Writing for this magazine in 1997, Cynthia Ozick argued that Anne Frank’s story has been “distorted, transmuted, traduced, reduced; it has been infantilized, Americanized, homogenized, sentimentalized; falsified, kitschified, and, in fact, blatantly and arrogantly denied.” While Ozick presented a damning chronicle of how a merry band of bowdlerizers, led by Lillian Hellman, reshaped Anne’s diary into a Hollywood-friendly stage play, anyone who’s read the original diary knows that Anne did a bit of unconscious Hollywoodizing herself. The way her apathy for Peter van Pels melts into love is such an MGM touch. “Oh, Peter, if only I could help you, if only you would let me!” she writes, a Joan Crawford feverishness to her voice. “Together we could drive away your loneliness and mine.”
Of course, many of us impose MGM touches on our lives in the retelling. We’re creatures of the movies, and so was Anne. Her protector Miep Gies recalled that Anne would “talk about movies and movie stars with anyone who would listen,” and her classmate Hannah Goslar noted that Anne was particularly fond of Shirley Temple. Indeed, her diary betrays a number of Shirley affectations: she is talkative, saintly, puff-chested, and sometimes she put on dance routines in the attic. Before going into hiding, Anne obsessively collected and traded movie-star photo cards, and fantasized about breaking into films herself. Next to the famous heavy-lidded photo of herself, she even jotted, “This is a photograph of me as I wish I looked all the time. Then I might still have a chance of getting to Holywood [sic].” In 1941, when Jews were banned from movie theatres in the Netherlands, Anne got her fix at home using a rented projector. Three years later, she wrote about devouring the Cinema and Theater magazines that Victor Kugler brought to the annex every Monday:
When Justin Bieber visited the Anne Frank House last Friday, he must have noticed that the walls were tattooed with film-star photos. Anne swapped them in and out from her collection as she tired of them, and among those in Anne’s last rotation are images of Ginger Rogers, Garbo, and Rudy Vallee. (There’s also a small postcard of chimps drinking tea.) For Bieber, it probably seemed like a paleontological variation on his 2011 “Ellen”-sponsored visit to the poster-covered bedroom of one of his endearing, jackrabbitish fans. For the past few days the pop singer has been the object of trumped-up media vitriol for his entry in the Anne Frank House guestbook (“Anne was a great girl. Hopefully she would have been a belieber”), and for treating his visit to the annex like a pop-in on another fan, one who had perhaps just ducked out to grab a bit of sun—but, as Anne’s stepsister Eva Schloss observed, “It’s so childish. She probably would have been a fan…. They make a lot of fuss about everything that is connected with Anne Frank.”
I think Bieber can be forgiven for thinking of Anne as someone who’s still breathing. The writer Shalom Auslander dubbed Anne Frank “the Jewish Jesus,” and like Jesus, Anne Frank is constantly being resurrected. Anne’s defenders seem not to understand that her appearance in irreverent sequels to the diary are crucial to keeping her alive as the “little bundle of contradictions” that she was. Our collective vision of Anne is always in peril of drifting into somber martyrdom (if you haven’t read the diary in a few years, it’s easy to think of her this way), and the so-called trespasses on her memory are really vital acts of defibrillation. For example, Auslander’s spastic novel “Hope: A Tragedy” presents her as an ancient attic-dweller plugging away on a follow-up to the diary. (His book is a dizzyingly prolonged Second City sketch—at one point Frank tries to hit someone with a box of matzoh—and if it’s ever filmed, the role would make a sublime, screwy last hurrah for Barbra Streisand.) Similarly, Philip Roth’s novel “The Ghost Writer” envisions an Anne who survived Bergen-Belsen, came under the wing of reclusive author E. I. Lonoff, and had to fend off the amorous advances of the Roth stand-in Nathan Zuckerman. Even Cynthia Ozick was momentarily moved to what-if speculation, writing, “It is easy to imagine—had she been allowed to live—a long row of novels and essays spilling from her fluent and ripening pen.”
The works of Auslander, Roth, and Ozick are obviously rooted in the disbelief that we all felt upon first reading the sentence, “Anne’s diary ends here.” Who can accept it? And who can resist grappling with a story so widely known that it risks becoming cliche, or myth? Faulkner famously spoke of the moment when he “discovered that my own little postage stamp of native soil was worth writing about and that I would never live long enough to exhaust it,” but Anne Frank’s diary is everyone’s native soil, and it has been so thoroughly tilled at this point—in dozens of biographies, memoirs, and sequels—that almost nothing fresh can grow. Bieber has been accused of egomania for perceiving Anne Frank as nothing more than a potential fan, but at least he scribbled down a novel thought: a departure from the thousands of platitudes that must fill those guestbooks. (I wonder if Bieber does this with everyone—if he spent his tour-bus tutoring sessions thinking about whether Harriet Tubman and Pope Joan and Seabiscuit would have liked his stuff. It’s a fascinating impulse: to worry not how you’ll be judged by history, but instead how great figures of history would have judged you.)
In a blog post last year, Richard Brody catalogued all the film stars glued to Anne’s annex wall, many of whom (Heinz Rühmann! Sonja Henie! Sally Eilers!) have long since fizzled away into obscurity. In a poignant historical reversal, Anne Frank—once an ardent little fan—has outstripped everybody that she idolized. Outside of moviedom, she was also nuts about Cissy van Marxveldt, an author who is more or less only known today because she was mentioned in Frank’s diaries. Van Marxveldt is like the handful of Jazz Age socialites who managed to stow away in the lyrics of Cole Porter songs and thereby sail into immortality. Relative fame is difficult to gauge, but it seems likely that in a hundred years Heinz Rühmann and Sonja Henie will only survive in the form of scraps of paper on Anne Frank’s wall. And it’s possible that the last trace of Justin Bieber will be his inscription in her guestbook.
Matt Weinstock lives in Brooklyn.
Above: Anne Frank, circa 1941. Photograph by Frans Dupont/Anne Frank House/Getty.
