nie öffentlich gezeigte Postkarten und Briefe aus der Feder des jüdischen Mädchens zeigt.
Erinnerungen an eine unbekümmerte Kindheit
Wer den Ausstellungsraum im Amsterdams Historisch Museum betritt, erblickt, aufgezogen auf die Rückseiten der Vitrinen, eine großformatige fotografische Ansicht des Wohnblocks im Merweideplein. Dieser Wohnblock steht für das andere Amsterdam der Franks. Hier lebte die Familie nach der Flucht aus Frankfurt gemeinsam mit vielen anderen jüdischen Emigranten von Februar 1934 bis zum Juli 1942, als sie ihr Versteck in der Prinsengracht bezog. „Anne Frank - haar leven in brieven" erzählt von diesen ersten Jahren der Anne Frank in den Niederlanden und zeichnet das Bild einer trotz allen Umständen weitgehend unbekümmerten Kindheit. Den Eltern Frank ist es lange gelungen, ihre Töchter Margot und Anne von den Nachrichten aus Deutschland abzuschirmen.
Auf Fotos sieht man Anne und ihre Freundinnen: lachend, Arm in Arm, eine vergnügte Mädchenbande. Alltagsgegenstände machen die Kindheit des Mädchens lebendig. Mit Perlenketten hat sie in der Montessorischule rechnen gelernt, in die Poesiealben ihrer Schulkameradinnen schrieb sie Gedichte und klebte Rosenbilder. Anne schreibt von Familienausflügen, von der Freude am Eislaufen und sendet „Küsschen" an die Großmutter und Cousins, die in die Schweiz emigriert waren.
Schweres Leben unter der Besatzung
Ihrem Cousin Buddy Elias und dem Anne Frank-Fonds in Basel ist es zu verdanken, daß diese Briefe, die in das fragile Glück der Franks Einblick geben, jetzt öffentlich gezeigt werden. Ausgestellt sind auch Bücher aus der Reihe „Joop ter Heul" der Jugendbuchautorin Cissy van Marxveldt, die Anne Frank gemeinsam mit ihrer Freundin Jacqueline van Maarsen verschlungen hat. An Kitty, eine Figur aus diesen damals ausgesprochen populären Geschichten, soll sie später die Briefe in ihrem Tagebuch richten.
Mit der Invasion der deutschen Armee im Jahr 1940 kehrt der eliminatorische Antisemitismus in das Leben der Franks zurück. Die judenfeindlichen Bestimmungen der Besatzer machen das Leben von Tag zu Tag schwerer. Anne schreibt im Juni 1941 an die Verwandten in der Schweiz: „Ich habe keine große Chance, einen Sonnenbrand zu bekommen, weil wir nicht ins Schwimmbad dürfen. Es ist eine Schande, aber ich kann nichts daran ändern." Wenig mehr als ein Jahr später erhält die Familie die Mitteilung, daß sich Margot der Deportation stellen soll - und flüchtet ins Versteck. Über das grauenhafte Dasein im Hinterhausversteck hat die Welt aus dem Tagebuch des Mädchens, das im März 1945 im Konzentrationslager Bergen-Belsen an Typhus starb, erfahren. In der Ausstellung in Amsterdam läßt sich nun das Leben entdecken, das Anne Frank schon vor ihrem Tod verloren hat.
Text: Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, 23.08.2005, Nr. 195 / Seite 6
Verborgene Blätter
HANS-JÜRGEN DÖSCHER
Carol Ann Lee: Otto Franks Geheimnis. Der Vater von Anne Frank und sein verborgenes Leben. Aus dem Englischen von Renate Weitbrecht und Helmut Dierlamm. Piper Verlag, München 2005. 494 Seiten, 24,90 [Euro]
23. August 2005 ANNE FRANK wird 1929 als Kind jüdischer Eltern in Frankfurt am Main geboren. Ihre Familie flüchtet 1933 nach Amsterdam, wo sie sich von 1942 an in einem Hinterhaus der Prinsengracht versteckt hält. Zu ihrem 13. Geburtstag erhält Anne ein Poesiealbum, das sie bis 1944 als Tagebuch benutzt. Darin schildert sie das Leben im Versteck zwischen Angst und Sehnsucht, Kindheit und Pubertät eines sensiblen Mädchens. Anne Franks Tagebuch, weltweit in über fünfzehn Millionen Exemplaren erschienen, gilt heute als einzigartiges document humain für das Schicksal aller unschuldig Verfolgten in der Zeit des Holocaust. Kaum bekannt wurde dagegen Otto Frank, Annes geliebter und bewunderter Vater, der als einziger seiner Familie die Schoa überlebte und sich zeit seines Lebens dem Licht der Öffentlichkeit entzog. Carol Ann Lee, ausgewiesen durch eine aufsehenerregende Biographie über Anne Frank, erzählt in ihrem neuen Buch, wie Otto Frank im deutsch-jüdischen Bürgertum aufwuchs und nach 1933 ein erfolgreicher Geschäftsmann in Amsterdam wurde. Auf der Basis bislang unbekannter Tagebuchnotizen aus der Feder Otto Franks kann sie die bewegende Geschichte der Gefangenschaft im Hinterhaus bis zum bitteren Ende der Deportation nachzeichnen. Neues erfährt der Leser nicht nur über die dunklen Seiten der vielfach gebrochenen Persönlichkeit Otto Franks, sondern auch über die komplizierte Textgeschichte des Tagebuchs von Anne Frank. Aus den verschiedenen Fassungen, die Anne Frank bis 1944 geschrieben hatte, fertigte ihr Vater nach 1945 eine Abschrift, in der er Passagen glättete, die ihm allzu intim oder boshaft erschienen. Mit Rücksicht auf seine Frau, die in Auschwitz umgekommen ist, redigierte er mehrere Eintragungen, in denen Anne ihrer überzogenen Kritik an der Ehe ihrer Eltern freien Lauf gelassen hatte. Otto Frank wollte niemandem weh tun, weder den Familienangehörigen noch den Holländern. So strich er auch Annes kritische Hinweise auf die niederländische Nazi-Partei und ihre Helfershelfer. Die authentische Tagebuchfassung sei "stachliger und eckiger", stellte schon Hermann Kurzke in einer textkritischen Analyse vom 12. November 1988 in dieser Zeitung zu Recht fest. Wer mehr erfahren möchte über Leben und Schicksal der Familie Frank, dem sei die ungeschminkte Biographie empfohlen.
Sunday, 1 August 2010
Anne Frank: was her diary intended as a work of art?
American critic Francine Prose argues that Anne Frank was a precocious young writer who set out to create more than just a diary of her experiences
Robert McCrum
In a brilliant observation, Philip Roth once described Anne Frank as Kafka's "lost little daughter". Frank's diary of her sequestration in the secret annexe of 263 Prinsengracht in Amsterdam is surely one of the most compelling documents of 20th-century European history, a heartbreaking, at times uplifting, record of a young life scorched and then exterminated by the Nazis.
But the title is misleading. Yes, it was first a diary, a teenage girl's response to extraordinary and terrifying day-to-day events. On closer examination, however, the back story of the "diary" and its composition reveals neither a wordstruck ingenue nor an impetuous adolescent scribbler but a precocious young writer at pains to create a work of art. Such is the argument of an absorbing new study by the American critic Francine Prose – Anne Frank: The Book, the Life, the Afterlife (Atlantic £16.99, pp336).
Prose explores how the book that began as Het Achterhuis ("the house behind") went through many drafts in composition, and then several postwar incarnations before it acquired its canonical title, The Diary of Anne Frank – as a Broadway play. Prose also describes how Frank discovered her vocation as a writer through the experience of confiding her thoughts to a cardboard-bound notebook, and how the text she created has become a touchstone of 21st-century responses to the atrocities of Nazism.
It is a measure of Frank's achievement that her work has inspired the most partisan and obsessive devotion on Broadway and in Hollywood, as well as provoking some of the most ludicrous episodes in the vile catalogue of Holocaust denial. Among those people, it has become commonplace to claim that The Diary of Anne Frank is a forgery.
The afterlife of books is one of the mysteries and fascinations of any library. Very many books, especially in this age of overproduction, are little better than Hello! magazine and leave virtually no trace in the sand. There are, however, three kinds of title that linger in the mind, and Anne Frank's diary has something of each.
First, there are what you might call the sacred texts of western civilisation, constantly reread and reinterpreted: for instance, the Bible, the works of Shakespeare, Cervantes and Milton, the novels of Franz Kafka. These are all classics, though not all classics enjoy the same afterlife. Utopia is a classic, but for every 100 people who cheerfully use the word "utopian", only a handful will be familiar with Thomas More's text.
Second, there are what I will call "zeitgeist books", volumes of fiction, poetry or ideas whose original appeal is inextricably linked to a moment in history. For instance, Penguin Modern Classics has just reissued John Le Carré's The Spy Who Came in from the Cold, a cold-war thriller that, 50 years on, speaks to a new generation of readers, describing a world now almost as remote as Edwardian England. Aldous Huxley's Brave New World is another zeitgeist book whose afterlife transcends its year of publication (1932). In our own time, Naomi Klein's No Logo is another zeitgeist book perhaps still too current to have acquired an afterlife.
And then, finally, there is that shelf in the library of European masterpieces whose authors, as Francine Prose puts it, "have been forced into a collaboration with misfortune", books that were made at an unendurably high cost to the writer. Nadezhda Mandelstam's memoir of Stalin's terror, Hope Against Hope, is one of these, and so are the works of Primo Levi.
As Prose admits, the terrible circumstances of composition must colour our understanding of how good these books actually are, and to what extent they are works of art. But, as she says of Anne Frank, her "unique and beautiful voice is still being heard by readers who may someday be called upon to decide between cruelty and compassion". If, as a result, a government official in Kazakhstan or a secret policeman in Latin America "opts for humanity and chooses life over death", that will be the vindication of a diary, written in an attic, by a 13-year-old Dutch girl in the 1940s.
Book
Anne Frank: The Book, The Life, The Afterlife, by Francine Prose
Reviews here