Quarrel & Quandary (12 page)

And the vehicle that has most powerfully accomplished this almost universal obtuseness is Anne Frank’s diary. In celebrating Anne Frank’s years in the secret annex, the nature and meaning of her death has been, in effect, forestalled. The diary’s keen lens is helplessly opaque to the diarist’s explicit doom—and this opacity, replicated in young readers in particular, has led to shamelessness.

It is the shamelessness of appropriation. Who owns Anne Frank? The children of the world, say the sentimentalists. A case in point, then, is the astonishing correspondence, published in 1995 under the title
Love, Otto
, between Cara Wilson, a Californian born in 1944, and Otto Frank, the father of Anne Frank. Wilson, then twelve-year-old Cara Weiss, was invited by Twentieth Century-Fox to audition for the part of Anne in a projected film version of the diary. “I didn’t get the part,” the middle-aged Wilson writes, “but by now I had found a whole new world. Anne Frank’s diary, which I read and reread, spoke to me and my dilemmas, my anxieties, my secret passions. She felt the way I did.… I identified so strongly with this eloquent girl of my own age, that I now think I sort of became her in my own mind.” And on what similarities does Wilson rest her acute sense of identification with a hunted child in hiding?

A sampling of Wilson’s concerns as she matured appears in the interstices of her exchanges with Otto Frank—which, remarkably, date from 1959 until his death in 1980. For instance: “The year was 1968—etched in my mind. I can’t ever forget it. Otis Redding was ‘Sittin’ on the Dock of the Bay’ … while we hummed along to ‘Hey Jude’ by the Beatles.” Or again: “What a year 1972 was! That was when I saw one of my all-time favorite movies,
Harold and Maude
, to the tune of Cat Stevens’ incredible sound track.… I remember singing along to Don McLean’s ‘American Pie’ and daydreaming to Roberta Flack’s exquisite ‘The First Time Ever I Saw Your Face,’ ” and so on. “In 1973-74,” she reports, “I was wearing headbands, pukka-shell necklaces, and American Indian anything. Tattoos were a rage”—but enough. Tattoos were the rage, she neglects to recall, in Auschwitz; and of the Auschwitz survivor who was her patient correspondent for more than two decades, Wilson remarks: “Well, what choice did the poor man have? Whenever an attack of ‘I-can’t-take-this-any-longer’ would hit me, I’d put it all into lengthy diatribes to my distant guru, Otto Frank.”

That the designated guru replied, year after year, to embarrassing and shabby effusions like these may open a new pathway into our generally obscure understanding of the character of Otto Frank. His responses—from Basel, where he had settled with his second wife—were consistently attentive, formal, kindly.
When Wilson gave birth, he sent her a musical toy, and he faithfully offered a personal word about her excitements as she supplied them: her baby sons, her dance lessons, her husband’s work on commercials, her freelance writing. But his letters were also political and serious: it is good, he wrote in October 1970, to take “an active part in trying to abolish injustices and all sorts of grievances, but we cannot follow your views regarding the Black Panthers.” And in December 1973, “As you can imagine, we were highly shocked about the unexpected attack of the Arabs on Israel on Yom Kippur and are now mourning with all those who lost their families.” Presumably he knew something about losing a family. Wilson, insouciantly sliding past these faraway matters, was otherwise preoccupied, “finding our little guys sooo much fun.”

The unabashed triflings of Cara Wilson—whose “identification” with Anne Frank can be duplicated by the thousand, though she may be more audacious than most—point to a conundrum. Never mind that the intellectual distance between Wilson and Anne Frank is immeasurable; not every self-conscious young girl will be a prodigy. Did Otto Frank not comprehend that Cara Wilson was deaf to everything the loss of his daughter represented? Did he not see, in Wilson’s letters alone, how a denatured approach to the diary might serve to promote amnesia of what was rapidly turning into history? A protected domestic space, however threatened and endangered, can, from time to time, mimic ordinary life. The young who are encouraged to embrace the diary cannot always be expected to feel the difference between the mimicry and the threat. And (like Cara Wilson) most do not. Natalie Portman, then sixteen years old, who in December 1997 débuted as Anne Frank in the Broadway revival of the famous play based on the diary—a play that has itself influenced the way the diary is read—was reported to have
concluded from her own reading that “it’s funny, it’s hopeful, and she’s a happy person.”

Otto Frank, it turns out, is complicit in this shallowly upbeat view. Again and again, in every conceivable context, he had it as his aim to emphasize “Anne’s idealism,” “Anne’s spirit,” almost never calling attention to how and why that idealism and spirit were smothered, and unfailingly generalizing the sources of hatred. If the child is father of the man—if childhood shapes future sensibility—then Otto Frank, despite his sufferings in Auschwitz, may have had less in common with his own daughter than he was ready to recognize. As the diary gained publication in country after country, its renown accelerating year by year, he spoke not merely about but for its author—and who, after all, would have a greater right? The surviving father stood in for the dead child, believing that his words would honestly represent hers. He was not entitled to such certainty: fatherhood does not confer surrogacy. His own childhood, in Frankfurt, Germany, was wholly unclouded. A banker’s son, he lived untrammeled until the rise of the Nazi regime, when he was already forty-four. At nineteen, in order to acquire training in business, he went to New York with Nathan Straus, a fellow student who was heir to the Macy’s department-store fortune. During the First World War, Frank was an officer in the German military, and in 1925 he married Edith Holländer, a manufacturer’s daughter. Margot was born in 1926 and Anneliese Marie, called Anne, in 1929. His characteristically secular world view belonged to an era of quiet assimilation, or, more accurately, accommodation (which includes a modicum of deference), when German Jews had become, at least in their own minds, well integrated into German society. From birth, Otto Frank had breathed the free air of the affluent bourgeoisie.

Anne’s childhood, in contrast, fell into shadows almost
immediately. She was four when the German persecutions of Jews began, and from then until the anguished close of her days she lived as a refugee and a victim. In 1933 the family fled from Germany to Holland, where Frank had commercial connections, and where he founded and directed a spice and pectin business. By 1940 the Germans had occupied the Netherlands. In Amsterdam, Jewish children, Anne among them, were thrown out of the public-school system and made to wear the yellow star. At thirteen, on November 19, 1942, already in hiding, Anne Frank could write:

And earlier, on October 9, 1942, after hearing the report of an escape from Westerbork:

Perhaps not even a father is justified in thinking he can distill the “ideas” of this alert and sorrowing child, with scenes such
as these inscribed in her psyche, and with the desolations of Auschwitz and Bergen-Belsen still ahead. His preference was to accentuate what he called Anne’s “optimistical view of life.” Yet the diary’s most celebrated line (infamously celebrated, one might add)—“I still believe, in spite of everything, that people are truly good at heart”—has been torn out of its bed of thorns. Two sentences later (and three weeks before she was seized and shipped to Westerbork), the diarist sets down a vision of darkness:

Because that day never came, both Miep Gies, the selflessly courageous woman who devoted herself to the sustenance of those in hiding, and Hannah Goslar, Anne’s Jewish schoolmate and the last to hear her tremulous cries in Bergen-Belsen, objected to Otto Frank’s emphasis on the diary’s “truly good at heart” utterance. That single sentence has become, universally, Anne Frank’s message, virtually her motto—whether or not such a credo could have survived the camps. But why should this sentence be taken as emblematic, and not, for example, another? “There’s a destructive urge in people, the urge to rage, murder, and kill,” Anne wrote on May 3, 1944, pondering the spread of guilt. These are words that do not soften, ameliorate, or give the lie to the pervasive horror of her time. Nor do they pull the wool over the eyes of history.

Otto Frank grew up with a social need to please his environment and not to offend it; it was the condition of entering the mainstream, a bargain German Jews negotiated with themselves. It was more dignified, and safer, to praise than to blame.
Far better, then, in facing the larger postwar world the diary had opened to him, to speak of goodness rather than destruction: so much of that larger world had participated in the urge to rage. (The diary notes how Dutch anti-Semitism, “to our great sorrow and dismay,” was increasing even as the Jews were being hauled away.) After the liberation of the camps, the heaps of emaciated corpses were accusation enough. Postwar sensibility hastened to migrate elsewhere, away from the cruel and the culpable. It was a tone and a mood that affected the diary’s reception; it was a mood and a tone that, with cautious yet crucial excisions, the diary itself could be made to support. And so the diarist’s dread came to be described as hope, her terror as courage, her prayers of despair as inspiring. And since the diary was now defined as a Holocaust document, the perception of the cataclysm itself was being subtly accommodated to expressions like “man’s inhumanity to man,” diluting and befogging specific historical events and their motives. “We must not flog the past,” Frank insisted in 1969. His concrete response to the past was the establishment, in 1957, of the Anne Frank Foundation and its offshoot the International Youth Center, situated in the Amsterdam house where the diary was composed, to foster “as many contacts as possible between young people of different nationalities, races and religions”—a civilized and tender-hearted goal that nevertheless washed away into do-gooder abstraction the explicit urge to rage that had devoured his daughter.

But Otto Frank was merely an accessory to the transformation of the diary from one kind of witness to another kind: from the painfully revealing to the partially concealing. If Anne Frank has been made into what we nowadays call an “icon,” it is because of the Pulitzer Prize–winning play derived from the diary—a play that rapidly achieved worldwide popularity, and framed the legend even the newest generation has come to believe in. Adapted by Albert Hackett and Frances Goodrich, a
Hollywood husband-and-wife screenwriting team, the theatricalized version opened on Broadway in 1955, ten years after the ovens of Auschwitz had cooled; its portrayal of the “funny, hopeful, happy” Anne continues to reverberate, not only in how the diary is construed, but in how the Holocaust itself is understood. The play was a work born in controversy, and was destined to roil on and on in rancor and litigation. Its tangle of contending lawyers finally came to resemble nothing so much as the knotted imbroglio of Jarndyce vs. Jarndyce, the unending court case of
Bleak House
. “This scarecrow of a suit,” as Dickens describes it, “has, in course of time, become so complicated, that no man alive knows what it means.… Innumerable children have been born into the cause; innumerable young people have married into it; old people have died out of it.” Many of the chief figures in the protracted conflict over the Hacketts’ play have by now died out of it, but the principal issues, far from fading away, have, after so many decades, intensified. And whatever the ramifications of these issues, whatever perspectives they illumine or defy, the central question stands fast: who owns Anne Frank?

The hero, or irritant (depending on which side of the controversy one favors), in the genesis of the diary’s dramatization was Meyer Levin, a Chicago-born novelist of the social realist school, author of such fairly successful works as
The Old Bunch, Compulsion
, and
The Settlers
. Levin began as a man of the left, though a strong anti-Stalinist: he was drawn to proletarian fiction (
Citizens
, about steel workers), and had gone to Spain in the thirties to report on the Civil War. In 1945, as a war correspondent attached to the Fourth Armored Division, he was among the first Americans to enter Buchenwald, Dachau, and Bergen-Belsen. What he saw there was ungraspable and unendurable. “As I groped in the first weeks, beginning to apprehend the monstrous shape of the story I would have to tell,” he wrote, “I knew already that I would never penetrate its heart of bile, for the
magnitude of the horror seemed beyond human register.” The truest telling, he affirmed, would have to rise up out of the mouth of a victim.