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Anne Frank This jewish girl, who was able to survive in her hiding place in the rear building at Prinsengracht 263 until she was denounced, plays a leading role in the social conscience. Born on 12 June 1929 in Frankfurt/Main, she fled with her family to the Netherlands in 1933. Emigrants from Germany - unlike in many other countries - were taken in there. When the deportations began in 1942, the Franks and others went into hiding in the Prinsengracht in Amsterdam. The fugitives were arrested on August 6, 1944, and Anne Frank was deported by way of Westerbok to Auschwitz and finally to the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp. She died there in March 1945 of typhus. The institutionalization of Anne Frank - whereby, according to the legend in the Netherlands, she was sheltered, could live a virtually carefree life and write her diary - began on May 3, 1957, with the founding of the organization Anne Frank House. This organization opened the Anne Frank House museum in the Prinsengracht three years later. Since then the hiding place is among the most frequented museums in Amsterdam. The universalization of the diary did not begin in the Netherlands, however, but rather took a detour by way of the United States. The diary was published there in translation in 1952. 45,000 books were sold on the first day of publication. Before anyone spoke of the Holocaust or Shoah or even Auschwitz the diary and the fate of Anne Frank became a synonym for the extermination of the Jews and Jewry by the National-Socialists. |
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In 1947 Anne Frank's father, Otto Frank, published a shortened version of his daughter's diary. The censorship was aimed primarily at the description of family conflicts as well as Anne Frank's grappling with her own puberty and sexuality. The Dutch edition was not called "The Diary of Anne Frank", but rather - in keeping with Dutch self-perception - "Het Achterhuis". Anne Frank's picture is also not on the cover. In the foreign language editions the title was changing in favour of the writer and has been called "The Diary of Anne Frank". This raises her out of the group of fugitives hiding in the building at the back in Prinsengracht. The book has since appeared in numerous editions and been translated into some sixty languages, with a total circulation of about 25 million copies. The picture of Anne Frank on the cover is usually that of a thin girl sitting at a school bench with a notebook in front of her. |
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In the 1970s and 80s there were attacks by neo-Nazis who doubted the authenticity of the diary, unfounded accusations of forgery which were quickly refuted. But a feeling of the vulnerability of the myth came up: there were protests against the investigation that was carried out and even inquiries in parliament. It was therefore helpful in this context that the commentated, critical edition of the (almost) unabridged diary was published in 1986. But this edition did not change the fact that primarily Jewish Americans still found fault with what they see as a superficial description. They criticize the "Anne Frank industry" and the established institutions such as the Anne Frank House in Amsterdam or the Anne Frank Fund in Basel as well as the appropriation of Anne Frank by other groups and institutions. A further edition appeared in 2001. |
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The universalization, but also the later much criticized "commercialization" of Anne Frank began with the theatre adaptation written by the married couple Frances Goodrich and Albert Hackett and first performed on New York's Broadway in 1955. There were obvious changes in the wording and thus in the meaning, abridgements and even additions of new passages. It was not the person of Anne Frank who stood in the foreground, but rather a supposed message: "Despite everything I still believe in the goodness in people." Shortly before the first film adaptation was released in 1959, "Life" magazine devoted, in August 1958, a title story to Anne Frank's diaries and life story: the dream of her youth, that her life might one day lead her to Hollywood, was thus - irony of fate - just about to be fulfilled. An excerpt from her diary was reproduced on the cover in which Anne Frank comments on one of her photos as a child and makes the above reference to Hollywood. |
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