The Many Afterlives of Anne Frank

The St. Louis Post-Dispatch explores a handful of the numerous identities Anne Frank has had in the afterlife:

ANNE, THE GIRL NEXT DOOR

This is the version that Goodrich and Hackett advanced in their spectacularly successful drama, which won a Pulitzer Prize and a Tony Award. The writers, a married couple whose earlier hits included "Father of the Bride" and "It's a Wonderful Life," took their direction from Anne's father, Otto Frank, the only one of the Jews who hid in the Amsterdam annex to survive the death camps.

Frank no doubt had his reasons for wanting to portray his wife and daughters in a golden light. But the distinguished writer Cynthia Ozick disdains any effort to help Broadway audiences identify with the teenager and her family.

In the play, "Anne became an all-American girl, an echo of the perky character in 'Junior Miss,'" Ozick wrote in a New Yorker essay.

The play emphasized Anne's relationship to Peter, the teenage boy in hiding with the Franks, and depicted the Franks as a consistently loving, cheerful family.

That sounds banal but, just 10 years after the war, this approach may have made sense.

"This play is about the 1950s," said Washington University drama professor Henry Schvey, who last semester taught a class in theater and the Holocaust. "It's nonthreatening and uplifting. That's all audiences wanted to hear, if they were willing to hear anything about the Holocaust at all. It made a contribution. But like anything else, it's a product of its times."

ANNE, THE ROMANTIC

Anne loved the movies, even favoring one photo of herself because she thought it made her look like an actress. With her big dark eyes and captivating smile, she's inspired others to see her in that romantic light, too.

Teenage girls in a number of movies and TV shows have explicitly identified with her; the indie rock group Neutral Milk Hotel salutes her, "the only girl I've ever loved," in the song "Holland 1945."

In "The Ghost Writer" by Philip Roth, an Anne Frank-like character on a New England campus in the early 1950s inspires an admirer to wonder who she really is.

ANNE, THE WRITER

This is the way a lot of people get to know Anne Frank, and it's the way she wanted people to see her. In her diary, she dreams of a writing career.

In fact, she intended the diary to be read by others, and revised sections of it herself with that in mind. Novelist Francine Prose, in her thoughtful book "Anne Frank: The Book, the Life, the Afterlife," examines the diary with a critical eye and comes away impressed:

"The greatest book ever written about a thirteen-year-old girl is Anne Frank's diary … a consciously crafted work of literature." Of course, she adds, we would gladly do without the diary if Anne and those like her had lived. "But none of us was given that choice, and the diary is what we have left."

ANNE, THE VICTIM

The Jews who hid in the annex to Otto Frank's factory — the Franks, the Van Pels family and a dentist — were protected by the heroic Miep Gies and a couple of other gentile friends for two years. The two years of confinement were horrible, but the worst was to come. In August 1944, someone, never identified, sold them out to the Gestapo for about $8. Seven months later, Anne and her sister Margot, starving and terrified, died of typhus within days of each other at Bergen-Belsen. V-E Day was a couple of months away.

ANNE, THE FREEDOM FIGHTER

Never happened, except in fiction. Excluding anti-Semitic crudities that exploit her life and death, probably the most bizarre version of Anne Frank's story showed up on TV's "Robot Chicken," a stop-action video in which a blond Anne fights Nazis, wins and cuddles with her cute boyfriend Peter on a bridge over a canal.

"Nazis are so uncool," she murmurs.

The reference is to this, an obvious parody of cliches in teen films and Hollywood's dumbed-down versions of historical events.

Anyway, continued:

The little opus is so bizarre it defies interpretation, but Schvey finds that it comports neatly with a major strain in Holocaust writing about women: "They are either entirely innocent, like Anne, or entirely heroic, like (poet-paratrooper) Hannah Senesh. There's no nuance."

In other words, Anne becomes her own flip side.

ANNE, THE IDEALIST

"In spite of everything, I still believe that people are really good at heart."

This is the most famous quotation from Anne Frank's diary, the one emblazoned on the cover of many editions. It's perhaps the line, and certainly the spirit, that Eleanor Roosevelt had in mind when she wrote, in her 1952 introduction, that the diary "makes poignantly clear the ultimate shining nobility of the (human) spirit."

Otto Frank had already edited the diary to ensure that kind of reading, eliminating passages that, he thought, revealed too much (Anne's fights with her mother, her discussion of her period; the text has since been restored). Understandably, he wanted Anne, his dead child, to stand as a symbol of hope and the triumph of the human spirit.

But increasingly, that view has come to seem willfully naive to some people — including playwright Kesselman.

The famous quote is taken out of context, she says. It's still in the play, but in a different way. The overall tone is different, too.

Like Rosenfeld, the Indiana University professor, Kesselman thinks that the effort to glean a hopeful, "universal" message from Anne Frank's life and work comes at an unacceptably high price: denying who Anne Frank really was and why she died.

ANNE, THE JEW

Rosenfeld says many have tried to describe other girls wounded by politics or war as the "Anne Frank" of their particular groups. He thinks that's wrong, and he holds the play to blame.

"I don't think that Goodrich and Hackett did it maliciously, but they de-Judaized Anne," he said, and in so doing, they diluted her story.

In Nazi-occupied Holland, where being Jewish was a status crime punishable by death, Anne was not Jewish incidentally. It was the central fact of her short, hard life.

If you can't appreciate what that means, Rosenfeld cautions, then you really can't appreciate Anne Frank.