28 Aug 2010 08:48:52
This is a story about one interesting author Anne Frank. 15 years of her life she lived in German. each person with even a passing connection to her story has told their own. And the uses to which her diary has been put have also been well critiqued, most notably by the American critic Cynthia Ozick, who, in an article for the New Yorker in 1997, argued: "The diary has been bowdlerised, distorted, transmuted, reduced; it has been infantilised, Americanised, sentimentalised, falsified." Ian Buruma, writing in the New York Review of Books the following year, put it more bluntly: Anne Frank has become a Dutch Joan of Arc.
In the absence of new material, those who write about her must either endlessly rehearse what's already known, reconstitute her for a modern audience or analyse those "new" Anne Franks. Francine Prose tries to do all three and fails much of the time. For, if Anne Frank has in some sense become a sign, then the task of analysing her book's afterlife requires the skills of a semiotician rather than a novelist.
Prose's chief argument is that, by viewing the diary as a historical document, we have overlooked its qualities as a "work of literary genius", although from the spring of 1944 onwards Anne rewrote her diary as she updated it, to turn it into a more eloquent piece of writing. After the war her father, Otto Frank, drew on versions A (the original) and B (Anne's revision) to produce C – the standard edition, until both the critical edition (1989) and the definitive edition (1995) supplemented C with hitherto omitted passages from A and B.
Yet none of this is new: indeed most of Prose's material is based on already published work, written by people who knew how the Anne Frank story ended. The problem of hindsight isn't just incidental to the framing of that story but central to it: the question that needs asking is why the diary has become so famous. Despite some insights along the way, Prose is so wedded to the idea of the diary's unique literary properties that she ends up simplistically suggesting that its fame is ultimately the result of its brilliance. But you have only to read the remarkable wartime diary of Etty Hillesum (An Interrupted Life, Persephone Books), a young Dutch woman who died young (in Auschwitz) but who remains almost entirely unknown, to realise that Frank's afterlife is rather more complex.
Her posthumous beatification – the remaining few frames of film of her have almost the status of a relic – rests mostly on those lines in her diary about still believing that people are good at heart. (The ones about people's innate "urge to destroy . . . to kill . . . murder and rage" have curiously never found equal fame.) Ruthlessly decontextualised, the good-at-heart sentence has turned Frank into an emblem of forgiveness, as though she were in some sense anticipating her own death and absurdly exonerating those responsible. Prose traces how this idea was taken up in the Broadway and Hollywood versions of the diary. Frank, according to Natalie Portman, who played her in the 1997 Broadway version, was "a happy person". A Californian teenager who corresponded with Otto Frank said that Anne "helped me through my teens". The American immigration authorities refused to grant the Frank family an entry visa during the war. But never mind: Anne Frank has been posthumously Americanised; you can almost reimagine her as a blonde, betassled cheerleader.
Prose doesn't shrink from this. She also quotes Bruno Bettelheim, who claimed that the play, "while it confronts us with the fact that Auschwitz existed . . . encourages us at the same time to ignore its implications". She gets closest to fresh thinking when she tackles the difficulties of teaching children about Anne Frank, and specifically how painful it is for teachers to tell their pupils the facts of the Nazi genocide without depressing them or leaving them without hope. One young American even contended: "Knowing Anne, she was happy in the concentration camps." Anne died in Bergen-Belsen, according to testimony, weeping, screaming, starving, squabbling, hallucinating and ultimately hopeless.
An awful lot of Anne Frank's diary has nothing to do with the Holocaust: it's an unusually candid expression of hostility to a mother in a confined setting, for instance. But perhaps we get the Anne Frank that we need, so that, bizarrely, what's also a journal about the early stages of genocide has ended up with the accolade of being the world's most famous be-nice-to-each-other primer. Prose, in her fantasies about teaching the diary, ends up colluding with this. Anne Frank, she suggests, lives on in the vitality of her writing, just as she always wanted to. But Anne Frank isn't alive. She died a horrible death, and that's what makes her real story so unbearable.
In the absence of new material, those who write about her must either endlessly rehearse what's already known, reconstitute her for a modern audience or analyse those "new" Anne Franks. Francine Prose tries to do all three and fails much of the time. For, if Anne Frank has in some sense become a sign, then the task of analysing her book's afterlife requires the skills of a semiotician rather than a novelist.
Prose's chief argument is that, by viewing the diary as a historical document, we have overlooked its qualities as a "work of literary genius", although from the spring of 1944 onwards Anne rewrote her diary as she updated it, to turn it into a more eloquent piece of writing. After the war her father, Otto Frank, drew on versions A (the original) and B (Anne's revision) to produce C – the standard edition, until both the critical edition (1989) and the definitive edition (1995) supplemented C with hitherto omitted passages from A and B.
Yet none of this is new: indeed most of Prose's material is based on already published work, written by people who knew how the Anne Frank story ended. The problem of hindsight isn't just incidental to the framing of that story but central to it: the question that needs asking is why the diary has become so famous. Despite some insights along the way, Prose is so wedded to the idea of the diary's unique literary properties that she ends up simplistically suggesting that its fame is ultimately the result of its brilliance. But you have only to read the remarkable wartime diary of Etty Hillesum (An Interrupted Life, Persephone Books), a young Dutch woman who died young (in Auschwitz) but who remains almost entirely unknown, to realise that Frank's afterlife is rather more complex.
Her posthumous beatification – the remaining few frames of film of her have almost the status of a relic – rests mostly on those lines in her diary about still believing that people are good at heart. (The ones about people's innate "urge to destroy . . . to kill . . . murder and rage" have curiously never found equal fame.) Ruthlessly decontextualised, the good-at-heart sentence has turned Frank into an emblem of forgiveness, as though she were in some sense anticipating her own death and absurdly exonerating those responsible. Prose traces how this idea was taken up in the Broadway and Hollywood versions of the diary. Frank, according to Natalie Portman, who played her in the 1997 Broadway version, was "a happy person". A Californian teenager who corresponded with Otto Frank said that Anne "helped me through my teens". The American immigration authorities refused to grant the Frank family an entry visa during the war. But never mind: Anne Frank has been posthumously Americanised; you can almost reimagine her as a blonde, betassled cheerleader.
Prose doesn't shrink from this. She also quotes Bruno Bettelheim, who claimed that the play, "while it confronts us with the fact that Auschwitz existed . . . encourages us at the same time to ignore its implications". She gets closest to fresh thinking when she tackles the difficulties of teaching children about Anne Frank, and specifically how painful it is for teachers to tell their pupils the facts of the Nazi genocide without depressing them or leaving them without hope. One young American even contended: "Knowing Anne, she was happy in the concentration camps." Anne died in Bergen-Belsen, according to testimony, weeping, screaming, starving, squabbling, hallucinating and ultimately hopeless.
An awful lot of Anne Frank's diary has nothing to do with the Holocaust: it's an unusually candid expression of hostility to a mother in a confined setting, for instance. But perhaps we get the Anne Frank that we need, so that, bizarrely, what's also a journal about the early stages of genocide has ended up with the accolade of being the world's most famous be-nice-to-each-other primer. Prose, in her fantasies about teaching the diary, ends up colluding with this. Anne Frank, she suggests, lives on in the vitality of her writing, just as she always wanted to. But Anne Frank isn't alive. She died a horrible death, and that's what makes her real story so unbearable.
