Missing Anne Frank

The soundtrack of my moody teenage years was Neutral Milk Hotel’s indie classic In the Aeroplane Over the Sea. A collection of poignant songs about lovelorn freaks, the album has an unexpected heroine: Anne Frank. Shortly before writing the album, frontman Jeff Mangum read The Diary of a Young Girl. The book overwhelmed him. “Here I am as deep as you can go in someone’s head,” he told an interviewer. “And then at the end, she gets disposed of like a piece of trash.” Mangum’s response was to try to rescue Frank—by writing her into his music.

In her new biography of Anne Frank, Ruth Franklin presents Mangum as one of a cast of notable figures drawn to the Diary and its author. More than a biography, The Many Lives of Anne Frank doubles as a cultural history of the Diary’s reception. As no one has done so thoroughly, Franklin shows how Frank became a testament to readers around the world, inspiring their art, politics, and personal experiences.

But is it Anne Frank who inspires readers or an idea of her? In the song “Holland, 1945” by Neutral Milk Hotel, Magnum sings:

But then they buried her alive

One evening, 1945 . . .

Now she’s a little boy in Spain

Playing pianos filled with flames

When I was sixteen, these words made sense to me: Anne Frank’s gilgul is a boy in Spain, a little boy vulnerable, like her, to the cruelties and indifference of the world. Today I’m not so sure. Is the lesson of Frank’s life and death that she was just a little boy in Spain, one life removed?

Franklin frames that question as the tension between who Frank was and what she became. She told the journalist Abigail Pogrebin:

Researching this book, I collected so many stories of people around the world who were affected and influenced by [the Diary]. . . . And yet at the same time . . . we don’t know the real Anne Frank. She’s been obscured by all the mythmaking around her image and also around the Diary itself. . . . I wanted . . . to get back to—who was the actual girl Anne Frank . . . and how is she related to the icon she became.

As Franklin shows, Anne Frank’s transformation into a universal symbol erased her Jewishness. Twenty-eight years ago, she was reborn as a little boy in Spain; now, she sometimes wears a keffiyeh. The brilliant girl whose life and tragedy were determined by the fact that she was a European Jew is somehow no longer a part of the story of European Jewry. Franklin sees this—she has documented the process more exhaustively than anyone before her—and yet the more she tells us about the icon, the further away Frank feels.

The feeling of distance lies at the heart of another recent book, French-Romanian novelist Lola Lafon’s When You Listen to This Song: On Memory, Loss, and Writing. Published to acclaim in France in 2022 and now translated into English by Lauren Elkin, the book recounts the night Lafon, whose own family was devastated by the Holocaust, spent alone in the Anne Frank House in August 2021. Although she weaves in bits of her own life story, the main thread is an account of her stay, given over to fragmentary poetic reflections on Frank and her legacy. The latter, Lafon concludes, has not put the girl completely out of reach. Not yet. But only a direct encounter can break through the crust of images and the feeling of absence these images create.

However, Anne Frank turns out not to be the only, or even the primary, encounter in the book. Although their projects are very different, neither Franklin nor Lafon is entirely content to focus on this particular Jewish girl born on the edge of a historical abyss.

Franklin succeeds in making her biography fresh. That is no faint praise, considering that the documentary material is meager and Anne Frank is already the great explorer of her own inner life. Moreover, most of the traditional work of biography—tracking down sources, turning the archive into a narrative—has already been done by predecessors like Ernst Schnabel and Melissa Müller. But Franklin combines the gifts of a talented biographer (her 2016 book, Shirley Jackson: A Rather Haunted Life, was justly celebrated) and the broad knowledge of a serious scholar to create a well-paced, informative narrative.

Readers unfamiliar with the process of Dutch Jewry’s destruction, the most complete in Western Europe, will appreciate how she weaves this history into Frank’s personal story:

Although the vast majority of Dutch Jews were deported between July 1942 and September 1943 to Auschwitz or Sobibór and gassed immediately, around 28,000 went into hiding, of whom around two-thirds survived. Those who were lucky enough to become onderduikers [Jews in hiding] usually did so under circumstances very different from Anne’s. . . . Many onderduikers went to farms or homes in country villages, but the Annex Eight—as Anne dubbed them—hid virtually in plain sight in the center of Amsterdam. . . . Very few Jews had their own hiding place; most had to change their addresses at least three or four times.

Such deft contextualization is especially useful for the periods of Frank’s life for which there is little documentation, like her final months in the camps.

But Franklin truly shines in the second half of the book, where she explores the outsized and surprisingly varied impact Frank has had on popular imagination. The richness and variety of examples make compelling and sometimes surprising reading. (In Japan, to take an unexpected example, the expression “Anne’s Day” refers to the first day of menstruation.) Here Frank emerges almost as a spirit moving through the world to warn humankind of evil and encourage optimism, the literary avatar of her most famous words: “In spite of everything, I still believe that people are really good at heart.”

The problem with this cultural afterlife is that Frank was murdered before she could rethink her assessment of human goodness. Her admirers typically elevate a fragment of what she wrote over the reality of her fate. As Dara Horn observes in People Love Dead Jews, the Diary’s most famous line “flatters us.” Its optimism “makes us feel forgiven for those lapses of our civilization that allow for piles of murdered girls.” And the lapse that allowed Frank to end up in a pile of murdered girls wasn’t some generalized evil or merely another form of human prejudice. It was a mission to annihilate Jews.

In 2016, The New York Times ran a headline that read, “Anne Frank Today Is a Syrian Girl.” In Ari Folman’s 2021 animated film Where Is Anne Frank, her fictional pen pal Kitty leaps to life from the pages of the Diary to scold onlookers in present-day Amsterdam, declaring that Frank’s spirit lives on in the city’s refugees. Frank now shows up in graffiti sporting an all-too-fashionable and predictable keffiyeh.

Lafon cogently rejects this logic of reincarnation: “If we are all Anne Frank, there is no more Anne Frank.” She sees the impulse to identify with Frank and the urge to reincarnate her in other bodies as an avoidance of the ugly reality of antisemitism. If Frank is a stand-in for any innocent killed anywhere, then no one has to confront what happened to her, specifically.

In France, Lafon’s birth country, where collaboration went far beyond realpolitik, the avoidance has been rooted in guilt. The antisemitism that let the French throw Jews to the wolves still festers. Lafon points to Prime Minister Raymond Barre’s infamous remark after the 1980 Paris synagogue bombing: “This odious attack targeting Jews on their way to synagogue hit innocent French people, who were crossing the rue Copernic.” Equally telling is a remark by a left-wing acquaintance of Lafon’s thirty-five years later, haltingly discussing the terrorist murders at the Charlie Hebdo offices and Hypercacher kosher supermarket:

Yes . . . but . . . it’s not the same, a young woman said. She said, that day, that to murder men and women because they’re Jews is different . . . without finishing her sentence.

Avoidance isn’t uniquely French. Lafon sees it in the “Hollywood humanism” of American adaptations of the Diary. The 1955 stage play, written by the same duo who wrote the screenplay for It’s a Wonderful Life, foregrounds Frank’s relationship with Peter van Daan, turning the Diary into a relatable teen romance. It features many textual changes of a universalizing tendency. Frank’s observation that “through all the ages [Jews] have had to suffer” becomes “we’re not the only people that’ve had to suffer. There’ve always been people that’ve had to . . . sometimes one race . . . sometimes another.” It was the Jewish director Garson Kanin who suggested this line, arguing that “the fact that in this play the symbols of persecution and oppression are Jews is incidental.” The film version, based on the play, was supposed to end on a shot of Frank in a concentration camp. Test audiences found this ending “too sad.”

“How beloved she is, this young Jewish girl who is no longer,” Lafon observes, indicting all these types of avoidance. “The Holocaust victim whose diary is the most read in the world, even if it’s missing the ending. Maybe that’s why she is so beloved. If she had survived, we know what she would have told us. . . . Maybe we wouldn’t have wanted to read it.”

In 2022, Richard Guenveur Smith, a non-Jewish actor, performed a one-man show as Otto Frank. Smith, who came to fame playing Smiley in Spike Lee’s Do the Right Thing, delivers a stream-of-consciousness monologue ranging freely from reflections on Anne to reflections on the plight of contemporary migrants. As Franklin relates, her friend commented to her afterward: “I missed the Jewishness of Otto Frank.”

Franklin feels similarly about the Anne who has emerged in popular imagination. The second half of the biography reads in part like a history of the erasure of her Jewish identity. This history culminates in films like Folman’s Where Is Anne Frank and newspaper headlines that turn a murdered Jewish girl into a byword of victimhood, but it begins even before the “Hollywood humanism” of American adaptations of the Diary. It begins with Otto Frank’s own idealism.

“Do not make a Jewish play of it,” Otto warned the novelist Meyer Levin, the first to try to bring the Diary to stage. Franklin writes of Otto:

He believed in the Diary as a beacon to promote international tolerance and peace. But it could have the necessary impact only if its universal qualities, rather than its Jewish qualities, were emphasized.

This is a recognizable form of idealistic, if deluded, Jewish self-erasure, as even Otto Frank recognized at some level.

In the same letter to Levin, Otto wrote that “in some way of course it must be Jewish . . . so that it works against anti-Semitism.”

It is harder to discern ambivalence about the Diary’s mission among the universalizers who followed Otto Frank. From Eleanor Roosevelt, who lent her name to an introduction to the Diary, to contemporary graffiti artists, they have treated Anne Frank as the iconic victim of intolerance in general. It’s as if antisemitism were undeserving of particular attention. Franklin writes:

The certainty with which the Diary’s admirers avow that Anne’s “message” for today’s world need have nothing to do with antisemitism seems even more shortsighted than it did in the 1950s. Even if those who originally promoted the Diary didn’t see it as a Jewish book . . . the fact that the subjects of persecution in the Diary are Jewish . . . is not “incidental.”

The story’s boundaries do not need to be expanded to “connect it to our current world,” as Folman claims. Our current world is one in which people can still be killed simply for being Jewish. To consider Anne Frank today to be a Syrian girl . . . is to risk losing sight of the real threat that antisemitism still poses . . . to Jews everywhere.

Where is Anne now? “Like God,” as a policeman says in Where Is Anne Frank, she is everywhere. . . . [But] an Anne Frank who is everywhere will ultimately be nowhere.

This stirring conclusion gets the importance of maintaining Frank’s Jewishness exactly right. And yet Franklin cannot quite leave it there. “For the Diary to fully realize its potential—not as a bestseller,” she writes, “but as a book that can combat prejudice of all kinds—it must perform the difficult balancing act of being at once universal and particular.” Why does a document of Jewish victimhood only “fully realize its potential” if it “combat[s] prejudice of all kinds”? Why must Jewish suffering always be an object lesson for humanity? It turns out that Franklin also wants to expand “the story’s boundaries.”

What is the alternative? Anne Frank long ago became an icon. Her Jewishness and the antisemitic plot that stuffed her in the Annex, then routed her out and dumped her in a bunk in Bergen-Belsen, where she died of cold, hunger, and illness, have become, at best, the specifics transcended by a universal symbol. At worst—and Franklin clearly does not think this—they’re a distraction from the Diary’s “full potential.” The alternative, Lafon thinks, is to discard the icon and return to the girl herself.

This, she acknowledges, is difficult, if not impossible. How does one encounter a girl who has been dead for eighty years? A girl who really is everywhere and hence nowhere. “I imagined the night as a suitable time to acknowledge Anne Frank’s absence,” Lafon writes of her mindset before her stay at the Anne Frank House. “I prepared myself to be attuned to the void, to receive it.” As Lafon wanders the museum portion of the Anne Frank House, she comes across a picture that seems to invite an encounter beyond the image familiar from a million paperbacks.

I saw something I’d never noticed, a detail, no doubt meaningless. Something that hadn’t made it into History, though we know everything about her.
On Anne Frank’s downy cheeks, there are little spots here and there, forming a childish pattern.
Anne Frank had freckles.
The real girl, after all.

The Diary itself affords a similar approach. Like any serious work of writing, it contains aspects of the author only revealed in its pages. Lafon relates the experience of Miep Gies (the Secret Annex helper who rescued the Diary), when she came across Frank writing one day:

I saw a look on her face at this moment that I’d never seen before. It was a look of dark concentration, as if she had a throbbing headache. This look pierced me, and I was speechless. She was suddenly another person.

Lafon, who says she began writing as a child to “be like” Anne Frank, knows how it feels to be pierced by Frank the writer, to experience the unknown in her.

But there is an encounter that surpasses all of these for Lafon. Her night spent meditating on Anne Frank culminates, unexpectedly, in an extended remembrance of a boy she met at a park when she was an eight-year-old in Bucharest. He was the son of an official at the Cambodian embassy, and shortly after they met, he walked out of her life and straight into the inferno of Pol Pot’s genocide. It is his memory that “opened the door to Anne Frank’s house,” Lafon writes. The distance that separates her from this boy is precisely what Anne Frank helps her to overcome, and vice versa.

Lafon’s aim is, I think, different from the universalists who trade on Frank’s symbolic caché. Her doomed childhood friend doesn’t become the “Anne Frank of Cambodia.” In fact, it’s jarring how abruptly Lafon turns from the girl who is her erstwhile subject. Suddenly, Anne Frank recedes, and the murdered son of an embassy official dominates the book. In retrospect, his trace was evident everywhere.

It is only after she encounters an Anne Frank who didn’t make it into history—an Anne Frank who can’t be reduced to a tool for combating prejudice—that this personal encounter takes place. The boy, too, becomes real to her again, more than an emblematic memory clutched tight. When Lafon writes, “The people we’ve lost haven’t disappeared. They are here. They remain, and the trace of their absence is a question,” she isn’t just being French, giddy with apparent paradox. Memory and history induce their own kind of loss, believing we know a person so well that she disappears under our very eyes. And then a jolt of the unfamiliar dispels that impression.

And yet, just as Franklin is, for all her brilliant critique of facile universalism, herself a little too sure what purpose Anne Frank and her Diary ought to serve, Lafon turns too completely to the Cambodian boy she knew, leaving behind the Jewish girl she writes about. The logic is different, but the swerve from Frank to someone, anyone, else is all too familiar.

I miss the Jewishness of Anne Frank.