By Layla Slate
Today, a simple Google search for “Anne Frank” yields her most highly regarded quote; “…In spite of everything I still believe that people are really good at heart.” The popular recognition of this quote and the American embrace of themes of innate human capacity for good and the will to persevere in The Diary of a Young Girl can reveal much about the American historical imaginary of the Holocaust. When considering the full complexities and horrors of the context of Anne’s moral reflections of the world, a much more sinister reality is revealed. In the 1997 piece, “The Misuse of Anne Frank’s Diary”, writer Cynthia Ozick criticized the American approach to the diary as a false re-characterization. She argues that the circumstances in which the story was changed ultimately failed to utilize the potential lessons from Anne’s life. Considering Ozick’s analysis and examining the ways in which Anne’s life has continued to permeate American discussions of the Holocaust, suggests that the story of Anne Frank has endured the test of time because of an oversimplification that fits the American narrative of the Holocaust. It is well-known how the alterations of her story have disregarded the complexities of her astute writing and the particularly Jewish nature of her persecution. These changes have arguably contributed to the durability and renowned perception of the story to an American audience lacking the ability and commitment to analyzing the profound global impact of the Holocaust. In other words, the alterations created a comforting and hopeful narrative ending capable of garnering more attention from the American public.
From the original altered publication of the diary, to the opening of the smash Broadway play in 1955, the media portrayal of Anne’s story received critical acclaim. The publication of the diary even garnered the attention of Eleanor Roosevelt, who penned an introduction about the
relatability of Anne’s experience, oblivious to the astounding un-relatability of Anne’s life under persecution. The play and subsequent film further informed popular culture of her experience, personalizing the suffering of the Jews in the Holocaust to the dominantly Protestant-American culture. However, this personalization was on a ‘universally’ human level, where Anne’s experience and subsequent response were characterized as representative of the ability to find good in the world, in lieu of any and all evil. However, it was deemed necessary with an American audience to de-particularize Anne’s experience as well. Describing this, Nora Nunn of Duke University writes, “It was precisely Frank’s Jewish identity that the team of U.S. playwrights sought to minimize.” The legacy of the diary itself has warranted adoption of it as a document of the Holocaust in the perspectives of some while to the disagreement of others. Considering the diary, Cynthia Ozick writes, “That the diary is miraculous, a self-aware work of youthful genius, is not in question.” The circumstances of the tragedy evoke a natural interest, which combined with the prodigy-like writing of the young Anne Frank, explains the status of the story in cultural consciousness to this day.
The legacy of Anne Frank cannot be analyzed without considering how her story was changed from its original composition. From the alterations of the book done by Anne’s father, Otto Frank, to the play’s simplification of Anne that emphasized purity and universal relatability (notably stripped of a particularly Jewish identity), it is clear how Anne’s story was no longer her own from the moment it was found. Ozick writes, “Anne Frank’s written narrative, moreover, is not the story of Anne Frank, and never has been.” Anne’s words were able to live on without her, though this came at the expense of her control over her words. Her diary served as consolation to her only remaining loved-one, her father, who made edits to the original manuscript of her diary. Though Otto’s contributions were not solely restricted to editing her work, as he is also known to
have censored large portions of Anne’s writing in which she explored considerations of her sexuality, or commented harshly on some of her close relationships. Though even as the diary includes her fears while living under persecution and her astute perspective about the horrors humans are capable of, the legacy of her story to the rest of the world, particularly the West, has been one of hope and inspiration. Ozick refers to the contrived depictions of Anne’s life in popular media as “nonsensical” based on what is truly known of Anne’s life under the Holocaust.
Discussions of the Holocaust persist into American culture despite removal by 75 years. Nathan Englander’s 2012 publication of short stories highlights how deeply the story of Anne Frank permeates our conversations about the Holocaust to this day. In “What We Talk About When We Talk About Anne Frank”, two Jewish couples play a childhood exercise they created, where they envision if they would hide each other were another Holocaust to occur. Englander’s assessment of the degree to which we talk about Anne Frank through the symbolism of a “game” comments on the extent of memorialization of an idea of Anne in the conversations we still have about the conditions of the Holocaust. The decision to invoke her name for this thought-experiment arguably demonstrates the extent to which the symbolic identity of Anne Frank has been dissociated from the content of a real analysis of what the Holocaust means for society. The concern over the need to find protection, a response to the events as they happen, takes priority over broader questions the Holocaust and Anne’s murder should likely generate, that is, what does the fact that 6 million Jews were dehumanized and murdered by a political institution warn us of about totalitarianism and genocide? Instead of tackling this line of thinking, references to Anne Frank persist in modern American culture in ways that do little to broach topics of human nature that Frank herself questioned in her writings. Beyond cultural commentary in literature, it is important to note the commonality of invoking the name Anne
Frank being in American popular and political culture. For the purposes of making provocative comedic commentary or for criticism of political ideology, comparisons to Anne’s story have often been made in public discourse to this day.
As the figure of Anne Frank has become a mainstay in American conceptions of the Holocaust, it is logical that the favored cultural consensus was for a comforting one of hope and reassurance that goodness can be found in the world, avoiding a memory of Anne Frank’s life that reflects what she truly faced. In “Stilled life: traumatic knowing, political violence, and the dying of Anna Frank”, writer Griselda Pollock refers to this as “consolatory iconization.” Pollock makes the argument that it is possible that the only way for Anne Frank's story to gain awareness was if an oversimplification of her story occurred that allowed audiences to assign ideas of innocence and goodness to her image. Pollock questions the extent of viewers' ability to empathize with a reality of human suffering that they have not personally experienced or witnessed. She asks the question, “Is Holocaust commemoration so troubled because it requires a grieving for the other (the Jewish or Sinti/Roma victims) in a place of pain beyond any human experience except for those who endured it?” I would argue that considering what we know of the choices of the playwrights during the 1950s and their assessment of the prospect of the play’s success, that it is possible that for their purposes they were correct in their decision to de-particularize Anne’s story. They believed that the potential of alienating American audiences would create a barrier to the success of the play. On this consideration alone it appears Pollock’s question accurately describes American audiences and their expectations of popular media for that time, as the addition of Anne’s story into popular media has been undeniably successful. Concerns for the comfortability of american audiences at the time however were not due to a lack of knowledge about the horrors of Jewish persecution by the Nazis. In the 2018 Time
article, “‘It’s Not That the Story was Buried.’ What Americans in the 1930s Really Knew About What Was Happening in Germany”, Lily Rothman reports on a new exhibit by the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum that intended to further disprove the myth that Americans at the time were unaware of the persecution of the Jews in Germany as it was happening. Despite this, recharacterization of Anne’s life for the sake of the play still appeared to be necessary to the playwrights when considering representing the experience to an American audience.
In “Rose-Colored Genocide: Hollywood, Harmonizing Narratives, and the Cinematic Legacy of Anne Frank’s Diary in the United States” scholar Nora Nunn makes the argument that in terms of cultural legacy, the re-telling of Anne’s story through “rose-colored glasses” have left a permanent imprint on how we grapple with issues of genocide in popular media ever since. Most significantly, Nunn employs this argument to explain why American culture has seemed to strongly grip Anne Frank’s story. Nunn explains the function of this, “Such bowdlerization distracted from inconvenient truths, such as the fact that…the Frank family had been unable to enter the U.S….or that Anne was among the nearly six million Jewish individuals who had perished in the Nazi concentration camps.” Thus, a censored version of the real events of World War II was a welcomed narrative to responding to this reality. Nunn further develops her argument about the cultural impact of the popular portrayal of Anne Frank and the Holocaust to explain how this has visibly changed media representations of genocide to this day. She argues that Hollywood narratives of stories such as Anne Frank’s, an example that most blatantly establishes this, has permitted audiences a false sense of security that the darkest events of the past are forever relegated to the past. Therefore, at the expense of the lessons it could have taught us about future brutalities, the re-rendering of Anne Frank in the narratives that fit the post-war period created a greater awareness of the Holocaust, but only an awareness of a useless narrative.
Given the alterations to Anne’s characterization and particular adoption of her story into the American historical imaginary, I find that the complexities of the story of Anne Frank has become whittled away to leave a story that only preaches the ability of the human will to triumph. Such a story is definitely more encouraging and addicting to audiences anticipating such endings from popular media. The longevity and duration of this story can be attributed to this process which allowed American moral perceptions and desires to formulate a story that would endure as a reassurance of the triumph of goodness in the world. The historical imagining of Anne frank has sustained in American culture clearly not only because of the sheer unbelievability of the horror and trauma, and not even for its value as an incredible piece of writing during a stunning scar in world history, but because of the way the particular imagining of Anne functioned as a reassuring resolution to the question of what the Holocaust tells us about human nature. Subsequently, it is already possible to observe how this story has and will continue to appear in our own time, through prominent pop culture references, and through the precedent it set about how we discuss genocide. The appearance of her story in society today as a symbol and as an example of how society grapples with knowledge of tragedy emphasize the ways in which American cultural understanding was never able to contend with the complexities and prominence of genocide.
Works Cited
Englander, Nathan. “What We Talk About When We Talk About Anne Frank.” What We Talk About When We Talk About Anne Frank: Stories, LRG, Thorndike Pr, 2020, pp. 3–32. Nunn, Nora. “Rose-Colored Genocide: Hollywood, Harmonizing Narratives, and the Cinematic Legacy of Anne Frank’s Diary in the United States.” Genocide Studies and Prevention: An International Journal, vol. 14, no. 2, Sept. 4, 2020, pp. 65-89. Crossref, doi:10.5038/1911-9933.14.2.1715.
Ozick, Cynthia. “The Misuse of Anne Frank’s Diary.” The New Yorker, 11 June 2019, www.newyorker.com/magazine/1997/10/06/who-owns-anne-frank.
Pollock, Griselda. “Stilled Life: Traumatic Knowing, Political Violence, and the Dying of Anna Frank.” Mortality, vol. 12, no. 2, 2007, pp. 124–41. Crossref,
doi:10.1080/13576270701255115.
Rothman, Lily. Truth behind the Myth of American Ignorance on the Holocaust. 26 Feb. 2019, time.com/5327279/ushmm-americans-and-the-holocaust/.