The Persistence of Anne Frank The Persistence of Anne Frank
The Diary of a Young Girl: The Definitive Edition
by Anne Frank
New Translation Edited by Otto H. Frank
and Mirjam Pressler
Translated by Susan Massotty
Doubleday, 340 pp.
Originally published in millennium pop, Volume II, Issue 2, Spring 1995
Anne Frank could have been my mother. By that I don't mean that my mother was a German Jewish teenager who hid from the Nazis in Holland during the war. Nor do I mean that every Jew born since the Holocaust is a child of the generation that endured it, although I think that this is true. What I mean is much more literal and personal: Anne Frank could have been my mother. Born barely a year apart (my mother in 1928 and Anne Frank in 1929) to middle-class Jewish families, both girls enjoyed sheltered '30s childhoods. And both of them--bright, cosseted daughters of doting parents--conceived a strong desire to shape their lives very differently from those of their own mothers. "One of the many questions that have often bothered me is why women have been, and still are, thought to be so inferior to men," Anne wrote. Casting her lot with "modern women" who "want the right to be completely independent," she resolved: "If God lets me live, I'll achieve more than Mother ever did." She wanted a larger sphere of action than her mother's wholly domestic life could provide. She wanted a career, she wanted to be famous, and she wanted to be remembered after she was dead. She loved to write, and decided to be a journalist. My mother, though in a position to take her pick of the eligible young Jewish bachelors in Buffalo, New York (where she grew up), also decided at about the same age to become a journalist. The difference is that today, at 67, my mother is still a working journalist, having spent her life doing the work she loves, and Anne Frank is 50 years dead, and the author of one of the most famous books in the world.
My point in recounting these similarities is not simply to highlight the injustice of Anne Frank's fate, or to speciously identify myself with a beloved icon. My point is to note Anne Frank's remarkable modernity. Reading the new, expanded version of her diary recently published by Doubleday, one is struck first by how contemporary she is, how familiar her concerns, her view of her life and her world sound even five decades later. She was born into a generation of women that helped transform life in the Western world in the second half of this century, and rereading her reminds us that Betty Friedan did not leap fully formed out of the Eisenhower '50s. Though they weren't necessarily activists, the generation of young women who lived through World War II--the teenagers and college students, the WAVEs and WACs and WASPs and Rosie the Riveters--laid the groundwork for the women who came after them. By the 1970s, when the Women's Movement was calling into question a whole host of received ideas about women's roles and capabilities, my mother, like thousands of these women in Europe and America, had been pursuing her profession, with only a brief hiatus to get four children born and into kindergarten, for over 20 years.
The contemporary-seeming qualities of Anne's diary make her more than just another mother of modern feminism, however. They help explain the enduring power and popularity of her diary, which by some reckonings has been read by more people around the world than any other book besides the Bible (and in its new edition, has once again hit the best-seller lists). Her wholly recognizable sensibility obliterates the safe distance we build between ourselves and previous generations. It makes it impossible for us to view the Frank family and the other people hiding in the Secret Annex as simply, in Philip Larkin's famous phrase, "fools in old-style hats and coats."
Anne makes her experience of the Holocaust more real than any hundred histories, movies, or museums. She makes it impossible for us to retreat behind a lack of identification with the victims--all those luckless hordes captured in black-and-white photographs with their strange-looking beards, their hooded and private faces. Still, this alone could not make the diary the ongoing phenomenon it has become. Most of us will avoid facing the full extent of man's capacity for cruelty and carnage, if we can. If we admitted the truth of how dangerous the people around us might be, functioning from day to day could become impossible. Motivated by a sense of debt to the dead or by other compunctions, a certain kind of reader will seek out books that convey the harsh realities of the past. But unless those books have prurient or sensationalistic elements, they will probably not have enough readers to make them bestsellers, much less propel them into the ranks of the best-selling books of all time.
She is the most reliable of narrators, and we trust her in everything.
And Anne Frank's diary is not remotely prurient or sensational. What it is, instead, is enjoyable. It's fun to read. She writes with a sure command of narrative, effortlessly composing graceful sentence after graceful sentence, deftly shaping each entry, and providing historical background (about her family as well as current events), political commentary, comic anecdotes, evocative descriptions, and canny portraits of people and situations. Unlike most of the entries in the recently published Children of the Holocaust and World War II: Their Secret Diaries, edited by Laurel Holliday (Pocket Books), which are harrowing catalogues of horror, there are many light moments in Anne's account, and her situation while she was keeping the diary was far better than that of most of the Jews in Europe. (Recognizing this, in May of 1943 she wrote, "When I think about our lives here, I usually come to the conclusion that we live in a paradise compared to the Jews who aren't in hiding.")
She was also lucky to be locked up with a varied and entertaining cast of characters enduring one of history's great upheavals in a confined space where nothing could escape her gleeful detection. Anne's family was led by her father, Otto Frank, a man of such decency that four of his employees risked their lives to hide him and his family in the warehouse of the spice and fruit pectin distribution company he ran. Much beloved by Anne, who called him Pim, Otto Frank was the rock of gentle wisdom on whom the others all relied. Edith Frank, Anne's mother, worried constantly about her family's health (knowing they couldn't call a doctor if anyone fell ill), struggled to keep them well fed, and, wounded by Anne's increasing independence, vented her feelings in occasional sarcasms that further alienated her daughter. (Anne's exasperation with her mother has given rise to the book's other life as a coming-of-age how-to manual, handed to teenage girls to let them know it's normal to fight with their mothers.) The fourth Frank family member was pretty, scholarly Margot, the well-behaved older sister Anne was always being urged to emulate, but whom she privately considered too passive and accommodating. In addition to the Franks, the inhabitants of the Annex included the fussy, old-maidish dentist Alfred Dussel and the constantly quarreling van Daan family: flirtatious, hypochondriacal Mrs. van Daan, greedy, bullish Mr. van Daan, and 16-year-old Peter, quiet, sensitive, and hungry for affection (and enamored of Anne by the end of their incarceration together). Among the four non-Jews protecting them, Anne was closest to young, stylish Miep Gies, an Austrian woman married to a Dutchman, who toiled long hours keeping Otto Frank's business running (his business survived though his family did not), rode her bicycle all over Amsterdam searching for black-market provisions to feed the eight people in hiding--a near-impossible task in war-deprived Holland--and still found energy to bake cakes and bring gifts on special occasions, including a pair of high-heeled red shoes to compensate Anne for the pleasures of teen life she was missing.
Did her faith in God desert her? Did she curse humanity?
Together, the inhabitants of the Secret Annex endured wretchedly cramped conditions (Anne had to share her tiny room with the 50-ish Dussel), airless gloom (they could never open the windows or move the curtains), scarce food supplies, and constant fear. They also shared holidays and birthdays, took correspondence courses in short-hand and foreign languages, read widely, played with the warehouse cats, followed the war by listening to the BBC at night on a secret radio, and looked forward hungrily to the daily visits of their caretakers, who brought them food, news of the outside world, and variation in the long monotony of the days.
Anne filled much of the time writing, and it's clear that the diary served as her own secret annex, a place into which she could withdraw from the irritable emotions and short tempers of the severely taxed adults scrutinizing her every move. Composing and later rewriting the diary entries enabled her to give order and meaning to the events, both frightening and trivial, taking place around her, and helped her exert some measure of control over them. At the same time, the diary gave her a way of expressing herself more freely--of being more wholly herself--than she could chance out loud. This must account in part for her cheerful equanimity as she witnessed the abrupt end to her happy childhood, although she was also graced with a remarkably sturdy ego. She was capable of great humility when she behaved badly, but unshakable in her judgments when she felt she'd been wronged (and the adults in the Annex ventilated much of their fear and frustration in petty skirmishes over the children, in which the talkative, strong-willed Anne came in for most of the abuse). She could be cranky and generous, funny and earnest, childish and unexpectedly level-headed. She saw herself clearly, and knew it. "I have one outstanding character trait that must be obvious to anyone who's known me for any length of time: I have a great deal of self-knowledge. In everything I do, I can watch myself as if I were a stranger. I can stand across from the everyday Anne and, without being biased or making excuses, watch what she's doing, both the good and the bad." This gift enabled her to present herself whole, and because she described her own behavior without vanity and that of those around her with extraordinary frankness (like Charles de Gaulle, she was aptly named), she is the most reliable of narrators, and we trust her in everything.
As a result, the diary possesses the virtues of the best novels, with the added attribute of being true. It admits us into the inner life of its protagonist, and presents an assortment of fully realized characters, some of them heartbreakingly courageous, others admirable in their dogged attempts to preserve some semblance of normalcy under the most trying of circumstances, and others painfully, humanly weak. It has overarching suspense (the group hiding in the Annex could be betrayed at any time) as well as day-to-day suspense (will the burglar discover their hiding place; will Peter kiss Anne?). And though it doesn't have a happy ending, the ending of the story is extra-textual, explained only in the notes. The diary itself simply stops, unviolated by the worst horrors visited upon these people we have come to love. And therein lies another source of the book's power, as well as the reason it has prompted controversy in recent years.
Anne's voice is so engaging, and possesses such a persuasive, buoyant vitality, that it seems to confirm the central contention of New Critical theory that whatever happens outside the text has no meaning, and no reality. As the best novels do, Anne Frank's diary creates a world unto itself, and this world seems so real, it makes the events outside those recorded in the diary recede into shadow. Reading the book, I found my memories of innumerable film and television documentaries about the Holocaust wavering, becoming insubstantial. I had to shake my head to remind myself that those images were not fictional concoctions, but still they could not rival the vivid reality of Anne's book and Anne's world--a world that remains forever present in the text, and is reconstructed regularly in both the film made from the diary (directed by George Stevens and released in 1959, now available on video) and the play, which on any given night is still being performed somewhere in the world. Even in the film and the play, we never see the characters exit the Annex. The Nazis bang on the door below, and the Franks, van Daans, and Alfred Dussel cower together. Frozen in time, they wait for the end--but it is an end that never comes.
Contributing to this impression, records of what happened to the inhabitants of the Annex after they were captured are scarce. Otto Frank, the sole survivor, witnessed van Daan being led off to the gas chambers at Auschwitz in October or November 1944. Edith Frank, separated from her daughters, died alone, also at Auschwitz, in January 1945, shortly before the camp was liberated. Mrs. van Daan was shifted from Auschwitz to Buchenwald to Bergen-Belsen to Theresienstadt and perhaps to a fifth camp. She was still alive in April of 1945. After that, no one knows. "Her exact fate is unknown, although it is certain she did not survive." Peter van Daan, a healthy young man arriving at the camps late in the war, statistically had the best chance of surviving. He was still relatively healthy when the Nazis evacuated Auschwitz, and he survived the grueling death march to Mauthausen, in Austria, only to die three days before that camp was liberated. Anne and Margot were moved from Auschwitz to Bergen-Belsen, which had the advantage of being a holding camp and not a death camp. Because they, too, began their internments late in the war and in good health, their father and friends held out great hope for their survival. But in the winter of 1945, sanitary conditions at Belsen were so miserable that typhus broke out, killing thousands of prisoners. Margot died first, leaving Anne entirely alone in the last few days of her life.
And we have no record of her thoughts during this time. Did she change her mind about the most famous line in the diaries, penned less than three weeks before she was captured--"I still believe, in spite of everything, that people are truly good at heart"? Had she been numbed by the misery she'd witnessed, or did she find the resignation she felt on April 11, 1944, after a particularly traumatic break-in to the warehouse, when she wrote, "I waited for the police and I was ready for death, like a soldier on a battlefield." Did her faith in God desert her? Did she curse humanity? In her last moments, did she murmur, "What a waste"? We don't know.
When we lose sight of her, she is pondering the duality of her own nature--the rambunctious, lively, joking personality she showed to the world, and the inner self, more thoughtful and serious, "much purer, deeper, and finer." She frets that the noisy Anne always seems to win out over the other, better, side of herself, and muses about why this is so. There is no hint of immediate danger, no sense that the end is near. Only a teenage girl working hard at forging an identity for herself.
That is the view we are left with, of the girl in the process of becoming a woman. We experienced novel readers don't need the rest of the story to imagine it for ourselves, in quick, short strokes--the brilliant college career, the promising start as a journalist, the series of romances leading up to the great love affair, the long life of hard work, high spirits, and strong family affections. We can see it for her more clearly, probably, than she could ever see it for herself, and painful though it is to contemplate this life she might have had, it is far easier to look at than the life she did have--the months of fear and degradation, the loneliness and sickness, and, very possibly, the giving way of this bright, bright spirit to hopelessness. This alternative reality remains forever a blur. We don't see it; she didn't get a chance to show it to us; and we can therefore safely skirt facing the full truth of her story.
Because it omits the harshest truths of her fate, the diary has been frequently cited as a comforting document--see, even in the midst of history's worst depredations, the human spirit is not quelled, goodness and beauty endure. And this is also the source of the controversy around the book--that it has been used to blunt the reality of the Holocaust as much as it has been used to vivify it; that people take comfort in Anne's faith in humanity rather than face the brutal reality that she was destroyed. In our celebrity-infatuated, fame-worshipping times, the thought may also sneak in that perhaps it's okay, maybe it was worth it, because she wrote a great book and she got her wish and became world famous, and her book survives even if she did not. But, as Primo Levi responded whenever asked if maybe he was sent to Auschwitz because he was "meant" to survive to write the great books he wrote about his experiences, no book is worth this degree of human suffering. No God could orchestrate such unspeakable events in order to produce a mere book. Miep Gies said the same thing a little differently at the end of her memoir of the inhabitants of the Annex, Anne Frank Remembered: The Story of the Woman Who Helped to Hide the Frank Family (Simon & Schuster, 1987). "Always, every day of my life, I've wished that things had been different. That even had Anne's diary been lost to the world, Anne and the others might somehow have been saved. Not a day goes by that I do not grieve for them."
Sara Laschever, executive editor of millennium pop, has written for the New York Times,
the New York Review of Books, the Village Voice, and other publications.
millennium pop home page